Cultural Left Want Immigrants to Radically Change British Society - Prof. Eric Kaufmann

[Music] so when we talk about immigration often we talk about numbers economics you know those sorts of issues of scale but you often study it from the angle of identity and that's the thing can you tell me more about that uh well yeah because i think that if you look at immigration opinion and what is linked what is most closely linked to it tends to be most closely linked to things that are cultural and psychological do you want the present to be more similar to the past if you do you tend to be more restrictionist do you think that diversity is is in some way stimulating or do you find it in some way disorderly do you think change is exciting or do you think it's a kind of loss these deep psychological orientations are really what tend to predict immigration opinion not so much have you lost your job what's your income level what's your class those economic things don't seem to matter that much so i would say yeah immigration opinion is very much tied into uh identity uh so it's psychology but then that's of course linked to identity so which identities are you attached to if your identity is to to things that you've achieved particularly professional achievements income to some degree uh education you're going to be less worried about changes to uh a nation for example or or shifts in the ethnic composition of a population if you are less invested in those credentials and in the achieved identities you're going to be more attached generally to the inherited described type identities and so there are all these links then between things which are more to do with culture and yeah culture and achievement rather than economics that's why education level is much more closely linked to immigration opinion than income is actually do you think also the fact that identity has become separated from ideas like nationhood geography etc over the past sort of 50 or six years due to globalization has meant there's more desire to migrate so from low economic areas to high economic areas people have that sort of mimetic thing where they say i want to live like that and so they move because they have no sense of why they live there well i mean if you look at global migration i mean it's ticked up a little bit from maybe two and a half to three percent of the world lives in a country they weren't born in it's not that different um i think yes global communications means the lifestyles of the west are beamed into all over the world um but actually if you look at migration a lot of it's just the same old economic push-pull factors that have always been the case that led to the irish going to the united states for example uh in large numbers um and in fact it's actually the middle income countries middle and middle income people tend to be more likely to emigrate than very poor people who can't afford it so i actually don't think that's the big difference the big difference if you look at the numbers is long-distance migration from the global south to western countries which has increased dramatically even since 1990 i mean the share of people born you know the increase is sort of gone it's gone from something like seven percent to 12 percent foreign born and most of that is sort of long-distance migration so that's the real big change i think a lot of that has to do with liberalization um in western countries of immigration to some degree um it's partly due to the global communications networks and the fact it's perhaps some of the transaction costs have been reduced in terms of movement um but i don't think it's because people in guatemala are less attached to being guatemalan than they would have been you know 50 or 50 years ago 100 years ago do you think we're seeing a sort of brazilianification of the west in terms of ethnicity and economics well brazilianification it's interesting it depends what you mean by i would say a gyanification or or or a a i'm trying to think of mauritianization would be a better way of putting it sort of moving towards multiple identity groups a sort of super diversity uh particularly in metropolitan areas whereas brazilianization is sort of large-scale melting with gradations of color i mean i think that's going to happen but it's not happening now i think now it's more like the dubification of of of western countries through large-scale movements in a lot of the groups have not melted in yet and so i think that would be more of an app description of where we are would you say that there's a problem of integration presently due to the scale of migration so with things like ghettoization and people forming their own sub communities within the greater nation um yeah i mean that's always happened to some degree but i think what people lose sight of is how long it takes for groups to melt into certainly to deeply melt into the ethnic majority i mean in the u.s case we take groups like the italians the irish the jews for example it took from sort of the late 19th century around about 1890 to 1900 fast forward to about 1970 1980 sort of three generations even four generations for the ethnic neighborhoods to break up the inner marriage to go across the catholic protestant jewish divide you know that takes a long time and so if you're bringing in large numbers of people uh it's just a huge momentum issue and that's one of the reasons why in the us case that immigration pause from 1925 to 65 was a period that allowed for more of this mixing and assimilation and melting to take place so it just takes a long time now of course where there are religious boundaries it's going to be slower uh than if there aren't religious boundaries and so one of the issues around say islam versus christianity is that it's going to be slower because of that religious boundary especially among some ethnic groups in france with the berber element they're more likely to marry out of their group to marry across the religious line than our say pakistani and bangladesh muslims in britain so you would anticipate the melting to go