TRIGGERnometry - Eric Kaufmann on Nationalism, White Identity & Immigration

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:10.000 I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:00:11.000 And this is a show for you if you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about.

00:00:17.000 At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts.

00:00:22.000 Our fantastic expert guest this week is a professor of politics at Birkbeck University in London, Eric Kavman.

00:00:29.000 Come on. Welcome to Chicken Omnitry.

00:00:30.320 Thank you very much.

00:00:39.800 It's great to have you here.

00:00:41.280 As always, before we get into the interview itself,

00:00:43.620 tell our viewers and our listeners a little bit about who you are,

00:00:46.020 how are you, where you are, what's been your story?

00:00:48.040 Well, my story, I mean, I have a very kind of cosmopolitan background to begin with.

00:00:51.660 So I was kind of born in Hong Kong, grew up in Canada, moved to London.

00:00:55.620 and I've got Jewish, Chinese, Latino in my background.

00:01:01.140 So I've got that very kind of international.

00:01:02.880 Lived in Japan for eight years.

00:01:05.900 But what I study is nationalism,

00:01:08.520 and that's partly because if you grow up abroad,

00:01:10.960 you're much more aware of, you know, it's problematized,

00:01:14.040 the idea of what is your country, what's it about.

00:01:16.480 So I developed this interest in nations and national identity,

00:01:19.980 so that's something I've focused on for over 20 years.

00:01:23.360 And you've got a book that's what we'll be talking about predominantly in this interview.

00:01:28.620 It's called White Shift, which is coming out very soon. 0.83

00:01:31.400 Yes, yeah. End of October in the UK, end of January in the United States.

00:01:35.720 And you've been kind enough to provide us an advance copy, which I've read is absolutely fascinating.

00:01:40.160 It's kind of dynamite, I think it's fair to say.

00:01:43.980 And, you know, let's get straight into that.

00:01:46.320 I think the main narrative at the moment when we talk about populism and nationalism and all these things is,

00:01:52.220 look, it's the Rust Belt, it's poor people who are freaking out about their job prospects and

00:01:57.360 their future economic security and all of that. And what you do in your book is essentially

00:02:02.580 debunk all of that. And if it wasn't called White Shift, I think it would be called It's 0.83

00:02:07.060 Immigration Stupid. Right, exactly. So a lot of the media narrative around populism immediately 1.00

00:02:13.720 after, say, the Trump or Brexit vote turned to who voted for Trump or who voted for Brexit and

00:02:20.100 Where do they live?

00:02:20.800 And you can see that the cities tended to be, say, remain voting and outlying areas tended to be for leave.

00:02:27.460 And those areas tend to be a bit more deprived.

00:02:29.560 So people kind of jump to these conclusions, well, it's the left behind.

00:02:33.000 They're the ones who voted to leave or they voted for Trump.

00:02:36.560 The problem with that, of course, is that, you know, just take London as a city.

00:02:40.860 It's got a large number of people who are not white British.

00:02:44.380 It's got a large number of people with university degrees, a large number of young people.

00:02:48.340 So that makes it fairly unusual demographically.

00:02:51.420 The only real way to do that study properly

00:02:53.980 is to take a white working class person in London 0.73

00:02:56.700 and a white working class person in the north,

00:02:59.100 in a mining town, for example, and compare them.

00:03:02.260 And when you do that, you actually see, if anything,

00:03:05.180 that person in London is slightly more

00:03:06.980 likely to have voted leave.

00:03:08.700 So that's the kind of method where you're actually

00:03:11.060 looking at individuals, individual level, large scale

00:03:14.180 survey data, not looking at these election maps

00:03:17.500 or talking about opioid crises or so on.

00:03:20.440 So, yeah, the first takeaway really is that it's almost all about immigration

00:03:24.780 when we talk about right-wing populism.

00:03:26.820 Not left-wing populism, Podemos and Corbyn, that is about the economy,

00:03:30.400 but right-wing populism in the West, not, again, in India or even in Eastern Europe.

00:03:37.320 In the West, it's about immigration.

00:03:39.620 And the academic literature is actually pretty solid on this as well.

00:03:43.260 The academic literature shows this and wouldn't dispute this.

00:03:46.780 Now, some, of course, would dispute it, but certainly when it comes to immigration, a lot of the academic, there was a meta-analysis done, which is an analysis of all the literature, and they find essentially that how poor you are, whether you're unemployed or not, whether you've lost your job, those are not things that predict your immigration attitudes, and these are not things that are driving right-wing populism.

00:04:06.900 So the mainstream narrative right now is essentially people have nothing to live on, people don't have a job, like you say, and they're lashing out against immigrants because that's where we normally channel our anger when we've lost out and whatever.

00:04:24.200 And you say?

00:04:25.780 Well, I say no.

00:04:27.040 I say essentially what this is about is anxiety over ethnocultural change, threats to identity.

00:04:33.220 And I'll give you a kind of question that we might ask people.

00:04:36.160 say in this country, we ask Brexiteers, white British Brexiteers, how concerned are you,

00:04:41.940 how much of a problem is pressure on public services? Zero to 100, 100 being it's a big

00:04:47.900 problem. And people give it about a 40, you know, Brexit leave voters give it about a 47, 48 out of

00:04:53.920 100. And all you have to do is stick the word immigrants putting pressure on public services.

00:04:59.480 So it's the same question, how much of a problem is pressure on public services, but it's immigrants 1.00

00:05:04.440 putting just two words pressure on public services it goes from sort of 48 out of 100 to 70 out of

00:05:10.920 100 for remainers it's the reverse and actually makes sense what the remainers are doing actually

00:05:15.600 does make sense because if the problem is pressure on public services the part of that problem that

00:05:20.800 is accounted for by immigrants has to be smaller than the problem itself so it makes no sense to

00:05:26.200 get a number moving from say 48 up to 70 because the problem the immigrant fueled part of the 1.00

00:05:31.780 problem cannot be larger than the whole problem but that's just a way of by way

00:05:35.740 of explaining that this is not driven by people's worry about pressure on public

00:05:40.360 service as economic things which is sort of the narrative of probably both

00:05:44.140 parties in a way because that's what they know they've got economic policy

00:05:47.500 tools it's also safer because we can talk about well people are feeling

00:05:51.500 pressure on material things schools and hospitals and that's why they're upset

00:05:55.220 about immigration it's not that nasty cultural stuff but actually it is that 0.98

00:05:59.860 cultural stuff. Well, let's break that down when you say the nasty cultural stuff. I've read your 1.00

00:06:05.880 book very carefully, so you're not saying that the majority of the people who are on the populist

00:06:10.980 right hate immigrants and they're racist, right? You're not saying that. I'm not saying that, no.

00:06:15.760 I actually think we need to open up a conversation about white identity, first of all, 0.99

00:06:20.840 and secondly, something I call the white tradition of national identity, and to do so in a fair-minded

00:06:26.920 way. So there is a certain kind of toxicity around the subject of white group identity

00:06:32.840 by Mitch... Oh, really? Is that right? I hadn't noticed.

00:06:38.400 So, and, you know... It never ends well, though, let's be fair. When you get through a group

00:06:44.020 of people together and go, right, we're white, we identify for being white, it tends to end

00:06:49.360 in camps. Well, no, I disagree with you. So, for example, I don't think identifying as

00:06:55.840 or identifying as black or identifying as Hawaiian,

00:06:58.840 you know, we have to look at these things differently.

00:07:00.840 I mean, all of those identities can be abused.

00:07:03.840 You can go... you can fixate and be extremist about it.

00:07:06.840 But just if you think about the world, you know,

00:07:09.840 80% of the world's countries have an ethnic majority.

00:07:12.840 You know, Persians in Iran, it could be Tswana in Botswana,

00:07:16.840 Japanese in Japan, et cetera.

00:07:18.840 Those... you know, these people identify with their group,

00:07:21.840 with their culture, and they're not out killing each other.

