Populism and the Future of White Majorities

untangling the web of factors behind the rise of populism and the kind of culture war divisions cropping up in countries around the world today is no small task it's an even bigger job when the thesis of the project requires you to confront what many do not want to talk about at all white identity eric kaufman's book is called white shift populism immigration and the future of white majorities is professor of politics at the university of london uk's birkbeck college and he joins us now for more nice to have you on this side of the pond thank you very much steve well since you've written a book about race can we start by talking about yours where are you very mixed i guess is the is the answer to that i mean i'm a quarter chinese a quarter hispanic from costa rica and uh a half central european jewish in ancestry so it's it's all over the place would you describe yourself as white yes simply because that's how other people take me and and it's broadly therefore how i take myself but i also would see myself as all those other components we are going to have what for many will be a very uncomfortable conversation well let me rephrase i think the conversation will be comfortable the topic is very uncomfortable for a lot of people so let's start because you start the book by saying that talking about the future of race makes us uncomfortable it's like talking about sex in victorian britain what makes this so uncomfortable for so many yeah i mean i just think that there has been a toxicity that's grown up around whiteness because of the associations with things that were bad that happened in the past and those are real you know slavery jim crow oppressing native peoples etc so i think this identity has a lot of baggage with it to put it bluntly here's a quote from the book you write if politics in the west is ever to return to normal rather than becoming even more polarized white interests will need to be discussed i realize this is very controversial for left modernists yet not only is white group self-interest legitimate but i maintain that in an era of unprecedented white demographic decline it is absolutely vital for it to have a democratic outlet marginalizing race puritanism is important but muzzling relaxed versions of white identity sublimates it in a host of negative ways let's get into that what are some of the more negative consequences that you have seen that have resulted from not addressing this well i think oddly enough anti-muslim prejudice is you know we can look at that as an outcome of terrorist events etc but it's also the case that it's more acceptable to talk about islam as a threat to the civic nation than it is to talk about slowing down the rate of ethnocultural change in a country that's closer to kind of white racism supremacy whereas if you talk about islam as a threat to gender roles jews gays etc that that is an acceptable liberal russia now so i think i would argue that islamophobia is where a lot of this sentiment has gone and is is in many ways much more counterproductive we could also look at i mean even brexit is in some ways a sublimation of concerns over immigration into eu bashing it's not to say there wasn't eu anti-eu sentiment but it wasn't really until that was yoked to the train of anti-immigration sentiment that that this movement really got going let me follow up on the brexit and of course the trump angle on this as well because i think most people you say the strongest demographic predictor for the decision to vote either for trump or for brexit was uh where do you live how much money do you make you're not on side with that eh no i mean you can look at the trump vote i mean even if you just take white americans income has absolutely no predictive power on whether you voted for trump or not so it's certainly not the losers of modernization the left behind now in britain there is a small effect poorer people were somewhat more likely to vote leave but by and large it is cultural indicators and psychological dispositions that give us the best predictive power so support for the death penalty is a much stronger predictor for whether you voted leave then how much money you earn what else do the trump and brexit supporters have in common well immigration is the central issue in both cases i mean in the case of brexit uh 90 percent roughly of brexit voters want less immigration for 40 of them and this is especially important immigration was their number one issue so it's not just that they're opposed but they want that's their number one priority and now in the united states amongst trump voters similarly 40 of trump voters say immigration is the number one issue facing the u.s so in both cases this was key and actually if you look at the people who switched who were former obama voters or non-voters views on immigration were absolutely central in explaining why they moved over to trump this may not be the case in the united states because many people voted for trump because they thought his prescription for the economy was better than hillary clinton's but i think it is fair to say that it looks like people voted those who did vote brexit did so regardless of adverse economic impacts that they expect down the road is that right well absolutely i mean there's a significant share of the brexit voters who are willing to take economic pain in surveys i've done to sacrifice up to five percent of their income uh in order to cut off all immigration from the european union for example so there is a willingness to take economic pain uh for the brexit voters yeah does that make sense to you it does make sense in the sense that if if you consider that sort of identity factors are driving the motivations of brexit voters as opposed to personal economic circumstance then in that sense it's rational for them to pursue this so even though from a strictly dollars and cents point of view it wouldn't make any sense um from if you take the full range of their preferences and priorities which include the cultural ones then it's probably it probably makes a lot of sense from that world view do you know why that is because i suspect if you ask most canadians what worries you more let me put it this way would you rather double your income or would you or are you more concerned that a family of color would move