faster in france than in britain across the muslim non-muslim line yeah and um would you say that the scale is an issue or do you think that at any scale of migration eventually it becomes integrated it just might take longer or well i think the scale is an issue and also i think the sort of stock is an issue because again if you think about there is a certain degree to which diversity is melting away and there's a certain degree it's building up and if the build up phase happens first the melting phase takes a while takes several generations and then it'll happen quickly but there's a real big delay and so we're in a period of building up this diversity and the d diversification is happening very slowly um and it won't happen in a serious fast way till the second half of the century so there is a good and sound argument for slowing down the rates of increase now um i would argue because simply because of the fact that these processes these mechanisms take time to operate do you think movements like blm and other movements which advocate for things like pulling down statues and changing the physical realm in which we live are partly due to the fact that when you have that scale of immigration the there are large groups of people who cannot identify with the history and the culture of the country which they're in um i i actually think if i were to say i think the a lot of the momentum behind things like blm oddly uh comes from a disaffected section of the white majority so i actually think if you look at polarization this is very much within the white group so the white left what i call left modernist the cultural left who want to essentially redistribute outcomes across different groups so they want for any desired social good such as you know ceos or you know top jobs for example those should show an even distribution across ethnic groups genders etc so that sort of redistributionist equal outcome approach as applied to identity groups is the driving philosophy for a lot of people on uh in western countries especially at the elite level what that means is they are very into group identity for outsider groups for exotic groups for um immigrant groups indigenous groups et cetera anything but the majority group so it's what i call asymmetrical multiculturalism ethnicity is great for minorities it's horrible if you're a majority de-identify you we we don't we want you not to identify with your ethnicity we want you to identify as a as a sort of ally to this left modernist movement so blm it kind of is one of the useful resources along with gender movements the metoo movement for example along with critical theory along with a whole set of different uh it might be indigenous in canada for example that's maybe where you want to go whatever you can use you might try and construct an immigrant past for england which you have to work a little harder to do but what you want to do is you want to create you know elevate otherness sanctify and make sacred historically marginalized groups that's the definition of wokeness you want to make sacred those historically marginalized groups while downgrading or even attacking the majority kind of white identity the major majority national identity uh as being in some way fallen uh so and so so that is sort of your world view and that yeah it is how is it related then to the immigration thing i don't think the immigration causes it no what i think the immigration does though is emboldens um people who have that anti-your own culture um very pro-minority culture exotic culture worldview that are kind of against their own society in a way or their or at least their own traditional society they can leverage um the growth of minorities to say this is actually where we're going to get our revolution from instead of the proletariat rising up and overthrowing the system and they're not the agent of revolution the agent of revolution of the rising uh minority groups through migration so they are going to be very favorable to migration including illegal immigration very much so that this is going to help bring forth a multicultural millennium in this new kind of culturalized uh socialist worldview would you say that both sides on this side of the debate are fixated on the concept of other so one defies one demonizes but it is really just a fixation well i'm not sure both sides do i mean i i certainly think you know the left modernist quote unquote side is othering white males for example and conservatives so that's clearly the anything that's associated with that you know becomes dehumanized to some degree can be free for all terms of attacking is not valued so yeah i think that's the case now obviously on the far right you also get uh the othering of minority groups uh you know muslims etc so yeah that does take place on both sides uh certainly both sides are engaged in us them or the extremists are engaged in us then logic the only thing i would say is the extremists on the left are at the heart of leading institutions um it is not considered radical for a university of cambridge professor um to say white lives don't matter that that or or a professor to say um abolish the white race and say well no no we don't mean white people we just mean you know that sort of rhetoric is not is considered acceptable at the heart of elite institutions whereas if you were to to change the racial uh referent there the person would be out on their ear and banished forever and rightly so i think but the double standard is is is extremely glaring but it's a kind of what what i'm saying here is that in a way the extremism on one side is at the heart of elite institutions the extremism on the other is is marginalized right rightfully so so it's a very sort of uh very stark kind of imbalance of power in a way or cultural power and um would you agree that there is an economic argument to be made for or against migration or do you think it's entirely a sociological social thing um i think there are arguments that would say you know higher migration leads to a certain amount of dynamism and and can