00:07:23.840 Now, some will, but when we think about what are the predictors of genocide, for example,

00:07:28.840 it's an ideology that says this country should only be inhabited by either a particular group

00:07:36.840 or people who adhere to an ideology like socialism or like Islamism. 0.99

00:07:41.840 And if you don't adhere to that, you're in the way and we're going to exterminate you. 0.99

00:07:45.840 So it doesn't necessarily matter whether it's a particularist identity like ethnicity 0.96

00:07:49.840 ethnicity or it's a universalist identity like Islam or socialism, there are extreme versions

00:07:54.820 and moderate versions. And you can have a moderate version of white identity as you can a moderate

00:07:58.760 version of Islamic identity. And there's nothing wrong with that. And that's sort of the normal

00:08:03.340 state of affairs in most countries most of the time. So I think this focus on white identity 0.86

00:08:09.420 as toxic actually doesn't have a basis, in fact. Even though we know, yes, we're all thinking about

00:08:16.160 You're wrong.

00:08:18.300 Yeah, we're all thinking of the Nazis.

00:08:19.900 You know, I lost relatives in the Holocaust. 0.74

00:08:21.900 You know, yes, of course.

00:08:23.520 But that's one case.

00:08:24.760 And we actually have to say, okay, all of the countries in the world that have ethnic

00:08:28.000 majorities that identify with their group, and then all of the places in the world that

00:08:32.860 have a genocidal event.

00:08:34.960 And we have data sets, actually, where we can look at this question systematically, and

00:08:39.260 we find, well, actually, you have to have a number of conditions in place, one of which

00:08:42.980 is this exclusivist focus on identity.

00:08:45.900 So it's not just saying, you know, we are Hindus in India,

00:08:50.300 but it's, you know, everybody who isn't a Hindu 1.00

00:08:52.840 is garbage and must be exterminated. 1.00

00:08:54.780 That's a very different thing from just saying 1.00

00:08:56.800 we identify as Hindu.

00:08:58.460 So you can have moderate versions and extreme versions

00:09:01.440 of any identity, whether it's a minority identity

00:09:04.160 or a majority.

00:09:05.240 So I really think, actually, we have to start to think

00:09:08.120 about it being, you know, okay to express a moderate white identity, or what I mean by that

00:09:14.360 is ethnic majority identity. Because again, 80% of the world's countries have these ethnic 0.87

00:09:20.380 majority identities. If we try and say you can't have that, I actually think we are making things

00:09:26.340 worse. If anything, I think that's the greater risk than if we say, okay, it can be expressed,

00:09:30.520 but it's got to be done in a moderate way. Whereas what you would argue we've had is

00:09:35.140 a blowback against excessive oppression of people's attempts to speak their mind about

00:09:40.280 these issues, which result then in Trump and Brexit and all that.

00:09:43.900 Yeah. So if you look at the Trump vote, for example, white identity is a major predictor

00:09:48.920 of the Trump vote. The sense that whites are being discriminated against, which is largely

00:09:54.400 not true if we think about economics and politics, where they're actually doing very well. But

00:09:59.300 in terms of the high culture, in terms of the sense of not being able to express an identity,

00:10:03.560 whereas other groups can on campus which is something the far right then uses so it uses

00:10:08.600 something which is actually true that there is this double standard in terms of majorities and

00:10:12.700 minorities being able to express an identity attachment to heritage and then it builds you

00:10:18.580 know the anti-semitism the anti-islam and all this other stuff layers that on top so i actually think

00:10:24.260 we're giving oxygen and ammunition to the far right by maintaining this double standard

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00:10:59.540 well see if you were like you you established your oppression credentials early on i have to do

00:11:05.200 that you absolutely i shouldn't have to do that no no no no just for anyone who doesn't know us

00:11:10.040 right i'm an immigrant francis mother's an immigrant eric you're an immigrant and mixed race

00:11:15.300 we've got a few other tech guys in the room they're all either immigrants or the descendants

00:11:19.960 of immigrants right so the reason we do that is because they're cheaper no but so we've established 1.00

00:11:27.280 that, right? Because if we hadn't, that would be racist, right? Having this conversation, I mean,

00:11:32.880 you are saying essentially white people need to be able to be proud of being white. Well, to be able 0.85

00:11:38.160 to have an, yeah, I mean, to have an identity, there's a difference. So there's a social psychology

00:11:42.040 literature going now 50, 60 years, and summarized in a paper by Marilyn Brewer, actually, 1999, that

00:11:48.100 there is no correlation between hating an out group and being attached to your in group. Now,

00:11:54.540 I actually think overly fixating on an in-group is unhealthy as well,

00:11:58.020 but what I just want to establish here is that,

00:12:00.500 so in the 2016 American National Election Study,

00:12:03.380 how warm you feel towards whites is not predictive

00:12:06.420 of how cool you feel towards blacks or Muslims.

00:12:08.960 Actually, there's, if anything, a slight positive correlation.

00:12:11.920 Warmer you feel towards whites, 0.83

00:12:13.520 slightly warmer towards blacks or other groups.

00:12:16.080 And this is a finding that's found in many instances.

00:12:19.900 So I think we have to, when we're talking about racism,

00:12:22.260 there is real racism.

00:12:23.100 We have to stick to the definition, and we can't sort of let that definition creep and expand to encompass anything that especially the left doesn't like, whether that's nationalism, whether that's majority group identity, etc.

00:12:36.740 That's been part of the problem, because as that definition has crept out and shut down debate, because when you say something's racist, you're saying it's disgusting, it's beyond the pale, so we can't talk about it.

00:12:48.620 And what that does is it then pushes it off the agenda of mainstream politics.

00:12:53.440 And that then, it's like saying we can't sell alcohol, so who's going to rush in and fill that gap?

00:12:59.120 It's not going to be a mainstream party.

00:13:00.900 It's going to be the Sweden Democrats, for example.

00:13:03.240 In Sweden, you couldn't talk about immigration.

00:13:05.400 That was seen as racist.

00:13:06.880 Boom, in come the Sweden Democrats up to almost 20% in the last election, right?

00:13:12.460 So it's the issue of a political entrepreneur having a market

00:13:18.680 because the mainstream parties feel this is too hot to handle.

00:13:23.020 Now, there are some instances where the mainstream parties really

00:13:25.540 should not touch an issue, like segregation,

00:13:29.560 imposing segregation between blacks and whites.

00:13:31.860 George Wallace, a candidate in the United States from the South,

00:13:35.700 he said, we want segregation.

00:13:37.740 And yes, he was able to get a certain amount of populist

00:13:40.620 support for that.

00:13:41.740 And I think the mainstream parties were right to say no to that and to push it off the agenda.

00:13:47.020 But then, if you take that approach, it's correct for that approach,

00:13:51.040 but then what about talking about levels of immigration?

00:13:53.780 What about talking about national identity?

00:13:56.260 You see, there's a temptation if you are on the left to want,

00:13:59.880 or even if you are on the right but you're a sort of free marketeer,

00:14:03.640 to want those taboos to expand and expand so that these issues are taken off the table,

00:14:09.700 especially if you fear that the population actually is disturbed by these issues

00:14:13.920 and you don't want to discuss them democratically.

00:14:16.900 Well, if you can push them off the table by making them a taboo,

00:14:20.060 you don't actually have to discuss them.

00:14:21.860 And that's actually stored up a lot of the pressure that has led to the blowback,

00:14:27.240 which I think we're experiencing or have experienced since 2012.

00:14:30.620 Because it's interesting what you said there,

00:14:32.800 where you said, you know, you get these people coming in and exploiting that,

00:14:36.000 which is essentially what Trump did.

00:14:37.580 Right.

00:14:38.580 How do you... And he's talking about white identity.

00:14:41.380 See, I would argue there are racist undertones to what Trump does.

00:14:46.440 For instance, you know, saying,

00:14:48.360 I've actually had this conversation with Constance,

00:14:50.440 I'm half Latin American.

00:14:51.840 I think that when he came out and he said, 0.97

00:14:54.080 some of these people are rapists, 0.71

00:14:56.300 I think that's a racist comment. 0.99

00:14:59.840 What... How do we...

00:15:01.520 I think the question I really want to ask is,

00:15:03.640 How did we divorce this idea of having a white identity from sort of the racist undercurrents that sometimes can marry itself with that?

00:15:14.540 Absolutely. So I think you gave a really good example.

