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Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities (2018) is a book on political demography by Eric Kaufmann.

Blurb:

Whiteshift tells the most important political story of the 21st century: how demographic change is transforming Western politics and how to think about the future of white majorities.

'Powerful and rigorously researched. . . this is a book that speaks to the most urgent and difficult issues of our time' - John Gray, author of Seven Types of Atheism

This is the century of whiteshift. As Western societies are becoming increasingly mixed-race, demographic change is transforming politics. Over half of American babies are non-white, and by the end of the century, minorities and those of mixed race are projected to form the majority in the UK and other countries. The early stages of this transformation have led to a populist disruption, tearing a path through the usual politics of left and right. One of the most crucial challenges of our time is to enable conservatives as well as cosmopolitans to view whiteshift as a positive development.

In this groundbreaking book, political scientist Eric Kaufmann examines the evidence to explore ethnic change in Western Europe and North America. Tracing four ways of dealing with this transformation - fight, repress, flight and join - he charts different scenarios and calls for us to move beyond empty talk about national identity. If we want to avoid more radical political divisions, he argues, we have to open up debate about the future of white majorities.

Deeply thought provoking, Whiteshift offers a wealth of data to redefine the way we discuss race in the twenty-first century.

Notes

1 The Century of Whiteshift

• Randolph Bourne
• Young Intellectuals
• Subaltern
• Theory of Basic Human Values, Pat Dade
• "Religion of Anti-Racism" by John McWhorter (eg. white privilege = original sin)
• Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell
• "Whiteshift is a process by which white majorities absorb an admixture of different peoples through intermarriage, but remain oriented around existing myths of descent, symbols and traditions." p.2
• "In approaching populism, many have been seduced by stories of 'left-behind' working-class whites, the opioid crisis and rusting factories" [...] but "values count far more than economics." p. 6
• “The Western tradition of opposing one’s own culture begins with the so-called ‘lyrical Left’ [see oikophobia ] in the late nineteenth century, which lampooned bourgeois values. After the First World War, the cultural Left turned against the nation, to the point that by 1930, according to the liberal George Orwell, essentially all English intellectuals were on the Left and ‘in left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful about being an Englishman’. In the more diverse United States, the lyrical Left’s critique took the form of an attack on their own ethnic group, the Anglo-Protestant majority, whom they saw as oppressing European immigrants and enforcing puritanical laws like the prohibition on selling alcohol. In the 1960s, this countercultural movement, which I term left-modernism, developed a theory of white ethno-racial oppression. Its outlook superseded the logical, empirically grounded, left-liberal Civil Rights Movement after 1965 to become a millenarian project sustained by the image of a retrograde white ‘other’. Today, left-modernism’s most zealous exponents are those seeking to consecrate the university campus as a sacred space devoted to the mission of replacing ‘whiteness’ with diversity.” p. 3

PART I Fight

Prequel to Whiteshift: From WASP to White in American History

• "think how unnatural it would be for a white American to support the white Serbian basketball team against the mainly black American 'Dream Team'!" --p.62
• Liberal progressives: William James and Felix Adler
• Josiah Strong's Our Country (1885)

The Rise of Trump: Ethno-Traditional Nationalism in an Age of Immigration

• "Only if you are living in a rapidly changing neighbourhood will the issue strike you between the eyes." p.78
• Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster
• In need of a scapegoat or a common enemy: "Just as the Civil War dampened anti-Irish sentiment and the Second World War calmed anti-Semitism, it can be argued that the War on Terror muted white ethno-traditionalist opposition to the growing Hispanic and immigrant presence." p.84
• Elite level, elite agenda, political elite: the liberal left and the liberal elite
• "conservative evangelicals have cooperated with Sunni Muslim imams, Shiite mullahs, Mormons and the Vatican to stifle UN family planning initiatives" p.86
• "creeping Europeanization", "Another index of creeping Europeanization was rising support for same-sex marriage, from 27 per cent in 1996 to 40 per cent in the 2000s to 53 per cent by 2012–13 and 64 per cent in 2017." p. 87
• Neocons vs paleocons
• Salience of immigration vs newspaper articles on the topic of immigration. p. 100
• "rapid ethnic change" p.100
• Provision 187, SB 1070
• "Cable produced a small bump in Republicanism", "conservative media effect"
• "It's not entirely clear if Trump sincerely believes in immigration restriction or merely found it a useful tool to acquire the presidency." p.116
• "Researchers find that teenagers with more open and exploratory psychological orientations self-select into university.110 This, much more than what people learn at university, makes them more liberal. p.119, see Bram Lancee. Oriane Sarrasin, "Educated Preferences or Selection Effects? A Longitudinal Analysis of the Impact of Educational Attainment on Attitudes Towards Immigrants" (2015)
• "The American hinterland is unlikely to support white terrorism, but Republican states or rural districts may become openly antagonistic towards the 'alien' federal government and the cities. As I'll argue, it would be far better if a transracial 'white' or American majority could be forged which bridges rural and urban, as occurred when the largely rural Protestant population fused with predominantly urban Catholics and Jews to form a new white majority between the 1960s and 1980s." --p. 136