have some positive economic effects if the immigrants are younger and and so i think there are some positives but there are also some negatives competition with the the least skilled part of the population their wages going down i think these are all small effects i think generally the literature would show their their small effects one way or the other i think the impact on the aging problem is is minimal and anyone who understands demography yeah can tell you there's no solution but does does the economic argument actually matter or is it just a sort of a an issue which is part of a greater social thing it's just something that is focused on too much when the real harm or benefit is on a social level um i think people can make the economic arguments but i don't think that's where the energy i mean clearly there are people who want low-cost labor uh and they want to be able to bring it in yes so large businesses or business interests clearly but i think the main argument is really a much more cultural one is the people who want diversity and who believe that uh people who are coming in are going to be a kind of revolutionary force or or will will radically change the society versus others who want to keep the society to some extent culturally as it is not incidentally um this is not sort of ethno-state white nationalism what what it is is uh sort of ethno-traditional nationalism it's a bit like retaining it's about saying well you know someone who's white or non-white is equally english equally british that's that's the the issue is not with membership but the issue might be well the country has traditionally had a ethnic composition of let's say whatever it is let's say it might be you know majority white with them with minorities now we're okay with some change but we don't want that to be sort of very rapid we want it to be slower the debate is over how fast the change some want it slower it's not some want turn the clock back as is often alleged by scaremongers on the left it's just that people want no we want it slower we want time for assimilation to take place because what we value uh in is in the national identity includes the question of ethnic composition just as by the way on the left they also value ethnic composition except for them it's diversity so if you were to say well we're going to have to see if it's all about british values it's all about ideals um then why do you care about diversity why do you want a more diverse society but they want diversity for its own sake and i think the other side probably wants less sort of more homogeneity not total homogeneity but perhaps less ethnic change that's part of like the landscape like customs like drinking tea like the english accent these are all not central to what it means to be english the accent is part of it but a critical mass of people speaking with that accent is is part of the ethno tradition that matters to people so you have con you know there is pressure to conserve it to some degree not totally and that's that subtlety you can't have these debates um with some people they think immediately once you start to talk about regulating rates of ethnic change you must be a racist right so they their worldview is purely black and white there's no shades of gray whereas all of the debate really is about the shades of grey how fast and given that the uh when you look at polling people tend to favor reduced rates of immigration even if you break it down to immigrants themselves first generation immigrants still a majority favor a reduced rate of immigration because they see themselves as being adversely affected by higher rates that the lower it is the better their outcomes are when they migrate and integrate given that why do you think there is such a lack of desire for governments to reduce immigration because i think there are strong kind of pressures first of all of business and economic pressures there are there is the nature of international law which by the way is non-binding but if your courts decide to opt into those definitions of international law if you have judicial activism that says well we you know we deport this person but we're going to give them five hearings because of this international convention so where you have the expansion of the definition of refugee where the expansion of all these legal definitions it just makes it much much harder to to set those levels and also it depends you know if there's a lot of inertia i think around the economic migration question you know the economic arguments there's still people who are say if you take the conservative government you'd have a significant number of economic conservatives that would still be more about uh low-tax social liberalism rather than being concerned about things that say brexit voters were concerned about so i just think that that but i do think you know post covert because we've had obviously a lot you know immigrations largely declines or grounds to a halt during covet the the full picture isn't going to be clear until we are clear of covid um and we can the numbers are going to rise again now the question is if the numbers go back to the to the way they were pre-brexit which is really what led to the brexit vote the question is how the government will react and respond i think they will respond by trying to get the numbers down but there is this view that somehow well you know what brexit voters were voting for was control once they have a point system in place like australia or canada where i'm from even if the numbers are 300 000 they're not going to care and i think that's wrong i actually think they will care and even if the skill level is higher i think they're going to care the question is how that then becomes articulated politically which voice is going to articulate that um and it's only when you have uh voices articulating that politically that that the mainstream government is going to respond but i think there are strong incent you know they're strong incentives i mean you're going to get attacked as a racist in the media for being nasty