00:15:17.460 When Trump said Mexicans are, he's generalizing about a group and saying they're rapists, that is racism. 0.99

00:15:22.660 Some of them are rapists. 1.00

00:15:23.020 Or some of them are rapists. I agree with you. That's a racist statement. 1.00

00:15:25.900 I think we need to distinguish that from, say, celebrating the arrival of Christopher Columbus, for example, or even the wall.

00:15:35.500 I mean, the wall is actually not racist.

00:15:37.960 If you think about a wall, okay, if you've got an illegal immigration problem, you decide to build a wall, there's nothing actually racist about that.

00:15:46.460 However, when you point to a group like Muslims or Mexicans and you say something nasty or generalizing about them, that is racist.

00:15:53.620 because, again, it's that distinction, or as I'm using the term,

00:15:57.140 it's a distinction between antipathy to an out-group

00:15:59.940 and attachment to an in-group.

00:16:02.360 If it's attachment to in-group, it can be racist

00:16:05.540 only if that attachment leads you to, say, discriminate.

00:16:09.420 If you're a lawyer and you're hiring lawyers

00:16:11.480 and you discriminate in favor of whites,

00:16:13.920 clearly people are not receiving equal treatment under the law.

00:16:18.820 So sometimes attachment to your own group

00:16:20.720 can lead to racist discrimination.

00:16:22.540 but generally not so I'm certainly allowing that there are instances where even if you don't hate

00:16:29.480 another group even if you just like your own group you can still be racist by discriminating

00:16:34.060 against other groups but in general I think that's not the case and if we start to say

00:16:39.780 that that identity identifying as ethnically English or white American is is inherently

00:16:46.080 racist I think you actually piss off a lot of people and you if anything you're giving fuel

00:16:50.360 to populism. And in the book, one of the things you talk about is the polarization that's occurred

00:16:56.140 within society in terms of attitudes to immigration between people who might be

00:17:00.480 broadleasing center or center-right and the left and the liberals. And you talk about the

00:17:05.920 authoritarians and the conservatives and their different interests and priorities on the right

00:17:10.360 and the liberals on the left. So can you tell our audience a little bit about how we're differently

00:17:14.880 and how we view immigration differently? Right. So this is one of the keys in my book,

00:17:18.340 because I don't use, say, class or age or any of these big demographics as key explanatory factors.

00:17:24.620 I tend to focus on psychological makeup, and there's a number of interesting writers.

00:17:29.480 Karen Stenner is one social psychologist, and there's a literature on that some people prefer order and stability,

00:17:37.560 and other people prefer change, diversity, for example, difference.

00:17:42.420 And those are preferences.

00:17:43.680 It's a bit like, do you prefer to go on holiday the same place every year,

00:17:47.280 or do you prefer to go to a different place every year?

00:17:49.400 And these things are, to some extent, hereditary.

00:17:52.700 Not entirely hereditary, but between kind of like a third and a half,

00:17:56.460 depending on the disposition.

00:17:58.000 So you've got people who really do like their habitual routine.

00:18:01.840 They're not particularly exploratory.

00:18:04.240 And there are a lot of these people,

00:18:06.020 and there's actually nothing wrong with them.

00:18:07.180 They just have a different taste.

00:18:08.280 Now, so with diversity, what I would say is,

00:18:11.840 in a liberal society, we must tolerate diversity.

00:18:14.740 So that, to me, is absolutely right.

00:18:17.280 to insist that everybody must tolerate difference.

00:18:21.060 But the second question becomes, well,

00:18:22.800 do you prefer more difference over less difference

00:18:26.020 or greater difference over homogeneity?

00:18:28.740 And actually, that is a taste.

00:18:31.080 It's different from toleration.

00:18:34.620 It's preference.

00:18:36.660 And if we actually look at where people move to residentially,

00:18:41.700 there's very, very little difference

00:18:43.000 between white liberals and white conservatives.

00:18:45.080 they tend to gravitate to very wide areas.

00:18:47.820 Liberals just talking again.

00:18:49.820 Right.

00:18:50.440 I'm not accusing liberals of anything.

00:18:52.580 I'm just saying that.

00:18:53.160 I am.

00:18:53.820 Well, okay.

00:18:54.680 I'm kidding.

00:18:56.100 But people's actions, and also in terms of friendship networks

00:18:59.980 and who people marry, a lot of the behaviors actually belie the fact

00:19:04.880 that actually people are preferring their own, not entirely, not exclusively.

00:19:09.940 But it's just to say that some people have a preference for more change and diversity.

00:19:14.700 So what that then means is, when it comes to something like immigration policy,

00:19:19.980 you can't go out there and just say, we must celebrate diversity,

00:19:23.020 and if you don't, you're a bad person,

00:19:25.080 because actually people are wired differently.

00:19:27.140 Now, we don't want to necessarily go to the other extreme and say diversity's bad.

00:19:30.560 We don't, actually.

00:19:31.420 But what we want to do is say there's differences in the population.

00:19:34.480 We have to respect those differences to some extent.

00:19:37.240 If you try and kind of push this idea that everyone must prefer diversity,

00:19:43.180 It's a bit like saying everyone must prefer to go on holiday somewhere new each year.

00:19:47.040 Actually, you're going to run up against a problem, which is that you're actually going to rankle people.

00:19:51.560 And Stenner's work shows that, in fact, by pushing a diversity narrative,

00:19:56.160 you're actually triggering a lot of these what are called authoritarians in the literature

00:20:01.220 who prefer that order and stability.

00:20:03.500 They react negatively to that message.

00:20:05.940 So if you're actually going to diffuse that threat

00:20:10.600 or diffuse what's driving populism,

00:20:13.300 you need a different message, which might be...

00:20:15.980 it might be one of saying,

00:20:17.240 well, immigrants are coming, but they're assimilating, 0.97

00:20:19.640 and things aren't changing that much.

00:20:21.180 That would be more the kind of message

00:20:22.840 that would work for people who like stability.

00:20:26.480 But again, you don't want to say that to people

00:20:28.460 who like change and diversity.

00:20:29.660 So you've got to have different messages.

00:20:31.160 It's just to say that there is nothing innately better

00:20:35.160 about preferring difference and change

00:20:37.560 to preferring stability.

00:20:40.000 And this is one of the things, again, one of these fuzzy lines that people get wrong

00:20:44.480 is they collapse the difference between tolerating difference,

00:20:48.100 which we must in a liberal society, and preferring difference,

00:20:52.900 which is what I would call, well, Isaiah Berlin, the liberal theorist,

00:20:56.820 would call positive liberalism, where you're actually saying,

00:20:59.360 this is the ideal we want everybody to push towards.

00:21:02.040 And that's when I think things get polarized,

00:21:04.540 because if you're starting to push people towards something that they don't believe in,

00:21:09.100 then you are actually going to polarize society.

00:21:12.320 And I think that's one of the mistakes, actually, that progressives have made

00:21:16.200 is this assumption that if you don't love diversity, change, openness,

00:21:20.760 that you must be a terrible person.

00:21:24.120 I mean, you raise that point, and we were talking about white indigenous cultures. 0.94

00:21:28.480 I used to work a lot in the East End of London,

00:21:32.520 and one thing that I noticed, like you said,

00:21:34.440 a lot of them would be pro-Brexit or leave voters, white working class.

00:21:38.680 But what I also noticed as well is that there tended to be a sort of resentment

00:21:44.080 because they would notice that people, so immigrants would be coming in,

00:21:48.360 they'd be in an area for a period of time and then they would move on,

00:21:53.580 whereas the white, essentially the white population would remain in that area.

00:21:59.780 Do you not think a lot of that as well is that resentment,

00:22:02.820 that they feel that they're not getting a good end of the deal, as it were?

00:22:07.540 And what they want is a politician to come and come in, like Trump, and redress the balance.

00:22:14.400 Well, it depends what you mean by a deal.

00:22:16.640 I mean, in the Brexit vote, it is true that people who are poorer were somewhat more likely to vote leave.

00:22:22.840 So there is some truth to it in the Brexit vote, whereas in the Trump vote, there's almost zero evidence for that.

00:22:29.220 What I would say is that it's true that there is some of that, but by far,

00:22:32.680 You know, a much more important question than whether people are deprived or are not being able to move would be something like, do you support the death penalty, or what's your views on immigration?

