TRIGGERnometry - Eric Kaufmann on Nationalism, White Identity & Immigration

Episode Date: October 29, 2018

Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London (@epkaufm) discusses nationalism, national populism, immigration, populism, Brexit, Donald Trump, academic corruption, bias in academia, liberalism, the liberal consensus, the European Union, the future of politics and a lot more with the guys at TRIGGERnometry. Buy Eric's latest book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07CHZZ9YZ/ Find us on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Our fantastic expert guest this week is a professor of politics at Birkbeck University in London. Eric Kavon, welcome to Trichonometry. Thank you very much. It's great to have you here. As always, before we get into, the interview itself. Tell our viewers and our listeners a little bit about who you are, how are you where you are. What's been your story? Well, my story, I mean, I have a very kind of cosmopolitan background to begin with. So I was kind of born in Hong Kong, grew up in Canada, moved to London. I've got Jewish, Chinese, Latino in my background. So I've got that very kind of international, lived in Japan

for eight years. But the study, you know, what I study is nationalism. And that's partly because if you grow up abroad, you're much more aware of, you know, it's problematized, the idea of what is your country, what's it about. So I develop this interest in nations and national identity. So that's something I've focused on for over 20 years. And you've got a book that's what we'll be talking about predominantly in this interview. It's called White Shift, which is coming out very soon. Yes, yeah.

End of October in the UK, end of January in the United States. And you've been kind enough to provide us an advanced copy, which I've read, is absolutely fascinating. it's kind of dynamite, I think it's fair to say. And, you know, let's get straight into that. I think the main narrative at the moment when we talk about populism and nationalism and all these things is, look, it's the Rust Belt, it's poor people who are freaking out about their job prospects

and their future economic security and all of that. And what you do in your book is essentially debunk all of that. And if it wasn't called Whiteshift, I think it would be called It's Immigration Stupid. Right, exactly. a lot of the media narrative around populism immediately after, say, the Trump or Brexit vote, turn to who voted for Trump or who voted for Brexit and where do they live. And you can see that the cities tended to be, say, remain voting and outlying areas tended to be

for leave. And those areas tend to be a bit more deprived. So people kind of jump to these conclusions. Well, it's the left behind. They're the ones who voted to leave or they voted for Trump. The problem with that, of course, is that, you know, just take London as a city, it's got a large number of people who are not white British. It's got a large number of people with university degrees, a large number of young people. So that makes it fairly unusual demographically. The only real way to do that study properly is to take a white working class person in London and a white working class person in the north, in a mining town, for example, and compare them. And when you do that, you actually see, if anything, that person in

London is slightly more likely to have voted leave. So that's the kind of method where you're actually looking at individuals, individual level, large-scale survey data, not looking at these election maps or talking about opioid crises or so on. So yeah, the first takeaway really is that it's almost all about immigration when we talk about right-wing populism. Not left-wing populism, Podemos and Corbyn. That is about the economy, but right-wing populism in the West, not again in India or

even in Eastern Europe, in the West, it's about immigration. And the academic literature is actually pretty solid on this as well. The academic literature shows this and wouldn't dispute this. 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. 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. And you say... Well, I say no.

I say essentially what this is about is anxiety over ethnocultural change threats to identity. And I'll give you a kind of question that we might ask people, say in this country, we ask Brexiteers, white British Brexiteers, how concerned are you, how much of a problem is pressure on public services? Zero to 100. 100 being, it's a big problem. And people give it about a 40, you know, Brexit, leave voters give it about a 47, 48 out of 100. And all you have to do is stick the word immigrants putting pressure on public services.

So it's the same question, how much of a problem is pressure on public services, but but it's immigrants putting just two words, pressure on public services. It goes from sort of 48 out of 100 to 70 out of 100. For Remainers, it's the reverse. And actually it makes sense. What the Remainers are doing actually does make sense because if the problem is pressure on public services, the part of that problem that is accounted for by immigrants

has to be smaller than the problem itself. So it makes no sense to get a number moving from, say, 48 up to 70 because the problem, the immigrant-fueled part of the problem cannot be larger than the whole problem. But that's just a way of explaining that this is not driven by people's worry about pressure on public service as economic things, which is sort of the narrative of probably both parties in a way

because that's what they know. They've got economic policy tools. It's also safer because we can talk about, well, people are feeling pressure on material things, schools and hospitals, and that's why they're upset about immigration. It's not that nasty cultural stuff, but actually it is that cultural stuff.