in the media you're going to have businesses who obviously want the low-cost labor because in many ways workers coming in in some cases they're better workers in some so there's probably an economic some economic benefit but there's certainly um businesses are going to want it there's a lot of pressure there and of course the the left is is going to want it as well so there is just going to be a fight that has to be had if you want to actually reduce numbers um and i think there is this view now that well post brexit you've got control numbers don't matter i've done some research would suggest that's actually not true that in fact the numbers are going to matter so it's just a question of when we get immigration rolling again and if it's hitting those kinds of numbers what is going to be the explanation year after year after year for why it remains at a level that brexit voters voted to reduce it's not they don't want zero immigration but a lower rate of immigration and and it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out well before even covered was a thing i think it was the 2019 figures the polish ethnic category was the only group which was net immigration from the uk every other group was coming in in larger numbers than leaving but the beginning of the polls leaving the uk was caused by the fact that their economy became developed a lot of them became wealthy here but they weren't happy with the standard of living in this country and they would prefer to go back to poland given their economy had recovered do you think a similar pattern will play out for different ethnic groups or do you think there are certain groups who will come here and settle and never leave well i think a significant chunk of the polls are settling i mean i think the if you took talk about flows there's probably a net outflow but that doesn't mean there isn't a large stock of polls that are settling i think if you look at other i would expect the eu migration to dry up simply because those populations are aging they their economies are doing somewhat better i just don't think they're gonna they have the capacity to send lots of people uh continually year on year so i think that that will dry up i think the sources are going to shift increasingly either to non-european sources or to some degree to places like ukraine and belarus and places that are outside of the eu so that's what i would predict is that you'll get some new european sources but probably an increase in non-european sources including commonwealth for example post-brexit yeah i would say asia uh would be a major asian middle east um maybe to a lesser extent sub-saharan africa but that's probably where i'd expect a larger share to come from probably the established uh south asian countries would contribute a larger number do you think that there will be a large-scale um migration from hong kong to the uk if so or if not what do you think the impact of that would be um i i don't know i mean i don't i don't think there will be a large scale who knows right and this is crystal ball gazing it is a wealthy society they don't need to move here for money uh but it just depends how bad the oppression gets a large scale i don't know i couldn't i couldn't tell you for sure i mean i think if it is large large-scale it depends how large-scale it is uh i i think you if it is very large-scale it will have an impact politically um and and i you know i and and of course these migrants are going to be you know they're not going to have high unemployment they're not going to be poor they're you know they're going to be contributing but i do think that you know it is a significant cultural change um and you know i'm a quarter chinese myself i grew up in vancouver which had this large hong kong wave and they're very successful they've done very well but you know there are significant cultural differences which are not the end of the world but anytime you get a scale migration like that you know what we know is that when you have large-scale migration like that you do tend to get some kind of a response and and given that i mean yes the fact that they are yeah you know the religion is is not really an issue and they are going to be contributing i mean that will lessen the impact but i still think there could be an impact so with a sort of diaspora as opposed to just the trickle you get a totally different sociological kind of framework in the host country is that what you're suggesting yeah so you would have so like in vancouver you've got wealthy chinese neighborhoods and you've got wealthy more relatively white neighborhood this is just somewhat increase in segregation it becomes a more you know there's certain parts of the city they're just more chinese which is not a problem but it's a different city so it's all about the difference so that the vancouver that i knew growing up is no longer or the suburb or whatever it is shifts and that's going to make some impact on people it's not going to drive all of politics but i would say it would have some impact even if there isn't a big it's not about poverty it's not about using pressure on public services but i still think you know culturally and in terms of the geography of urban areas there is a shift that's introduced by any large-scale movement um i'm not entirely convinced that that that will materialize though indeed it's uh one of the problems with the gambit against china saying oh we'll take them all if they don't come it's very embarrassing isn't it we've attempted to play sort of a foreign policy type maneuver which then doesn't manifest yeah i mean i think if they don't come it's not necessarily a bad thing in the sense that it will have put pressure on the chinese hopefully to move them in the right direction um you know the question is if they do come how many come in over what period and i think if it is high numbers over a short period there will be a political impact i would have thought political impact um i mean maybe it'll be offset because people think they're they're fighting against oppression