00:22:42.800 You know, these are much deeper questions in terms of getting at that cultural attitude.

00:22:47.760 I mean, this is one of the reasons why education, having a degree or not, is so much more important for predicting the populist right voting than income.

00:22:56.020 So you can be a wealthy plumber, for example, and you're very wealthy, you're very safe and secure, but because that educational qualification, getting a degree is linked to certain kinds of worldviews and cultural attitudes, it's a much more powerful predictor of support for the populist right.

00:23:15.040 So, again, it's tapping a more cultural orientation rather than material orientations.

00:23:21.580 And even when it comes to, for example, resenting politicians or the system, that, too, is not a predictor of populist right voting.

00:23:30.840 So, you know, Brexiteers, voters for the Green Party, voters for the Labour Party, especially for Corbyn.

00:23:37.800 But there isn't really a difference when you ask questions like, you know, decisions should be made by the people and not politicians, or Westminster politicians are remote.

00:23:46.260 There are a number of these questions in the British election study, which all show that this is not something that predicts support for Brexit.

00:23:53.360 And I think we have to go – by the way, this is the other thing I talk about a lot in the book, is we really have to go to these large-scale individual-level data sets to be able to control for these – you know, you put income in there, you stratify by age.

00:24:06.280 So you can control for all these different effects, and once you do that, you actually see how unimportant something like income is compared to these attitudes.

00:24:15.960 Death penalty is the clearest one, because that gives you a much stronger take on whether someone voted for leave than something like class.

00:24:24.520 Oh, really? So if you agree with the death penalty, you're far more likely to be a leave voter?

00:24:29.560 Absolutely, yeah.

00:24:31.180 Wow.

00:24:31.500 And is it a mark of, like, conservatism or authoritarianism, is that what it is?

00:24:37.560 Yeah, so it's a mark of what they call authoritarianism, which I think is a somewhat unfortunate term, you know, reflects the orientation of academia, which is fine.

00:24:46.760 I mean, of course, we can think what we want about the death penalty, but it's also linked to views on child rearing, strict versus permissive.

00:24:54.140 So strict child rearing, views on death penalty would be another one. 0.99

00:24:58.240 So these kinds of predictors, which all fall under the rubric of authoritarianism, that's a much more powerful predictor of, say, populist right voting than anything related to class or income.

00:25:11.820 All right. Well, we are where we are with this, right, with immigration and with the whole conversation.

00:25:18.260 If we accept everything that you say in the book, which is that's what's driving it,

00:25:23.740 what do you project going forward if we keep doing what we've been doing?

00:25:29.860 Well, here's the thing, right?

00:25:31.140 So in the book, the other part, and I mean, the book's entitled White Shift,

00:25:34.580 and the first part of White Shift is really about whites declining

00:25:37.600 as a share of the population across the West.

00:25:40.660 So in the extreme case might be Canada, where it's sort of in 2006,

00:25:45.760 it might have been about 80% white, 20% minorities.

00:25:49.220 2106, it's going to be 80% roughly non-white, 20%.

00:25:52.780 So that's kind of, that's the most rapid change.

00:25:56.080 You know, it won't be that quick.

00:25:57.620 In Britain, it'll still be about 50% white

00:25:59.920 by the end of the century.

00:26:01.180 And in the U.S., it'll be somewhere in between.

00:26:04.060 That's kind of white shift one, 1.00

00:26:05.440 which is leading to this, you know,

00:26:07.220 these decline in security in the white population,

00:26:10.480 which is fueling populism,

00:26:12.160 making immigration such a key issue,

00:26:13.900 and polarization, but if you actually go sort of 50 years beyond,

00:26:19.040 so trailing that initial white decline is the second meaning of white shift,

00:26:23.700 which is what I'm arguing is going to happen,

00:26:26.440 is that the white majorities are actually going to absorb large numbers of non-white groups

00:26:31.760 essentially through intermarriage, voluntary intermarriage, already happening.

00:26:35.980 The fastest-growing group is the mixed-race group.

00:26:40.020 And so if you just look at projections of the mixed-race group in Britain,

00:26:42.900 going way out.

00:26:44.980 And, you know, of course, with all the caveats

00:26:46.460 about these long-term projections,

00:26:48.200 assuming that the rate of intermarriage remains the same,

00:26:51.180 regardless of what happens to immigration levels,

00:26:54.900 you know, by the end of this, you know, by the mid-century,

00:26:57.220 it's only about 7% or so mixed race.

00:27:00.280 By the end of the century, it's like almost 30%,

00:27:02.900 and then 50 years later, it's like 75%.

00:27:05.680 So you get this kind of exponential curve,

00:27:08.100 simply because anyone who's mixed, a mixed-race background,

00:27:11.660 You know, myself might be an example of that, a quarter Chinese,

00:27:15.660 so anyone I marry then, you know, my kids will be counted as mixed-rate.

00:27:20.660 The secondary question of how they're treated, whether they're treated as white or not,

00:27:24.660 is a secondary question.

00:27:25.660 But still, the proportion of the population that has some non-white background in Britain

00:27:30.660 will begin to increase exponentially.

00:27:33.660 The question then will be, well, how does that mixed-race majority,

00:27:36.660 which I'm arguing will kind of take over as the majority,

00:27:39.660 the majority how do they identify and i'm kind of arguing that they will mainly or they will

00:27:45.100 selectively tend to emphasize their european ancestry simply because at the global level

00:27:52.540 that's what's going to be distinctive about them whereas the non-european parts of the world which

00:27:56.620 will be economically much more powerful and also demographically much more powerful i mean there

00:28:02.620 will be more of a sense of that is going to be the distinctiveness but what it does of course mean

00:28:07.260 is that, yes, the typical quote-unquote white person

00:28:11.120 will have darker features,

00:28:14.020 will look more like what we would call mixed race today.

00:28:18.060 So that's kind of the very futuristic take on this.

00:28:21.740 So the three of us are a good example of the future.

00:28:23.940 That's what you're basically saying.

00:28:25.440 Because I find it very interesting you talking about people's fear,

00:28:29.980 and that's never been a fear of mine, number one,

00:28:32.260 because my mother is Latin American.

00:28:33.560 Number two, I spent a lot of time in Latin America,

00:28:36.080 and that's essentially what the population is like.

00:28:39.640 Do you think that it's...

00:28:41.920 Right is probably the wrong word to use for it,

00:28:44.180 but do you understand why people have this fear

00:28:47.200 that, you know, that we are going to become

00:28:49.900 an inverted commas less white?

00:28:51.880 Because to me, it's, well, that's just my family,

00:28:54.500 that's how I've grown up.

00:28:55.540 So for me, it's nothing to fear at all.

00:28:57.940 Right, so two things on that.

00:28:59.500 One is that Latin America, 0.99

00:29:01.780 you're right that that's what's happened there,

00:29:03.180 but there are, it's not necessarily the direction

00:29:05.780 that we would want to go, even though we may be moving in that direction.

00:29:09.660 Because Latin America has a racially stratified system

00:29:12.160 where lighter-skinned people tend to be overrepresented

00:29:14.380 in politics, top jobs, et cetera.

00:29:17.760 More of a model, I think, are what you see with the Maori 1.00

00:29:20.920 and the Hawaiians and Native Indians,

00:29:22.780 where whether you are more or less purely Native Indian

00:29:26.360 doesn't mean you're more or less...

00:29:28.020 Your class, your income, your opportunities aren't affected so much.

00:29:32.580 I think you can have that kind of a society.

00:29:35.140 So there are groups like in Central Asia, like the Turkmen or the Pashtun and these other groups where, you know, you have people who look very white and you have people who look very South Asian.

00:29:43.500 And that doesn't seem to be the basis for social stratification.

00:29:46.580 So, yeah, I would hope we could avoid the Latin American model if possible. 1.00

00:29:52.440 But the other thing is...

00:29:53.300 We don't want to be like you, man.

00:29:55.640 I'm a quarter Costa Rican, too.