next door to you i think most people rather have the double income as opposed to worrying about who lives next door yeah absolutely i i think that's true for most people but it also depends on what scale we're we're talking about if it's a large-scale change in neighborhoods uh and a lot of don't forget a lot of people's i mean they don't see that kind of upside doubling of income it's it's maybe a few percentage points on gdp which they may or may not experience so they're not yes maybe if you told them you've got a million dollars then yes they wouldn't stick to that position but given the sort of the sums involved i think they've they made that calculation what is the religion of anti-racism as you describe it okay so part of the book is about this idea of the the left and how it's evolved post 1960s in a more culturalist direction that is the the issues that the left prioritizes are less about class and more about race sex gender um and that's fine because those issues did need to be addressed but it's one thing to say there's a there's discrimination against blacks on the basis of you know of race and then to move from that to saying society is systemically racist and by the way if you say america is a colorblind society you are engaging in racism you see that the move is from a sort of something you can measure and define as a violation of equal treatment to something that says something which we would never thought of as racist actually is racist it's like it's like saying us is a colorblind society that move towards i guess a sort of more i think is religious because it's sort of seeing things as racist which most people wouldn't see as racist and defining especially conservatism as racism and that's sort of part of the problem is that expanded definition of racism which has come to include say something like nationalism something like reducing immigration or making it slower what that does is it then gets the backup of conservatives who say well i'm not a racist i just want less change and i want you know people to be assimilated uh and that sets the spiral of polarization and motion so particularly with the rise of the populist right um i use the analogy of a bootlegger where if the mainstream parties or mainstream liquor outlets are not allowed to operate in this issue so mainstream stores aren't allowed to supply liquor that a bootlegger is going to pop up that supplies it and similarly if mainstream political parties aren't allowed to sort of advance a platform of reducing immigration because they'll be accused of racism whether internally or by the media etc then the bootlegger is going to pop up and provide the good which is not provided by the mainstream parties and that's the populist did it seem to you though in the last let's say four decades of the 20th century that there was pretty decent buy-in to the notion of a multicultural society where we all need to get along well there wasn't there is buy-in i mean there's there are different gradations there i mean mult it depends what we mean by multiculturalism if it's tolerating people of different backgrounds appreciating their cultures that's that's one thing um i think when it's you know as the demographics move and that's a lot of what the book is about is in a period where the white share begins to drop and you know it then becomes immigration becomes sort of a lightning rod a symbolic issue that the majority looks at and thinks ah okay this drives home the idea that they're no longer you know setting the tone in the society it's not the country they knew etc um what multiculturalism tends to then be about if multiculturalism is about um more diversity is always better multiculturalism is defined against the battled oppressive past which is monocultural so this is a sort of dichotomy history is moving progressing inevitably towards multiculturalism you got to be on board and you have to maximize that so it's that sort of that's where i'm arguing that this is a sort of more religious teleological sort of you know assuming that history has a certain direction and if you're in the way of that if you contest that then you are if not a racist at least a reactionary some pretty heavy hitters have said that multiculturalism is well what i mean where if i got it here angela merkel the german chancellor said it has utterly failed multiculturalism there's plenty of eastern european leaders who are obviously happy to agree with that do you think the multicultural consensus so to speak is over yeah i do think so i mean you start to see this i mean there's a big difference between merkel and those east european leaders but i think that starting in the late 90s with the rise of the national front in in france and the freedom party in austria you start to get center-right figures nicholas sarkozy for example moving into this sort of civic nationalism which says we have to emphasize what we have in common not emphasize differences and that's sort of where merkel and all those european leaders were in 2010. um so yeah starting in the in the 90s in britain you can date it very precisely to something of the park report in 2000 and then you had some riots between muslim youths and white british use in 2001 and then a series of islamist terrorist attacks sort of 2004 onwards so that really soured the mood against this idea of celebrating diversity and that our national identity is essentially about diversity so that whole narrative i think got derailed in the sort of early 2000s and yet here you are sitting in a studio in the middle of the capital city of the province of ontario where the majority of people were not born in this country and where multiculturalism i think most folks think kind of works why is canada seemingly the exception to all this right right so urban areas including london by the way are very very ethnically mixed and also the mayor's office has a sort of multicultural idea of london so it does exist in the diverse cities it's more controversial i think when it's applied to a country um in you know i don't think canada's the exception is english canada and we may see that in one of the charts that in quebec we can already see a very european pattern taking root both in terms of you know attitudes uh to immigration and the way politics cultural politics has become important you know what since