and so we can identify politically with them and whatever and that's true but you know i i just give talk about little things that will change so it may be you know in vancouver some schools that had a rugby program that no longer existed because that's not where the interest of the new student body is and as this google shifts and uh maybe trees you know in vancouver trees were cut down because that's you know they want to have more house and less proper i mean these are small little things house price pressure crowding whatever maybe that's not going to be the issue but maybe it will be the issue and if you look in what's happening in in so if you take australia new zealand canada where it tends to be your middle class well-integrated successful uh asian migration but the issues there are are going to be more around segregation house prices uh crowding etc uh and and that will be more the way the issue expresses itself not fears over crime and and uh uh pressure on public services and unemployment and things like that so with a particularly very unique form of immigration a potentially large scale or medium scale not necessarily huge but a group that moves all at one time um who have quite a lot of wealth and uh highly educated etc and so on would you say there's less of an incentive for that group to integrate than for poorer uh immigrants who need to learn english to get a job you need to integrate to fit in and so on yeah that's an interesting question i i i i think to some extent you're right that there is less need to integrate certainly geographically if you've got money you can live where you want to and so there whereas if you're poor and you start to rise and you don't have co-ethnic neighborhood let's say you don't have an ethno-burb for rich bangladeshis you have to move into a relatively wide area so it's kind of a forced integration so i think there are probably some ways in which you're right so a wealthier group doesn't have to do that um i would say they would you know i would have thought they would certainly integrate linguistically i already many of them might speak english or do speak english um there aren't huge differences in you know in a lot of public mores especially hong kong chinese are are more anglo let's say than mainland chinese um queueing and things like this and then there tends to be reasonably high under marriage rates but of course the larger your group is the less you need to intermarry for example so in in the united states chinese have a much higher intermarriage rate or a higher inter-marriage rate than chinese do in canada because in canada they're a larger group so just by dint of being a larger group you you don't need to interact as much let's say with the whole society but also these are they tend to be quite metropolitan they tend to be the kind of people who will travel more they're there anyways rather than somewhere so even if they do come here they won't necessarily settle into those communities their children might end up going to schools abroad meeting their spouse in another country working so much so they're not necessarily you know bedding into this nation it depends if it's just the elite or it depends how far down the social scale you know if you get a large migration you will most of them will be middle class sort of lower middle you know that sort of uh chinese elite which which you know so in vancouver a lot of them have hong kong passports and they're shuttling between hong kong the kids might live alone in the house you know so that situation exists for the very wealthy i wouldn't think it would characterize for the bulk of say hong kong migrants if they came in large numbers then this is a problem the misconception that they are all very wealthy there are millions of hong kongers who are uh be knocks or i suppose it's the term the uh british overseas nationalists who have the right to come here but aren't necessarily english-speaking they aren't necessarily in professional work they aren't necessarily what we perceive as a british hong konger right they're certainly not all super wealthy i think most of them would be sort of a middling economic background um you know i think the english wouldn't be that much of an issue but i do think culturally you know there's going to be you know they're going to want to go to chinese restaurants and this is this is what large groups in large jobs are going to want to do their their social life will center more around their own community um naturally quite naturally this is they're going to be a flight to familiarity in the new setting that's what what groups do in the first generation it depends on how dominant they are in particular suburbs and neighborhoods so there's a suburb yeah in vancouver called richmond which is like now 80 percent asian for example um where once you reach these sorts of um levels you've got chinese malls which i don't have a problem with it's just a fact that there is going that's going to exist you will have chinese smalls and chinese strip malls and whatever and the people go and have their chinese meal and mahjong which is fine that's part of their culture you can't deny that uh to them but yeah i think people have to understand that if you're a large-scale movement that you are going to get an enclaving like that and that this will could persist over generations so richmond was the relatively chinese area and is even more so now uh now that may not last it may be that another group moves in perhaps uh if if the chinese immigration dries up then you might get another bin and that's part of the super diversity but i think people if it is a very large movement then there will be an issue around a distinct enclave that will exist so been talking a bit about the way that certain different ethnic groups blend together over time do you think that a problem beyond the ethnic issue is the religious one where there are certain things which are sort of set in stone which can't blend you have two doctrines which contradict each other they go they come to heads so there are there