Britain: The Erosion of English Reserve

• "It is very good that there are yellow French, black French, brown French. They show that France is open to all races and has a universal vocation. But [it is good] on condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France would no longer be France. We are still primarily a European people of the white race, Greek and Latin culture, and the Christian religion." --De Gaulle (C'est très bien qu'il y ait des Français jaunes, des Français noirs, des Français bruns. Ils montrent que la France est ouverte à toutes les races. Mais à la condition qu'ils restent une petite minorité.), interview with, Alain Peyrefitte, March 5, 1959, following the Algerian independence

• "Yet many British politicians privately recognized that permitting colonial subjects to migrate freely to Britain would cause a populist backlash." p. 142, see the Commonwealth Immigrants Act
• "These facts make him a racist" p. 145, on Enoch Powell who spoke of "wide grinning pickanninies" gaining the "whip hand" in his "rivers of blood" speech. But, Powell is not a racist for his remark on "neighborhoods changing beyond recognition", "Powell's mention of neighbourhoods changing beyond recognition raises the valid point that the cultural impact of rapid immigration is perceived as negative by most whites in reception areas."
• "Thus from a mixture" Defoe constitutional patriotism by Habermas
• Too diverse? (2004) by David Goodhart
• Asking majorities to accept their ethnic decline and focus their identity on common values is like “This is akin to asking the host country of a World's Fair to close its national booth and focus its sense of community exclusively on the fairgrounds.” p. 159
• Chicken and egg paradox in media/politic correlation p.161-62
• "Other surveys found a near-majority of Britons in favour of banning immigration from Muslim countries" p. 163
• "Last Whites of the East End"
• White flight/white avoidance; Throughout the Western world, the dominant process is not white flight but white avoidance. p. 166
• "Cultural reassurance", do we need to give "cultural reassurance" to people, boodschap van algemeen nut, regeringsvoorlichting, see demagogue, demaslave
• "The smells from the houses will make you heave!" = racist according to EK p.169
• "I'm not a racist but" disclaimer p. 170
• "anti-racist taboo", "moral reticence", "generalized other"
• The Breaking Point poster is taboo-- EK, p. 195
• "Education and income are correlated, but it's possible to be a successful building contractor with no degree or a penniless graduate." "death penalty" BES p. 198
• "twin studies suggest a third to a half of political behaviour is inherited – and continue with early childhood" p. 199
• Propaganda??? p. 202-3. The book presented two immigration scenarios to a panel of respondents on the Brexit:

1. A "conventional civic nationalist" narrative

‘Britain is changing, becoming increasingly diverse. The 2011 census shows that White British people are already a minority in four British cities, including London. Over a quarter of births in England and Wales are to foreign-born mothers. Young Britons are also much more diverse than older Britons. Just 4.5 per cent of those older than 65 are nonwhite but more than 20 per cent of those under 25 are. Minorities’ younger average age, somewhat higher birth rate and continued immigration mean that late this century, according to Professor David Coleman of Oxford University, White British people will be in the minority nationwide. We should embrace our diversity, which gives Britain an advantage in the global economy. Together, we can build a stronger, more inclusive Britain.’

1. An "open ethnic nationalist" narrative "based on reassurance over assimilation":

‘Immigration has risen and fallen over time, but, like the English language, Britain’s culture is only superficially affected by foreign influence. According to Professor Eric Kaufmann of the University of London, a large share of the children of European immigrants have become White British. Historians tell us that French, Irish, Jews and pre-war black immigrants largely melted into the white majority. Those of mixed race, who share common ancestors with White British people, are growing faster than all minority groups and 8 in 10 of them marry whites. In the long run, today’s minorities will be absorbed into the majority and foreign identities will fade, as they have for public figures with immigrant ancestors like Boris Johnson or Peter Mandelson. Britain shapes its migrants, migration doesn’t shape Britain.’