00:29:57.240 But no, the question about fear, no, I think, yeah, I think we have to address that fear,

00:30:04.240 because everybody, this is the point about white identity, and also what I call the white

00:30:09.460 tradition of national identity, which is this idea that I'm attached to being American, let's say,

00:30:14.940 America has a traditional ethnic composition, which is a white majority, a black minority,

00:30:19.540 et cetera, or Britain has a traditional ethnic composition, which is a white British majority

00:30:23.860 and minorities. And conservatism, a lot of these things are conservatism rather than racism, being

00:30:31.200 attached to ethno-traditions that tend to give a country part of its uniqueness. And so the people

00:30:39.320 don't want to see those particularities erode, or they want to see them erode more slowly,

00:30:46.000 right? So there are many shades of gray. It's like, okay, I'm okay with a certain amount of

00:30:49.680 change but not rapid change and all that nuance tends to be crushed out in an

00:30:54.060 argument where it's either you're you're for openness or you're closed you know

00:30:57.360 actually a lot of people are in between they're okay maybe with some change but

00:31:01.120 they want to slow it down I mean that's sort of where a lot of people are on the

00:31:04.980 immigration question so yeah I think that's understandable I don't think the 0.91

00:31:08.960 fears I'm not actually sure how much of this is fear as much as a sense of loss

00:31:14.100 you know one of the best questions for predicting immigration attitudes is

00:31:17.820 things in America were better in the past.

00:31:20.900 You know, that kind of thing.

00:31:22.060 But people are attached to the way things were

00:31:23.800 when they were 20 years old.

00:31:25.980 Growing up, they see, you know,

00:31:27.740 another question would be,

00:31:29.340 I don't recognize my country anymore.

00:31:30.860 You know, these sorts of things.

00:31:31.920 And that's just tapping into that cultural conservatism,

00:31:35.600 which I do think has to be distinguished from, 0.99

00:31:37.840 you know, I hate Latinos or I hate Muslims, 1.00

00:31:41.280 which is a clearly very racist thing. 0.98

00:31:43.620 So I think a lot of this is actually people's expression

00:31:45.740 of a kind of conservatism.

00:31:48.740 Now, the question is, what do you do with that?

00:31:50.880 And part of my—what I'm saying is part of it is you have to listen to that

00:31:56.080 and you have to say, okay, that's a valid—because some people are driven by culture,

00:31:59.600 some are driven by economics, and that's a valid concern.

00:32:02.280 You're not going to get everything you want because we're a democracy

00:32:04.540 and some people want more immigration and there's the economy,

00:32:07.160 which needs immigrants and so on, so we're going to come to an accommodation.

00:32:11.140 And I actually think that would be better because people would feel,

00:32:13.060 okay, I've been heard, I haven't been shouted down as a racist,

00:32:17.200 but I can't have everything I want because we have to pay the pensions and so on,

00:32:21.920 or some other reason.

00:32:24.680 So I think you can actually get at those fears.

00:32:27.340 And also the other thing is I think you need to have a vision

00:32:29.100 for what's going to happen to the white majority.

00:32:32.760 If you just say, you guys are going to shrink,

00:32:35.960 we're going to get more diverse, celebrate that.

00:32:38.860 It's just, that's actually, it'll work for the more cosmopolitan-minded members of, and this is again down to psychology, some people like that change and they're going to embrace that, but for a significant chunk of the population, that's not going to wash, they're going to want some vision of where they're going.

00:32:54.980 And partly that's why this idea of white shift is, okay, you know, it is true that what I'm arguing here is that this mixed race group is essentially going to carry forth the memories, the myths, the history of this, what is currently the white group. 0.89

00:33:09.780 If people can, if the white majorities can see something positive in that, then maybe they can say, okay, we've got a positive future too.

00:33:17.560 No, we're not just yesterday's news.

00:33:19.160 You know, I think some way of giving them a future, whereas if you just say we're getting more diverse and that's great, I think that's going to further the kind of polarization that we're seeing.

00:33:31.740 So it sounds like the prescription that you have is it would be reducing the levels of immigration while reassuring the white majority that immigrants who come here are going to integrate, they're going to become part of society, they will intermarry, and we all live happily ever after together.

00:33:48.600 Yeah, yeah. So part of this is to say that, you know, the average person thinks the number of immigrants or the number of Muslims is two or three times higher than it actually is.

00:33:58.680 So if we've got a problem, the problem is that the narrative of change and diversity is dominant.

00:34:04.860 And what we need more of is the narrative of actually, there's a lot of people intermarrying, and actually, you know, all those European immigrants, their kids are identifying as white British, and they're being, you know, essentially they're part of you.

00:34:17.580 And the Afro-Caribbeans, half of them marry out, and the mixed-race offspring marry mostly whites. 1.00

00:34:24.280 So there's a narrative of kind of melting and reducing the threat that actually they're joining you, you know, and that, in fact, they're not so different.

00:34:34.000 I mean, that's the kind of thing that you want to emphasize.

00:34:37.340 So it's completely under the radar, all of that knowledge about how much voluntary assimilation is going on.

00:34:43.520 Even Muslims, not so much in this country, but, like, in France, you know, over half, I think it's about half of Algerians, French Algerians, marry outside the group.

00:34:55.720 So a lot of French Muslims are actually secular, and they're marrying out, and nobody knows that.

00:35:01.540 You know, these are the kinds of things that need to be more widely known so that people actually can think, okay, you know, it's not a case of we're just going to be outnumbered and threatened.

00:35:11.260 So part of what I advocate is moving to a different style of political communication, especially for conservative whites.

00:35:20.100 You have to have different messages.

00:35:21.520 You can't go to minority groups and say, hey, you guys, you're being assimilated.

00:35:25.420 Isn't that great?

00:35:28.720 But that's okay.

00:35:30.500 I mean, I think politicians do this all the time.

00:35:32.780 I mean, you know, they have slightly different messages.

00:35:36.480 Sorry, I just want to finish on that.

00:35:38.440 But you would also, if I, please correct me if I'm wrong, you also do say in the book that immigration levels need to come down.

00:35:45.500 Well, yes.

00:35:46.340 Well, I don't, I'm not making a prescription.

00:35:48.700 What I'm saying is that if the public is not comfortable with the rate of ethnic change and they're willing to pay the economic price, well, then the immigration numbers should come down. 0.84

00:35:59.500 I'm saying that maybe when the majority gets comfortable with this idea that they're growing through assimilation,

00:36:07.500 then maybe they'll relax a bit, and then maybe those numbers will come back up again.

00:36:12.500 But one of the problems that I see, particularly with that left narrative that says,

00:36:18.500 you know, it's racist to be in favor of reducing immigration,

00:36:21.500 especially reducing immigration because you're uncomfortable with the ethnocultural consequences,

00:36:26.500 I mean, that is still essentially a taboo.

00:36:28.500 a taboo. I mean, even Steve Bannon, you know, was interviewed when he had that interview with

00:36:34.400 The Economist, and he was saying, I'm an economic nationalist, which is nonsense. Actually, if you

00:36:39.400 look at the support base and what drives the Trump vote, it is not economic nationalism. It is

00:36:44.220 essentially a cultural sense of cultural loss. So because of that taboo over what I would call

00:36:52.920 sort of this idea of casting ethno-traditional conservatism as racism,

00:36:58.540 attachment to your own group if you're white as racism.

00:37:01.080 Because of that narrative, it prevents open discussion of this.

00:37:05.500 And I actually think it makes things worse in many ways.

00:37:07.600 I mean, I think the Brexit vote, for example,

00:37:09.500 to some extent the Brexit vote was an outcome of people who are upset at immigration,

00:37:14.920 more upset at non-European than European immigration, by the way, 0.82

00:37:17.840 and if you actually look at the polling, the survey data on this,

00:37:21.160 they couldn't actually express themselves.

00:37:25.160 No politician could articulate that fear directly.

00:37:28.160 So this kind of got diverted into punching the EU.

00:37:31.160 Now, I'm not saying that there weren't grievances around the EU

00:37:34.160 and Brussels being bureaucratic and remote and free movement and everything,

00:37:38.160 but still, that was an acceptable narrative, is to hit the EU.

00:37:42.160 And so it all—you know, because immigrants are white, we can go after that. 1.00

00:37:46.160 We can claim they're putting pressure on services

00:37:49.160 or they're competing for jobs and whatever.