Well, let's break that down. when you say the nasty cultural stuff. I've read your book very carefully, so you're not saying that the majority of the people who are on the populist right hate immigrants and they're racist, right? You're not saying that. I'm not saying that, no. I actually think we need to open up a conversation

about white identity, first of all, and secondly, something I call the white tradition of national identity, and to do so in a fair-minded way. So there is a certain kind of toxicity around the subject of white, group identity by Mitch, by which. Is that right?

I hadn't noticed. So, and, you know. It never ends well, though. That's, to be fair. When you get through a group of people together and go, right, we're white, and we identify for being white, it tends to end in camps. Well, no, I disagree with you. So, for example, I don't think identifying as white or identifying as black or identifying

as Hawaiian, we have to look at these things differently. I mean, all of those identities can be abused. You can fixate and be extremist about it. But just, if you think about the world, 80% of the world's countries have an ethnic majority. Persians in Iran, it could be Swana and Botswana, Japanese in Japan, etc. Those people identify with their group, with their culture, and they're not out killing each other.

Now, some will. But when we think about what are the predictors of genocide, for example. It's an ideology that says this country should only be inhabited by either a particular group or people who adhere to an ideology like socialism or like Islamism. And if you don't adhere to that, you're in the way and we're going to exterminate you. So it doesn't necessarily matter whether it's a particularist identity like ethnicity or it's a universalist identity like Islam or socialism. There are extreme versions and moderate versions, and you can have a moderate version of white identity. as you can, a moderate version of Islamic identity.

And there's nothing wrong with that. And that's sort of the normal state of affairs in most countries most of the time. So I think this focus on white identity is toxic actually doesn't have a basis, in fact. Even though we know, yes, we're all thinking about the Nazis. You're wrong. Yeah, we're all thinking of the Nazis.

You know, I lost relatives in the Holocaust, you know. Yes, of course. But that's one case. And we actually have to say, okay, all of the countries in the world that have ethnic majorities that identify with their group, and then all of the places in the world that have a genocidal event. And we have data sets, actually, where we can look at this question systematically,

and we find, well, actually, you have to have a number of conditions in place, one of which is this exclusivist focus on identity. It's not just saying, you know, we are Hindus in India, but it's, you know, everybody who isn't a Hindu is garbage and must be exterminated. That's a very different thing from just saying, we identify as Hindu. So you can have moderate versions and extreme versions of any identity, whether it's a minority identity or a majority. So I really think, actually, we have to start to think about it being, you know,

okay to express a moderate white identity, or what I mean by that is ethnic majority identity. Because, again, 80% of the world's countries have these ethnic majority identities. If we try and say you can't have that, I actually think we are making things worse. If any of the, I think that's the greater risk than if we say, okay, it can be expressed, but it's got to be done in a moderate way. Whereas what you would argue we've had is a blowback against excessive oppression of people's attempts to speak their mind about these issues, which result then in Trump and Brexit and all that. Yeah, so if you look at the Trump vote, for example, white identity is a major predictor of the Trump vote.

the sense that whites are being discriminated against, which is largely not true if we think about economics and politics, where they're actually doing very well. But in terms of the high culture, in terms of the sense of not being able to express an identity, whereas other groups can on campus, which is something the far right then uses. So it uses something, which is actually true,

that there is this double standard in terms of majorities and minorities being able to express an identity, attachment to heritage. And then it builds the anti-Semitism. the anti-Islam and all this other stuff layers that on top. So I actually think we're giving oxygen and ammunition to the far right by maintaining this double standard. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world,

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I have to do that. You absolutely have to do. No, no, no, just for anyone who doesn't know us, right? I'm an immigrant, Francis Mother's an immigrant. Eric, you're an immigrant and mixed race. We've got a few other tech guys in the room. They're all either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, right? And the reason we do that is because they're cheaper. No. But so we've established that, right? Because if we hadn't, that would be racist, right? Having this conversation, I mean, you are saying essentially

white people need to be able to be proud of being white. Well, to be able to have an identity, yeah. I mean, to have an identity, there's a difference. So there's a social psychology literature going now 50, 60 years, and summarized in a paper by Marilyn Brewer, actually, 1999, that there is no correlation between, hating an out-group and being attached to your in-group. Now, I actually think overly fixating on an in-group is unhealthy as well.

But what I just want to establish here is that, so in the 2016 American National Election Study, how warm you feel towards whites is not predictive of how cool you feel towards blacks or Muslims. Actually, there's, if anything, a slight positive correlation. Warmer you feel towards whites, slightly warmer towards blacks or other group. And this is a finding that's repeated, found in many instances. So I think we have to, when we're talking about racism, there is real racism. 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.