you've raised it we may as well show this right now right here is you know the surveys this is a world values survey in in red which are the bars on the left and then ipsos mori did a survey in 2017 which are the darker bars on the right and you know for those of you listening on podcast i will try to describe this the french canadian slash quebec opposition to immigration is a majority it is much more significant than in english canada where it is a minority in america it appears to be a majority and in australia uh it appears to be a minority or just around the 50 mark uh yeah how do you want to um how do you want us to understand the difference between french canada and english canada well i think what's important first of all is is any is the differences say in in terms of public attitudes can all be seen between english canada and french canada so there's nothing about the canadian state or its model that is doing the work here i mean i think one of the differences is that in quebec you you have an established french canadian collective memory which is linked to a myth of ancestry that is in quebec and that is that's a powerful symbolic resource and also a cultural tradition which they want to conserve whereas the english canadian cultural tradition which was sort of a britannic loyalism or britannic nationalism was destroyed with the decline of the british empire the prime minister says we have no core identity right right so into that vacuum of the end of loyalism comes multiculturalism this sort of 1960s derived progressive ideology which has roots by the way in the u.s in the sort of 1915 to 1920 period when there was a lot of immigration into the eastern u.s so this when trudeau says canada has no core culture he's sort of exemplifying uh you know this ideology which says that we want to move away from monoculturalism towards uh multiculturalism and be and part of that is to say there's no core culture that people have to assimilate to rather everybody is going to have their own tradition their own culture yes they're going to interact in public and in the media in politics and the economy and so on but identity will remain largely at that sort of multi-polar level but that's not the case in quebec no in quebec there is a a clear ethnic majority with an attachment to its tradition that is interested in in propagating that tradition in english canada that tradition was destroyed now that doesn't mean that populism cannot take root in english canada it just mean means it'll have a harder time because not only is there not a tradition to conserve as clearly but secondly this night sort of 1960s progressive culture of of anti-racism multiculturalism political correctness and expanded definition of racism has entrenched itself so heavily in the institutions that it's a much stronger force but again that's not that does not mean that populism cannot emerge because we've seen it in sweden and germany which had the same you've anticipated my next question which is i think when you were sitting down to write this book some months ago you you thought that you thought that there didn't seem to be places in english canadian society where anti-immigrant sentiment could grow but that may now have changed i think it's changed somewhat i mean i always knew that an anti-immigration sentiment was there in in english canada because even in those figures where english canada is more tolerant it's still 40 percent or more saying less immigration and this is partly because attitudes to immigration are also rooted in these psychological dispositions do you like diversity and change or do you prefer stability and more homogeneity and that's between a third and a half inherited karen stenner is a social psychologist that tells us that so when we're talking about english canada yes it's the case that the conditions are not as good but what's really interesting now and what we've seen is that it used to be the case people said germany because of its nazi past would never have the populist right britain because of its first past the post would never have the populist rights spain because of franco now spain has got vox which is a a populist right party and i think that english canada too will have this and part of the reason is because i mean there's high immigration there's multiculturalism and in many ways trudeau is a polarizing figure that is going to help uh this kind of debate you know the populist parties move but the question is really going to be how that fits into federal politics and whether there's space um because the other thing is you can't it's not only about cultural traditions it's also about what's the country i knew growing up how is my area changed so you don't actually need a cultural memory going back generations for that to be a driver of populism so even in english canada people who remember a time when the country was more homogeneous that on its own will be enough to actually drive support for this kind of politics we have another chart because on this program we have charts for everything here is sheldon you want to bring this up graph number two uh here's how liberals and conservatives see the country very differently and again i'll try and describe this for those listening on podcast if you like the cbc you tend to be a liberal if you're a conservative you tend not to like the cbc the notion of having a diverse mix of people in the country again if you're a liberal you like it if you're a conservative the support numbers are much lower margaret atwood she's a polarizing figure if you're liberal you like margaret atwood if you're a conservative not at all first nations liberals seem to like more than conservatives do how about resource towns now we go the other way conservatives seem to like resource towns more than liberals do liberals like medicare more than conservatives do and i'm delighted to say liberals and conservatives love hockey equally that is the one thing upon which this country can unify hockey what do these responses tell you about the canadian identity right so um i mean this isn't a huge sample but essentially what it tells me is a couple of things first of all and the question was really about how canadian do these symbols make you feel so it's not exact i specified not to say how much do you like this i mean in the survey um so this is