00:37:51.160 And actually, the outcome of that might be quite negative for the British economy.

00:37:55.020 That's one example.

00:37:55.840 Another example is to say, okay, people are upset about immigration.

00:37:59.940 It's because of pressure on public services.

00:38:02.120 So if you are an immigrant, you have no access to public services for five years, or whatever it is.

00:38:08.440 So any attempt to tighten up, and all that just does is injure an immigrant who wants to go to the hospital 0.94

00:38:16.060 or wants to get who needs maybe income support.

00:38:18.840 So basically what you're saying is we're having a fake conversation.

00:38:21.880 We're talking about the economy.

00:38:23.600 We're talking about immigrants taking jobs or taking hospital beds,

00:38:27.980 where really that isn't the core concern that's driving the populist right.

00:38:32.080 Exactly, exactly.

00:38:33.120 And it's somebody who, you know, typically someone will be against immigration first,

00:38:38.720 and then they'll look for the reasons that are acceptable and might be pressure on services.

00:38:44.680 So Jonathan Haidt has this idea of the elephant and the rider.

00:38:46.960 The elephant is the driver, and then we tell ourselves a story, that's the rider.

00:38:50.920 So I think this stuff about services and jobs is a bit of a rider's story.

00:38:55.340 Not to say that it has no impact, but if you look, for example,

00:38:58.420 you ask people, is immigration a problem in your local area?

00:39:01.800 20% say it's a problem.

00:39:03.920 Is it a problem nationally?

00:39:05.180 70%.

00:39:05.940 Now, that kind of tells you that this is much more of a national level issue.

00:39:10.280 Then it's not about local concerns.

00:39:12.180 Local concerns do matter in some cases.

00:39:14.660 Boston in Lincolnshire or some of the Midwest United States towns

00:39:19.080 that have had rapid increases in Hispanic population,

00:39:22.120 then, yes, you will always see this jump in support for populist right.

00:39:25.980 But for most people, it's what's going on nationally that counts.

00:39:30.820 Yeah.

00:39:31.820 Because you were talking about the worries about, for instance,

00:39:37.260 Muslim immigration or the rest of it. 1.00

00:39:39.020 Isn't a lot of this based in aesthetics?

00:39:41.400 I'll give you an example.

00:39:42.400 I was going to, my dad is from Wigan

00:39:45.440 which is a very poor part of, obviously

00:39:47.200 for those of you who are watching, obviously

00:39:48.840 he's a very poor part of north of England

00:39:50.300 and I was going to watch a rugby league match

00:39:53.580 which was everybody from up north

00:39:55.960 came to Wembley to watch a rugby match

00:39:57.640 and the supporters were talking to me

00:40:00.100 and they were going, oh I can't recognise London anymore 0.92

00:40:02.260 before it used to be filled with cockneys like you 0.96

00:40:04.820 and on one hand, right, I'm born in London

00:40:08.880 but if I'd taken more from my mother's side of the family

00:40:12.400 I doubt we'd be having that conversation.

00:40:16.180 Right.

00:40:16.860 So, do you see, I just think...

00:40:18.880 Yeah, spite... Okay, what I would say, though, is...

00:40:21.060 So, what's your point of...

00:40:22.700 Yeah, but I'm saying that a lot of it is just...

00:40:25.300 Isn't it a lot of it that just people see something

00:40:27.820 completely different to them and recoil in fear,

00:40:30.320 and it's almost an emotional response?

00:40:33.260 Okay, so it depends.

00:40:34.960 If they see people who are different and fear them or hate them...

00:40:39.260 Yeah.

00:40:39.880 ..then that's racism, and I think that's deplorable.

00:40:41.700 If what they're saying is, I was attached to London that had a certain character, and I feel a sense of loss, I think that's very different.

00:40:50.980 I don't think that is.

00:40:51.700 I think that's just a conservatism, and people should be able to express that sense of loss, and they should actually even be able to say, I don't want that to change as fast.

00:41:01.440 You can imagine, you can see it.

00:41:02.480 So we can look at, say, African Americans in Harlem or black Britons in Brixton here in London.

00:41:08.360 But, you know, let's say Brixton, and of course we know it's become a lot less black, become more white as hipsters and others are moving in. 0.80

00:41:16.420 So you might be in Afro-Caribbean and Brixton saying, I miss the way Brixton used to be. 1.00

00:41:22.260 And my view is, actually, that's just conservatism.

00:41:25.560 That's not that you hate white people, right?

00:41:28.720 So that's the kind of subtle differences that I think we need to talk about. 0.98

00:41:32.320 But if you're saying, I hate those white people, then that's different. 0.80

00:41:36.020 So that's why I think we need to make these distinctions. 0.94

00:41:40.260 And actually, if you do surveys and you ask liberals and conservatives their views of why people don't like immigration,

00:41:47.940 you will tend to get liberals thinking that it's the conservatives hate minorities.

00:41:53.480 And the conservatives will say, no, they just are attached to their own group.

00:41:56.620 So we're getting people kind of talking past each other and kind of seeing the other in a negative light.

00:42:03.380 and I actually don't think that's necessarily the case.

00:42:15.260 How do you think we got here, Eric?

00:42:16.940 How did we get to this point where expressing those concerns

00:42:21.120 that might be conservative about the way things used to be

00:42:24.180 or things are changing too fast, when did that become racist?

00:42:28.820 And how did that become racist?

00:42:30.420 Right. Well, that's a very interesting story, which I kind of go to in the book. I'm not so much of a fan of these theories which say that this social justice warrior stuff is a new thing and it's related to social media.

00:42:41.820 I mean, of course, those things have an impact. But I actually think you have to put this in the context of a much longer intellectual history and ideological development of the left that goes back even 200 years to utopian socialism and anarchism.

00:42:56.100 We only have five minutes.

00:42:57.200 Okay, five minutes. 0.97

00:42:57.640 OK, so what I mean is you have more time to die.

00:43:00.600 I was just trying to keep it.

00:43:02.860 All right, I'll try and make it short.

00:43:04.500 So basically, there's a fusion of two ideas.

00:43:08.840 One is what I call, well, not me, but other sociologists have called modernism, which

00:43:13.840 is this idea of anti-tradition.

00:43:16.540 New and different is better, essentially.

00:43:18.500 That's what we're about, new and different.

00:43:20.860 And if you look at modernist intellectuals in the United States, for example, their view

00:43:26.360 was that the WASP, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture,

00:43:30.080 was stifling, boring, and that you had the prohibition

00:43:33.360 of alcohol in 1920.

00:43:34.940 So they reacted against that, and they said,

00:43:37.120 well, look at these expressive groups

00:43:38.840 like African-Americans with their jazz and Greeks, 1.00

00:43:42.200 and how wonderful are these exotic people, 0.97

00:43:44.060 and how boring and awful are our group.

00:43:47.660 And that's kind of like the beginnings, then,

00:43:50.120 of this kind of trope, which is sort of a bit

00:43:52.880 of an academic word, but this narrative

00:43:54.380 of kind of being against your own group, the adversary culture.

00:43:58.880 Now, it's not a bad thing to be critical of your own group.

00:44:01.740 You don't want to be just completely saying my group's the best and that's it.

00:44:05.280 So you have to have that, and you need cosmopolitans.

00:44:08.320 I mean, I actually think that you have to have space for people to be citizens of nowhere 0.98

00:44:12.460 or whatever.

00:44:13.440 But essentially that criticism, that critique of the majority culture actually then becomes

00:44:19.140 the dominant culture in the high culture.

00:44:22.560 So this starts to happen, you know, even in the 50s,

00:44:26.040 you know, you had the beatniks and you had a number of intellectuals

00:44:28.320 who were again talking about square white culture and all of this, 0.99

00:44:31.880 but it didn't quite have the same edge of, you know, white privilege, you're awful. 0.98

00:44:35.760 But it was a similar sort of sentiment. 0.96

00:44:38.860 And then we get into the 60s and 70s

00:44:42.040 with the expansion of television and the university sector.

00:44:44.640 And this becomes the dominant motif in the high culture.