are aspects of this where for example islamic immigration is far less likely to integrate as easily and as quickly as say quick christian european immigration yeah i mean i think they that are there are i mean the the theorists would call it counterintropic factors like religion which um which simply erect a larger barrier um and and so the intermarriage rate say between afro-caribbean christians and whites is going to be higher than between south asian muslims and whites uh now that's or south asian hindus and sikhs and whites incidentally are going to have a lower it's going to be higher than muslim but lower than the afro-caribbean christian so religion does erect a barrier to to um mixing now it depends partly on the ethnic group so you know like i mentioned the berbers in france have a pretty high intermarriage but the south asian muslim groups tend not to um and so yeah i think that is a factor um it's not you know there's gonna be some mixing it might be ten percent out marriage uh it's it's rising ever so slowly but of course the larger a group becomes mathematically the lower the out marriage rate not just marriage i mean there's things like i think it was um louise casey's report where she had that fascinating statistic where she uphold the children and found that some of them believe they lived in a majority muslim country because the school they go to the mosque they go to the people they surround themselves with the local shops the local communities everyone they see is islamic so that religious sort of thing where they go to a different school they go to a different mosque they don't mix in the same way as secular migrants might yeah it will it will limit it will reduce the level of mixing particularly in those enclaves now most probably most of the muslim residents of britain don't live in the in in a muslim concentration area like blackburn or old you know that is there relatively few such places more of them would be in places like newham where you just have many many different groups the super diverse kind of area except with with the white share declining quite rapidly in these types of areas so they would have very limited or or contact with uh white british people but they would have contact with other increasingly having contact with other minority groups immigrant groups who may or may not be muslim um so yeah i don't think i just don't think that as much is the issue as much as the uh rate of change um and even though a lot of this change is super diverse neighborhoods like the newers of this world it's not necessarily the blackburns it's i would think the brent newham type model is is more likely to be the kind of predominant future model than the blackburn model i'm not as worried about the blackburns i think the the issue is more a question of at what scale are you going to replace not replace that's the wrong word but what is the scale in which you want super diversity to rise in your cities in your urban areas um [Music] at what rate do you want that to replace the existing ethnic morpholi morphology that's there right so um and there is a rate at which you know which is an optimum rate that's what i would say um and and some people want it slower some want it faster we need to actually have a rate that people are comfortable the most people are comfortable with so yeah one of the issues is it's very difficult uh to have an open conversation about the reasons people want lower migration and and also when it's not possible to have a conversation about migration because political taboos essentially take this issue off the table for mainstream parties then the only parties that can address the issue are essentially populist parties or populist leaders like trump so in a way the taboos help to create the populist parties and leaders it's a bit like a department store that will only sell one color pair of pants what that means is the black market has to supply the demand that people want but that isn't being supplied and that in a way the populist is the political black market here then there's a lack of regulation so it's there's no quality control no exactly and and you don't know what you're going to get um and now sometimes you do want to keep things off the table like segregation for example there were populists who advocated that in the u.s but at other times something like the rate of immigration is not a civil rights issue i think i think therefore you have to have uh a proper and open debate about that including uh about the rate of cultural change that should be part of our debate the fact is being stifled means it's getting sublimated into all kinds of other channels that in many ways more destructive and does the taboo around talking about it exacerbate the decline of social cohesion so because we can't speak about it the kind of people who do speak about it tend to be the ones who are the most radical and therefore they represent people and it causes far worse tensions yeah and i think more than that the two sides can't have conversations in elite institutions like universities like uh media is to some extent more of a free-for-all but i think in these elite institutions we're not getting a proper conversation between the two sides because one side is considered taboo and so yeah that leads to uh resentment of elites resentment of an elite institution so i think one of the big outcomes of all this is just deepening polarization uh ideological polarization in the society um which at some level might eventually threaten democratic norms to you know in the u.s case you could say that at the fringe some of the things that you know trump because he's tapping into this frustration he's able to tack on some things which such as claiming the election is stolen which i think are arguably a threat to democracy so you don't know what you're going to get with a populist which is one of the reasons why you really want to have a more open debate so do you think the emperor has no close effect if someone just points out the elephant in the room uh it gives him a ground swell