presumably how much these symbols are making up people's national identities so what we see is that there is no single canadian identity there is a there are two competing identities and depending on ideology is one dimension in which this polarizes so for example the diverse mix of people that is a sort of key symbol of multiculturalism that's a very important thing for liberals canadian identity we should say these were white canadians white canadians absolutely i don't think the results would differ much even if you didn't restrict it to whites but uh but what's also interesting is conservatives don't seem to have a clear set of symbols that make up their canadianism they know what they're against the cbc uh they're less keen on diversity they don't you really know yeah they don't really have symbols that they are for that liberals are against so don cherry both liberals and conservatives like don cherry so there aren't symbols that conservatives can move to to distinguish themselves whereas in the united states i ran a similar survey and there are very clear conservative symbols like pickup trucks and cowboys which divide liberals and conservatives let's do another quote from the book here because you asked the question what's a white minority to do let's find out what that path looks like i chart you right the four main white responses to ethnic change fight repress flee and join whites can fight ethnic change by voting for right-wing populists or committing terrorist acts they may repress anxieties in the name of politically correct anti-racism but cracks in this moral edifice are appearing many opt to flee by avoiding diverse neighborhoods schools and social networks and other whites may choose to join the newcomers first in friendship and subsequently in marriage the title of your book is white shift and that's what we're going to talk about now how what is the white shift and how would it work right so essentially white shift has two two meanings one is sort of the next few decades which is this idea of the declining white majorities across the west and the sort of populist politics and polarization that that seems to be associated with longer term though white shift really is going to be about a large-scale racial mixing which is going to result in this mixed-race majority so in britain for example say that again mixed race majority exactly so in britain for example where which is perhaps a little bit behind canada in this um the proportion of mixed race is only about two percent now it's slated to go to about only about seven percent by mid-century but then it starts to sort of move up in a sort of logarithmic curve so we get to about almost 30 percent mixed by the end of the century and very quickly 75 50 years later so it's further out but it's almost mathematically inevitable given the rates of inter racial marriage we see across western countries so that's that sort of long-term white shift which is the white group absorbing people of many different backgrounds but what i argue in the book particularly for europe is that this mixed population will trace its primary ancestry and cultural antecedents back to the european traditions simply because those will be more distinct in the world of 2050 for example where you know whites are going to be a very very small share of the globe's population now this is fascinating because i think it's fair to say 50 years ago in this city in particular but in the country in general if you were italian the white majority didn't necessarily think you were part of them or portuguese or certainly not jewish but nowadays all those groups are considered white so you are fast forwarding us whatever 10 20 30 40 50 years to a point where even people we consider brown today are going to be considered part of the white majority then right if there are certain cultural cues sort of this i'm arguing that it could be about first name it could be about dress or some sort of cultural style um but essentially there are two meanings of the term white the first is sort of racial which is a piece of the physical spectrum that you know isn't i think gonna change that much it's fuzzy at the edges the second is it's a proper name for the ethnic majority the group that uh you know shares common ancestry or believes itself to be of shared common ancestry and it's that second meaning essentially the i don't think that what we call white in kind of racial phenotypical terms is going to change much but the the ethnic majority group will expand beyond the boundaries of that racial whiteness to include people who aren't who you wouldn't know are why well i was going to say like 50 years ago no disrespect intended you know a guy with your asian and jewish background would not be considered white in this city right but but now you are well there but but again i think people have taken this too far so in the united states it's often claimed that right that jews or italians weren't white they weren't part of the wasp ethnic majority but they were still considered white and white under the law and there's a number of studies have shown this so they weren't as white as the white anglers no they weren't no they weren't but that's a different that's a sort of intro white in within the racial group exclusion i i try and distinguish between the racial and the ethnic and the ethnic was narrower than the racial and i think it's going to become broader than the racial well you will not be surprised to hear that what you have just advanced is causing a lot of angst among some there was a turkish political scientist whose name i can't pronounce i'm going to try it actually right am i close yes he called you part of the quote academic alt-right said your work provides illiberal anti-immigrant sentiments with a veneer of respectability what do you say to that well first of all he had almost no backing amongst any academics so that's number one but the other thing is what's he what's interesting about this is the actual alt-right like the daily stormer and these places have been attacking me relentlessly you know within videos with tens of thousands of members because i'm i'm essentially saying that whites are going to melt into this multi-racial majority so i'm kind of getting attacked from the real alt-right and i'm sort of getting attacked from the far left now i know