• "the facts of assimilation" proven where? p. 203

The Rise and Rise of the Populist Right in Europe

• "historical traumas" p. 212 "Historical traumas such as Hungary's loss of two thirds of its territory after the First World War, Spain's humiliation in the 1898 Spanish–American War, Germany's"
• Robert Putnam, "He discovered that Americans stopped having their neighbours over for dinner as often after 1960." p. 217
• "We are, as Jonathan Haidt remarks, part bee, hardwired to be tribal." p.217
• subtle ways of polling: "'People differ in many ways and each human being is unique. One person likes music, ..." p.219
• Ron Inglehart
• Gay men kissing Dutch film, “It is not a prudent way of welcoming people to the Netherlands” [other source]
• "…a higher immigrant share is a consistent predictor of higher opposition to immigration over time…" p.222 "in Western Europe there is a .63 correlation between projected 2030 Muslim share and the highest poll or vote share a populist-right party has achieved." p. 251 --Kaufmann on the “immigration backlash” hypothesis
• "The refugees that make it to the West are a relatively wealthy, male, risk-taking subsample of the total pool of potential claimants." p. 231
• "Building secure refugee facilities in the rich countries is the best way forward for the following reasons"EK referencing Paul Collier, p. 233
• Kakuma, lottery, opinion of EK
• "There is no absolute legal or ethical right to migrate" Alexander Betts p. 238, failure to respect state sovereignty will result in "mass publics" turning against "the courts"
• "If Western countries are the nearest countries to a conflict, they should accept an unlimited number of refugees. A precedent is the 250,000 Belgians who sheltered in Britain during the First World War then returned home in 1918." p. 239
• "Erasing the line between refuge and settlement makes it more likely countries will bar the door the way they did in 1939. " p. 239
• "People tend to be more favourable when answering a question using the term 'immigrants' than the more impersonal 'immigration'. " p. 241
• "It's also important to see that populist-right parties [in Europe] were capitalizing on a public mood, not manufacturing it." p.247, referring to Nate Breznau's paper "Europe’s Ageing Societies Need Immigration – And That Means Anti-Immigration Politics Is Here To Stay", 2017
• "safety-without-settlement policy" p. 248
• "Many white working-class voters are attracted to anti-immigration politics and reject the 'cultural turn' of the left that has influenced post-1960s cadres of party activists." p. 256

Canadian Exceptionalism: Right-Wing Populism in the Anglosphere

PART II Repress

Left-Modernism: From Nineteenth-Century Bohemia to the Campus Wars

• The 'cultural turn' of the left in the 1960s marked "a shift away from a story of the working class as the advance guard of socialism to a new narrative of cultural minorities as the vanguard of multiculturalism."
• Norbert Elias (The Civilizing Process) and Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger) p.295
• "I maintain we are currently in such a period, in which hegemonic liberal norms known as 'political correctness' are being challenged by both populists and centrists, some of whom are trying to install new social norms, notably those defining Muslims and cosmopolitans as deviant." p. 298
• Day of Absence p.300, positive liberalism, negative liberalism
• Hypatia transracialism controversy p.310-11
• "The CIA even funded modernist art", "sacralization of race and gender" p. 314
• "kalyptization", "organic intellectuals", James Coleman, busing p. 316
• "Black Studies" p. 317
  • "Late in the afternoon of November 5, 1968, a group of black students presented San Francisco State College President Robert R. Smith with a list of 10 "nonnegotiable" demands. The list had already been published in the daily newspapers. Among other things, the black students ordered the college to establish at once a black studies department with 20 full-time faculty members. They insisted that the new department be controlled by its faculty and staff, free from interference by college administrators or the statewide Board of Trustees." --Shut it down! : a college in crisis : San Francisco State College, October 1968-April 1969 : a report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, Student strike of 1970
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, "pure and simple" p. 326
• Freakonomics "low hanging fruit" p. 329
• "Field experiments" p. 332
• James Damore o. 337
• As Jared Diamond outlines in Guns, Germs and Steel, agriculturalists have replaced hunter-gatherers
• "the Bantu cattle-herding ancestors of African Americans, who largely wiped out the indigenous pygmy and San peoples" P. 340, citing Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel
• Bruckner, despite being Jewish, sees the Holocaust as the West's second Golgotha, 'as if Christ died a second time there'. --p. 340-1

Left-Modernism versus the Populist Right

• the term "white privilege" is more searched for in Google but its search frequency rises at the same rate as "white genocide". p. 359
• The Race Card (book) , racialized society, p. 366
• "left-modernism has placed us in a situation where expressing racism has become more acceptable than articulating racial self-interest." p.371 but racial self-interest is not racism says EK
• "tribally", see Koert Debeuf

PART III Flee

Hunkering Down: The Geographic and Social Retreat of White Majorities

• Thomas Schelling game theory and white flight, p. 402, EK only partly agrees with Schelling's theory that
  • In 1969, Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling published "Models of Segregation", a paper in which he demonstrated through a "checkerboard model" and mathematical analysis, that even when every agent prefers to live in a mixed-race neighborhood, almost complete segregation of neighborhoods emerges as individual decisions accumulate.
• In the US, African-Americans are most integration-minded, while Hispanics and Asians fall in between – though they are generally opposed to having many black neighbours.34 What's remarkable is that whites emerge as the most exclusive. p. 404
• Two nations: metro America and retro America, meaning progressive metro areas and the conservative countryside, from the book The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America
• More diversity equals less solidarity. p. 421, see David Willetts