which could cause very sort of frenetic unstable elections and movements socially um well i do think that politicians who key into this frustration over uh political correctness of which trump was you know trump that was the next immigration that was i think one of the main reasons he was elected leader of the republicans and and one of his main issues um so i just think it is an issue that you know it's the issue that the right can tap into very successfully uh and populist can tap into successfully i mean i think one of the other results of this might also be that the left becomes increasingly unelectable which is what we're seeing in western europe and britain to some extent as well because the activists are enforcing these taboos and making the party uh come out with gestures like uh you know taking the knee and statements around the flag and statements around immigration which will make the party unelectable and so that could be another but of course that's a loss to democracy because then you don't have a viable opposition which which worsens democracy as well and do you think that the conservatives are doing a similar thing in this country by taking on the woke and talking about the woke and [Music] culture wars and whatnot are they just sort of channeling the sort of fury of the red wall voters and i think that they they are they are i mean i don't think that they are doing this deliberately i just think you know the culture war has been started in the institutions by the progressive left they've been at it for decades but they've really ramped up the the temperature i think what the conservatives have done is they've reluctantly been dragged into this and are acting defensively um because of the immen immense advances that have been made on the cultural warfront within these institutions i don't think the conservatives have started the culture war they are simply responding defensively i don't think their opportunity yeah the thing is it is a vote winner so it happens to have an advantage but i do i think the conservatives went into this willingly no i think they were scared of the same taboos that everyone else is scared of but it's gotten so extreme and so bad that they have actually crossed the rubicon now and are starting to do things which i think are very important to do and they're getting pilloried by sections of the media but i think they're doing the right thing to what extent do you think that the demographic changes you know when you look at sort of native birth rates compared to the the influx and also the birth rate of certain migrant groups what do you think the demographic influence will be on the culture uh in the long term well you have you have a couple of things going on so i don't think the the birth rates of groups coming are actually much higher anymore i think they used to be much much higher it's so it's not so much a birth rate issue and it's not even so much the groups coming in that are changing the wokeness is not actually a result of minority ethnic groups it is much more a result of um the white left if you like weaponizing or using these groups to fulfill a vision um and to take forward an agenda a cultural revolutionary agenda of radical transformation and and so i think that is really more what's going on i think sort of looking long term what happens is you get different responses to the the ethnic change one group is very supportive one group fears the loss of their culture which is sort of the majority group um so that's stage one is you have a divergent reaction to the diversity increase stage two is the populist response to want to slow down this diversity increase is attacked as racist by the progressive left the people who are attacked as racist don't like being attacked as racist they attack wokeness now you're into a sort of second level meta conflict over the morality of political correctness right so it's sort of built upon the diversity thing now you could say even without immigration the proxy war would be it could be about other things it might be in the u.s just the old black white issue it might be about gender it might be so so it's not necessary that we had the immigration for the rise of wokeness i think wokeness would have risen regardless but it will use the battles over diversity and maybe that will give some oxygen to it because it's a sort of an age-old trope isn't it the oppressed class being liberated and being sort of set free it's it's present in pretty much every political um chicanery that's occurred in history two people on a very high level batting heads and using the masses as an excuse for for what happened out there and you just have to look at the at the categories these very artificial categories like bypoc you know black indigenous people yeah essentially which make no sense on the ground just as lgbtq actually doesn't make any sense on the ground um these are political categories and the uh the cultural left is is essentially using these for their oppositional identity project their their sort of ideological project but actually is relatively uninterested in the individual cultures underneath they're not actually that interested in in i i would say in terms of african-american tradition and culture music etc i mean the just as as the socialists weren't that interested in working-class culture i mean these are they they're interested in them for their oppositional stance and to the extent they become contented that's a bad thing because if they're not opposing another entity in this case the white majority or white males or whatever if they're not being oppositional in their identity that's a problem and the left would like to stoke them up to be oppositional they don't want them to just have an ethnic identity call pride in their tradition and culture that's not useful [Music] you

Channel: The New Culture Forum

Views: 23,764

Keywords: New Culture Forum, Peter Whittle, So What You're Saying Is..., Culture Wars

Id: BRiScrn-a1I

Length: 42min 48sec (2568 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 04 2021