00:44:48.040 And once that happens, and then it becomes something that you have to buy into,

00:44:52.100 Because academia then changes, and we talked about this earlier,

00:44:56.980 where the left-right ratio amongst the professoriate goes for something like...

00:45:02.200 It goes from something like 2 to 1 in 1960 to, particularly in the social sciences and humanities,

00:45:07.380 it's kind of 10 to 1 or something like that.

00:45:09.940 So you get a complete domination over time because of the baby boomers moving into academic positions. 1.00

00:45:16.620 And something similar happens in parts of the media, but it's never quite the same in the media.

00:45:21.200 It's really academia where you get this complete changeover.

00:45:25.380 And then they bring their mores with them,

00:45:27.140 and one of them is this idea that white identity is racist,

00:45:30.920 worrying about ethnic change is racist.

00:45:33.240 It's never actually...

00:45:34.340 You will never find a clear statement

00:45:36.500 or a political theory defense of this

00:45:39.340 in philosophical terms in any of the literature.

00:45:42.180 You will find it in the critical race, the radical stuff, 0.98

00:45:45.060 which is basically ideology dressed up as academic research.

00:45:48.480 But in terms of the respected top journal political theory, you won't find a statement of this.

00:45:55.060 But then all of a sudden it becomes the case that talking about immigration is a racist thing.

00:45:59.800 It was less the case, you know, in Britain.

00:46:01.880 Britain actually had a more open conversation.

00:46:04.320 But U.S., Sweden, Germany, you know, many countries you really didn't have, it was seen as very taboo.

00:46:11.520 And this is part of the reason why we see the sort of sudden emergence of the AfD in Germany

00:46:17.160 or the sudden emergence of the Sweden Democrats

00:46:19.660 because there simply was nobody willing to touch those issues politically.

00:46:24.280 Now, you've said that sort of harking back on this nostalgia

00:46:28.340 and wanting the country as it used to be isn't racist.

00:46:32.580 Do you think Trump and this right-wing populism is here to stay?

00:46:37.620 And do you think it's going to be a factor?

00:46:39.520 Or do you just think it's a political blip, as it were?

00:46:42.660 Yeah. I mean, I should say that conservatism isn't racist,

00:46:46.260 but it doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing to do so.

00:46:48.460 But I just think it's a perspective we should be debating.

00:46:51.420 The populism, is it here to stay?

00:46:53.320 I think right now it is,

00:46:54.460 because the ethnic shifting is making the majority insecure.

00:47:00.220 It's bringing cultural issues more to the surface.

00:47:03.060 And this is actually cutting across the old left-right political divide,

00:47:07.480 which used to be about redistribution versus free market.

00:47:11.620 That's becoming less important,

00:47:12.940 whereas the culture wars, if you like,

00:47:15.760 around more or less diversity and change

00:47:18.620 versus, you know, tradition and continuity.

00:47:20.620 That's becoming a bigger issue.

00:47:22.860 Yeah, if you look at the European case,

00:47:25.260 in 9 out of 10 European countries after 1996,

00:47:29.180 you look at the migration numbers,

00:47:31.440 you can look at the rise in media stories

00:47:33.580 about immigration, tracking that.

00:47:35.120 And tracking that is support for the populist right

00:47:38.120 and concern about immigration.

00:47:40.660 And so actually the numbers are very solid

00:47:43.300 in showing how immigration is very much the driver.

00:47:47.200 Now, if immigration falls, as it has,

00:47:49.220 that will take some of the steam out of the populist right. 0.99

00:47:52.440 And it has actually, if you really look at the numbers,

00:47:54.840 these numbers peaked at the peak of the migrant crisis,

00:47:57.820 have fallen back a little bit.

00:48:00.680 But I think underlying this are all these unanswered questions

00:48:04.000 about who are we, what's the future of the country

00:48:08.040 in terms of its traditional ethnic composition.

00:48:10.520 And that's why I think, actually, if politicians were honest

00:48:12.680 and addressed that and said, that's a valid concern, there is going to be change,

00:48:18.480 we've heard you, we've taken your concerns on board,

00:48:21.540 immigration is actually going to be lower than might be optimal for the economy

00:48:25.860 because we're listening to your cultural concerns.

00:48:29.040 I actually think that would be the way forward.

00:48:32.220 But that isn't happening, Eric.

00:48:33.660 It's not happening.

00:48:34.340 It's not happening at all.

00:48:35.380 Are you concerned by the direction that we're going in?

00:48:38.760 Well, what's happening is that these populist right parties have emerged

00:48:43.220 and started posting these very high numbers, and you've had Brexit and Trump.

00:48:46.980 That's actually broken the taboos around some of these subjects.

00:48:51.320 So in Sweden, now all the parties are talking about reducing immigration,

00:48:54.900 which they have to in order not to lose those voters to the Sweden Democrats.

00:48:59.760 I think actually the breaking of some of those taboos is a good thing, 0.73

00:49:03.120 but some of the taboos actually needed to be in place.

00:49:05.940 So I think now you're seeing these burqa bans, you know, I don't agree with some of the anti-Muslim stuff.

00:49:12.460 So particularly bans on freedom of religious expression.

00:49:16.660 So I think that's where this, you've started this process of rolling back the taboos, but then it can overshoot and go too far.

00:49:22.960 That's the risk.

00:49:24.320 And maybe Poland and Hungary, we even see some of the results of that.

00:49:28.040 So, you know, but I think this is the risk when you don't address these problems, let them get out of control.

00:49:34.460 then they take on a dynamic of their own.

00:49:37.040 So, you know, the politicians aren't, well, they're beginning to address it.

00:49:40.820 I think I would say there's been an improvement in the sense

00:49:43.700 that more countries are now willing to discuss levels of immigration, you know.

00:49:48.400 And that wasn't the case before.

00:49:50.900 So maybe we'll get to a stage where the centre parties will take over this issue

00:49:54.880 and say, OK, we will keep the numbers, you know,

00:49:58.460 modest to what the population is comfortable with.

00:50:01.020 Hasn't happened in Britain, though, so far, has it?

00:50:02.900 Well, there's been a discussion about immigration in Britain.

00:50:09.300 And, of course, if you're part of the EU, obviously you can't control the numbers.

00:50:12.420 But even the non-European numbers were quite high in Britain.

00:50:15.520 So I do think it's partly happened in Britain.

00:50:18.720 It's happened in Britain a lot more than in some other countries.

00:50:21.880 So Britain was certainly having a more open conversation than Sweden or Germany.

00:50:26.320 And I do think that, you know, if the numbers continue to be higher than what people want,

00:50:31.300 there will be pressure on the mainstream parties.

00:50:33.960 The mainstream parties, I think, are somewhat responsive.

00:50:36.680 I think they will pay attention to that issue.

00:50:39.180 So it's not the case, it's not the same situation

00:50:41.340 as Sweden prior to 2014, where they said,

00:50:43.780 we won't even, we're gonna close our years,

00:50:45.540 and that's something we don't talk about,

00:50:47.180 and, you know, that is a particularly bad situation.

00:50:51.180 So I actually think the mainstream parties are learning,

00:50:54.020 and are kind, and that's also on the left.

00:50:56.220 The center-left in a number of countries,

00:50:58.260 Denmark would be one of them, 0.99

00:50:59.800 are moving in that direction as well.

00:51:02.620 But again, if there is a worry,

00:51:04.240 I think it might be that the stigmatization of Muslims,

00:51:07.020 which is something that is, I think, a toxic, bad thing.

00:51:11.300 It's one thing to be against,

00:51:13.560 to say that the burqa doesn't allow a woman the right to express herself.

00:51:18.300 I think that's fine to sort of make a cultural case for it,

00:51:21.660 but to ban it legally, I think, is problematic.

00:51:24.460 Well, you're a real liberal in the traditional sense of the word.

00:51:28.040 You believe in freedom.

00:51:29.800 Well, it's absolutely fascinating.

00:51:33.140 We're almost out of time.

00:51:35.880 Tell me, I always like to ask this question of people who work in a field

00:51:38.600 in which they are not necessarily representative of the mainstream opinion.

00:51:42.100 What's it like being you in academia?

00:51:45.660 Right.