um i mean he's a great guy and i i have respect for him but i mean i think he's sort of really going off the deep end here and doesn't have a lot of support even within the academic left who have actually criticized members of whom have criticized him for this so i'm not too worried about that let's say that the issues that you raise in the book are not addressed adequately in the way that you would like to see them dissent is stifled there is no opportunity to discuss these things and so on over the next 50 years how do you see us rolling out well i think that that will lead to polarization and so i think now seems pretty bad now it will yes i think it could get bad it could get worse um i think the u.s is where you see that sort of stifling going on within the democratic party which is actually i think worsening polarization now the republicans are off the deep end too but i think we have to get to a position where i say in the book we can discuss immigration rates as calmly and rationally as tax rates and with tax rates you know yes you might want more you might want less the people who want less you don't simply demonize as the worst people on earth and vice versa so i think we need to get to a position where we can have that calm discussion and then people will say i wanted a lot less but they want more so we've met in the middle and i can accept that you know i think that is the way to kind of defuse some of this it's never going to be no one's ever going to get exactly what they want and actually the european mainstream parties are are adapting i would say i mean the left-wing parties in many countries are saying yes we have to talk about this issue we have to sort of accommodate this to some degree and that's fine i think that is a healthy way to proceed when you actually throw a wrench into the works and say no this is off the table we can't have a democratic discussion i think you build up pressure and it gets expressed and sublimated in ways we can't predict i mean brexit is one example well brexit's one example but at least it was a democratic vote are you anticipating more white terrorism going forward i don't i'm very against scaremongering and manipulating of fear so and and i tend to believe in the sort of stephen pinker argument that we are moving towards a less violent society i think you will just get polarization so in the u.s the democrats may win elections but the senate may be because it's based on a territorial principle which is you know whites tend to be more spread across the united states the senate will go republican in the governor's mansions and you'll get this standoff between rural or or the wider parts of america and the federal government and that's just going to be an unhealthy state of affairs you would rather have a situation where each you know where people can find compromise and work to solve problems in a rational way sure that's what everybody wants but the fact is that that uh i mean they call it a balkanization for a reason and it was only 25 years ago the balkans exploded can you imagine that happening in the united states i don't i mean it's it's obviously anything's possible and i know some people are predicting civil war in the u.s i'm more skeptical of these claims i just don't think people you may get some terrorism you may get a slight uptick in in far-right terrorism i'm reluctant to say there's going to be civil war although i know there are people who argue that does war in a weird way bring people together it does have a clarifying effect it's awful but it can have a clarifying effect right right it absolutely does so if if the u.s was invaded then their polarization would be gone and there there's there are even experiments that show when you talk about an alien invasion of earth you have people read that paragraph then a lot of their attitudes shift on these matters and become more conciliatory so yeah there's no question and we've seen it in history in the u.s you know the second world war really kind of ended anti-semitism in a very large way which was actually quite strong in the 20s and 30s and similarly the civil war kind of took away a lot of the anti-irish prejudice that was there in the 1850s so we got about a minute to go here eric so let me ask you one thing the time is just funny it does yeah it does you entertain the idea that as the west becomes more diverse some white people in reaction could retreat and try to kind of recreate a 1950s eisenhower style leave it to beaver america what would that look like today could you do that today well i was this was in the context of of um uh virtual reality and these sorts of ideas which i think are i mean i say in the book i think that's science fiction and this is never going to happen but it was more more a playful way of exploring the idea of exit and flee and and how that might manifest itself in the sort of uber tech age were you being playful as well when you thought half of america is going to be amish in 50 years well no i don't think that's playful i mean if you 200 years ago right 200 so it's a little over 200 years um i don't know essentially these groups and this is what i wrote about in my previous book ultra-orthodox jews the amish hutterites etc to some extent the mormons uh they they are sort of defying the modern trend towards lower fertility and the amish double every 25 years they've done that for a century or more if they do that for another two centuries yes there will be 300 million amish in america a fascinating book and well worth the conversation i want to thank you for coming in tonight and sharing your views on this that's eric kaufman white shift populism immigration and the future of white majorities thanks so much eric thanks steve the agenda with steve bacon is brought to you by the chartered professional accountants of ontario helping businesses stay on the right side of change with strategic thinking insightful decisions and business leadership are you on the right side of change ask an ontario cpa

Channel: The Agenda | TVO Today

Views: 144,178

Keywords: The Agenda with Steve Paikin, current affairs, analysis, debate, politics, policy, immigration, western population shift, white majority, populism, demographic change

Id: Ev1Wyk5EsGY

Length: 30min 18sec (1818 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 14 2019