PART IV Join

Mixing or Moulding? Interracial Marriage in the West

• "Algerian French men" are intermarrying, but what about the women, see interfaith marriage in Islam, p. 439
• "Danish muslims", stricter family reunifications, p. 440
  • "This disproportionately affects Danish Muslims. Indeed, the share of Danes of non-European background who marry someone from abroad declined from 63 to 38 per cent between 2002 and 2005."
  • see 24-year rule
• Ernest Gellner "counter-entropic", p. 440
  • "Religion is the clearest example of what the leading British sociologist Ernest Gellner termed a 'counter-entropic' trait that allows a group to resist assimilation. , p. 440
• J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur's New Man, p. 442
• "While we happily interbreed with each other, producing a continuous spectrum of inter-races, we are strangely reluctant to give up our divisive racial language." --Richard Dawkins cited on page 442, originally from The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (2004)
• "Physicists tell us that the rainbow is a simple continuum of wavelength. It is biology and/or psychology, not physics, that singles out particular landmark wavelengths along the physical spectrum for naming. Blue has a name. Green has a name. Blue-green does not. The interesting finding of anthropologists’ experiments is that there is substantial agreement over such namings across different cultures. We seem to have the same kind of agreement over judgements of race. It may prove to be even stronger and clearer than for the rainbow" --Richard Dawkins[2] , p. 442
• "Ethnicity is about subjective myths of decent" p. 445
• "The assimilation of non-Christians who are religiously observant into the ethnic majority is much less likely due to religion's function as an ethnic boundary marker. Islam is not unique here, the same holds true for Hinduism and Sikhism" p.448

The Future of White Majorities

• 1. Ethnic unmixing, in which minorities leave or are forced to leave, resulting in a return to 1950s levels of homogeneity.
• 2. A melting pot, in which the white group melts with others, forming a larger or smaller component of the total depending on
• 2. A salad bowl,
• Coco Chanel introduced the suntan, p.471
• "Figure 11.7 shows that most Americans (63 per cent) choose the melting pot over the Mauritian-style salad bowl." p. 473
• "As whites decline demographically and economically in the world, their confidence, which incubated both liberalism and left-modernism, is likely to wane." --p.476
• Michael Lind, “The Beige and the Black,” New York Times Magazine, August 16, 1998.
• Ready Player One (2011)
• Lee M. Silver, Remaking Eden (1998), transhumanism
• "Louis B. Mayer took second-generation-Polish calendar models and turned them into WASPs, and the American became a packaged product. The ethnics changed their names — Doris Kappelhoff became Doris Day, Bernie Schwartz turned" --The Decline Of the WASP (1971) by Peter Schrag
• "The argument that minority ethnic groups are encouraged to take pride in their identity while whites are not strikes me as undeniable in the present climate". --p. 482

Will 'Unmixed' Whites Go Extinct?

• "In today’s world, all societies are becoming multicultural, multiethnic and multi-religious." --António Guterres

White terrorism

Right-wing terrorism

• Anders Behring Breivik, Jo Cox

Navigating Whiteshift: Inclusive Majorities in Inclusive Nations

• Mark Lilla, p. 518
• "Asymmetrical multiculturalism", p. 519, see Tariq Modood
• "mention ethno-cultural reference points dear to whites", advise to Hillary Clinton not to ignore white voters, p.519
• cultural points, immigration selection, p.522-24
• "Attacking Muslims as a threat to Jews, homosexuals or free speech offers an acceptable liberal rationale for immigration preferences that are largely motivated by a desire for ethno-cultural protection" p. 526
• "Liberal institutions such as the press, bureacracy or courts" should not adopt "the positive liberal ethos of left-modernism" because it will damage their "trust in liberal democracy." p. 526
• "It's vital not to permit cosmopolitanism to become coercive. Broadening one's tastes and moral horizons is one version of the good life, not an iron moral law. [...] Some prefer to holiday in the same place each year, others prefer new vistas. Neither is morally superior." The first category should not be accused of "racism, nativism, xenophobia, closed-mindedness and parochialism." p. 527
• Victor Turner, multivocality instead of multiculturalism, p. 330

See also

• The book uses the term subaltern five times
• Media effect, ennobling, edification
• Right-wing populism
• Cultural assimilation
• Ethnic conflict
• Multiculturalism
• Race and genetics
• George Bellows
• the Lyrical Left
• Humanitarian visa
• Randolph Bourne
• Correlation
• Working class in the United States
• Causes of the vote in favour of Brexit left-behind hypothesis
• Value Modes
• Whiteness studies