00:51:46.820 Well, come back to me after the book's published, and we'll see.

00:51:51.080 I'd say already there is a sense in which quite a few people

00:51:55.480 are not pleased with some of the things that I say.

00:51:59.020 But I think that in the field I'm in,

00:52:00.760 which is quantitative political science,

00:52:02.820 if you've got your numbers behind you,

00:52:04.320 I think most of those people are actually pretty fair-minded.

00:52:07.720 And most academics, I think, are center-left.

00:52:11.580 There is a significant far-left group.

00:52:13.120 I mean, I'm not going to gloss that.

00:52:14.500 But you just have to say, well, I'm

00:52:16.420 going to deal with the people who are civil.

00:52:18.160 I can have massive disagreements with people

00:52:21.460 politically, but we can still be civil.

00:52:24.160 And so I think that's-

00:52:25.080 Can you?

00:52:25.580 So in academia, you still can?

00:52:27.020 At least in... I think UK academia is...

00:52:29.440 It depends. It's department to department.

00:52:31.580 I would say in my department, yes.

00:52:34.540 It's like West Side Story.

00:52:35.820 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:52:36.760 But I know that in some others, there's a lot of conformity.

00:52:39.600 And so it's probably harder if you have...

00:52:41.440 All it takes is a few very outspoken individuals

00:52:43.680 to sort of chill and make it a much more polarized...

00:52:47.700 Well, or a more difficult environment, I'd say.

00:52:50.160 But I don't think the UK is yet in the same boat as the United States,

00:52:53.940 where you have these completely rabid departments

00:52:57.100 and, you know, there are the climate,

00:53:00.720 that kind of climate like Evergreen State and Middlebury,

00:53:03.900 and, you know, there hasn't, as far as I'm aware,

00:53:06.080 there hasn't been anything quite that extreme in Britain.

00:53:08.620 Let's hope it doesn't get there.

00:53:10.120 Yeah, let's hope.

00:53:11.440 Let's hope.

00:53:12.140 Because that is a big, like,

00:53:13.620 in terms of what's happening outside of academia,

00:53:16.540 that is such a huge problem,

00:53:17.980 is the inability to have honest, genuine conversations.

00:53:21.220 It's like when I talk to somebody that I disagree with,

00:53:23.940 face-to-face, and we actually have a genuine conversation and we both come away from having

00:53:29.320 learned something, I'm almost surprised every time because that's so counter to the kind of

00:53:35.680 conversations that we're now used to having on Twitter, on Facebook, on wherever. Do you know

00:53:40.260 what I mean? Oh, no, I think you're absolutely right. And this gets to the heart of this problem

00:53:44.480 with these taboos because you get people who are so committed to this, what I call left modernism,

00:53:50.460 and this vision of equality and diversity, this kind of utopia.

00:53:53.340 And if you're in the way of that, you're not an ally,

00:53:55.840 and somehow we've got to get you out of the way,

00:53:57.840 and so I can't tolerate you, I've got to suppress you.

00:54:00.120 And part of it also gets to a belief that human beings are blank slates

00:54:04.160 and that if we can just choke off the supply of messages

00:54:07.860 that are countering our utopia,

00:54:09.920 if we can just silence those people,

00:54:13.160 then we won't have a problem

00:54:14.240 because we know people are essentially clay to be molded.

00:54:17.720 And so if we can control the information supply, then we can get what we want.

00:54:22.480 And so the focus is always on shutting down and controlling.

00:54:26.160 And actually, I just think that's just not human nature.

00:54:29.600 I mean, you've got differences in some people.

00:54:31.920 People aren't just blank slates, you know, and they're not going to be fooled.

00:54:35.780 So I think, you know, I think it's a self-defeating strategy.

00:54:39.460 Some people are blank slates.

00:54:40.800 I've met a few in my time.

00:54:42.680 I've taught a few as well.

00:54:45.540 Well, listen, Eric, it's been a fantastic interview.

00:54:47.720 Thank you very much for coming to speak to us.

00:54:49.540 The question we always like to ask at the end is,

00:54:51.420 what is the one issue that no one's talking about that we ought to be talking about?

00:54:56.360 Minority supporters of populist right parties.

00:54:58.700 So minority Trump voters would be one. 0.67

00:55:00.900 My mother being one.

00:55:02.040 Oh, really?

00:55:02.660 My mother's a Latino Trump voter.

00:55:04.400 Oh, really?

00:55:04.940 She loves him.

00:55:06.160 Well, almost 30% of Latinos voted for Trump.

00:55:10.900 Here's an interesting one.

00:55:13.120 A question was asked after the Charlottesville riots,

00:55:15.500 which hopefully your viewers will be familiar with,

00:55:20.080 which was around this confederate...

00:55:21.380 Judging by a couple of them with that. 0.78

00:55:23.420 Right, okay, okay.

00:55:25.060 So the Charlottesville riot,

00:55:26.740 they asked a number of questions like,

00:55:30.000 white Americans are under threat in America today,

00:55:33.200 something like that. 0.90

00:55:34.980 Whites are under threat in the country today.

00:55:37.400 70% of Latino and Asian Trump voters replied yes to that question,

00:55:43.820 which is not that different from white Trump voters' answer to that question.

00:55:47.340 Or it's very important to protect and preserve the European Christian heritage of the United States.

00:55:53.440 You know, Asian and Latino Trump voters, something like 55% said yes.

00:55:59.320 So there's actually quite an interesting phenomenon of ethnic minorities who are patriotic,

00:56:05.380 and part of their patriotism is an attachment to the way the nation is culturally.

00:56:10.020 So it's really a mistake to think that minorities are automatically going to go in favor of multiculturalism.

00:56:17.940 They're going to split.

00:56:18.540 Most of them actually will support multicultural vision, but actually there's a polarization there as well.

00:56:25.720 Very interesting.

00:56:27.180 Eric, thank you very much for coming on.

00:56:28.620 Your book is called White Shift.

00:56:29.840 It's released on?

00:56:31.200 October 25th in the UK, not till the end of January in the United States.

00:56:36.620 All right.

00:56:37.020 well as francis takes a massive sneeze at the perfect time as we're about to end the episode

00:56:41.780 um get the book when it comes out it's i've read it it's absolutely fascinating it's a great great

00:56:47.040 book uh i think you're as i said to you before we started the interview you're probably going

00:56:51.060 to get slammed from the left and from the right which is exactly where we are uh and i think that

00:56:57.500 probably means you're doing something correct i was going to say doing something right but you're

00:57:01.080 doing something correctly which is trying to be in the middle is what we try and do on the show

00:57:06.060 It's like, you know, the right is going right and the left has gone wherever it's gone.

00:57:11.540 It's gone crazy as well.

00:57:12.760 And I think moderate people in the middle who are interested in truth and facts and evidence need to come together and have these conversations and try and, you know, make society more harmonious as we move forward.

00:57:23.040 And I think that's if people were to actually read your book instead of reading three sentences and getting annoyed about it, I think that's where it's headed.

00:57:30.020 So thank you very much for coming to speak to us.

00:57:31.940 Get the book.

00:57:32.640 If you enjoyed it, obviously, as always, subscribe to the YouTube channel.

00:57:36.120 Click that bell button.

00:57:37.560 Do you want to do the social media stuff?

00:57:39.060 Yes.

00:57:40.240 So if you're enjoying it, please follow us on TriggerPod at Instagram,

00:57:45.460 on Twitter, Trigonometry on Facebook, and I think that's about it.

00:57:50.920 That's it.

00:57:51.280 And, Eric, before we let you go, your Twitter handle is?

00:57:53.980 At E-P-K-A-U-F-M. 1.00

00:57:56.840 E-P-K-A-F-M. 1.00

00:57:57.640 E-P-K-A-F-M. 1.00

00:57:58.160 Well, we'll get that in the video, so make sure you follow Eric.

00:58:01.220 you're always tweeting and retweeting interesting articles so plenty of stuff for you to get into

00:58:05.700 thank you very much and enjoy your week we'll see you in a week's time for another fantastic episode

00:58:09.280 see you later

TRIGGERnometry - October 29, 2018

Eric Kaufmann on Nationalism, White Identity & Immigration

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