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. And what that does is it then pushes it off the agenda of mainstream politics. And that then, it's like saying we can't sell alcohol. So who's going to rush in and fill that gap? It's not going to be a mainstream party. It's going to be the Sweden Democrats, for example. In Sweden, you couldn't talk about immigration. That was seen as racist.

Boom, income the Sweden Democrats, up to almost 20% in the last election, right? So it's the issue of a political entrepreneur having a market, because the mainstream parties feel this is too hot to handle. Now, there are some instances where the mainstream parties really should not touch an issue, like segregation, imposing segregation between blacks and whites. George Wallace, the candidate in the United States, from the South, he said, we want segregation. And yes, he was able to get a certain amount of populist support for that.

And I think the mainstream parties were right to say no to that and to push it off the agenda. But then if you take that approach, it's correct for that approach, but then what about talking about levels of immigration, what about talking about national identity? You see, there's a temptation if you are on the left to want, or even if you are on the right but you're a sort of free marketeer, to want those taboos to expand and expand so these issues are taken off the table,

especially if you fear that the population actually is disturbed by these issues and you don't want to discuss them, democratically, well, if you can push them off the table by making them a taboo, you don't actually have to discuss them. And that's actually stored up a lot of the pressure that has led to the blowback, which I think we're experiencing, or have experience since 2012. Because it's interesting what you said that, where you said, you know, you get these people coming in and exploits that, which is essentially what Trump did. Right.

How do you, and he's talking about white identity, see, I would argue there are racist undertones to what Trump does. For instance, you know, saying, I've actually had this conversation with constant, I'm half Latin American, I think that when he came out and he said some of these people are rapists, I think that's a racist comment.

What, how do we, I think the question I really want to ask is, how did we divorce this idea of having a white identity from the sort of the racist undercurrents that sometimes can marry itself with that? Absolutely. So I think you gave a really good example when Trump said Mexicans are, he's generalizing about a group and saying they're rapists, that is racism. Or some of them are rapists. I agree with you. That's a racist statement. Okay. I think we need to distinguish that from

saying celebrating the arrival of Christopher Columbus, for example, or even the wall. I mean, the wall is actually not racist. If you think about a wall, okay, if you've got an illegal immigration problem, you decide to build a wall, you know, there's nothing. actually racist about that. However, when you point to a group like Muslims or Mexicans and you say something nasty or generalizing about them, that is racist because again it's that distinction that, or as I'm using the term, it's a distinction between antipathy to an out-group and attachment to an in-group. If it's attachment to in-group, it isn't, it can be racist only if that

attachment leads you to say discriminate if you're a lawyer and you're hiring lawyers and you discriminate in favor of whites, clear clearly people are not receiving equal treatment under the law. So sometimes attachment to your own group can lead to racist discrimination, but generally not. So I'm certainly allowing that there are instances where even if you don't hate another group, even if you just like your own group, you can still be racist by discriminating against other groups.

But in general, I think that's not the case. And if we start to say that identity, identifying as ethnically English or white Americans, American is inherently racist. I think you actually piss off a lot of people, and if anything, you're giving fuel to populism. And in the book, one of the things you talk about is the polarization that's occurred within society in terms of attitudes to immigration

between people who might be broadly seeing center or center-right and the left and the liberals. And you talk about the authoritarian and the conservatives, and their different interests and priorities on the right and the liberals on the left. So can you tell our audience a little bit about how we're differently and how we view immigration. Right, right.

So this is one of the keys in my book is I don't use, say, class or age or any of these big demographics as key explanatory factors. I tend to focus on psychological makeup, and there's a number of interesting writers. Karen Stenner is one social psychologist, and there's a literature on that some people prefer order and stability, and other people prefer change diversity, for example, difference. And those are preferences.

it's a bit like, do you prefer to go on holiday the same place every year, or do you prefer to go to a different place every year? And these things are, to some extent, hereditary, not entirely hereditary, but between kind of like a third and a half, depending on the disposition. So you've got people who really do like their habitual routine, they're not particularly exploratory, and there are a lot of these people, and there's actually nothing wrong with them. They just have a different taste. Now, so with diversity, what I would say is in a liberal society, we must tolerate diversity. So that to me is absolutely right to insist that everybody must tolerate difference. But the second question becomes, well, do you prefer difference over more difference

over less difference or greater difference over homogeneity? And actually, that is a taste. It's different from toleration. It's preference, right? And if we actually look at where people move to residentially, there's very, very little difference between. white liberals and white conservatives, they tend to gravitate to very white areas. Liberals just talking. Right. So, I mean, I'm not accusing liberals of anything. I'm just saying that.

Well, okay. I'm kidding. But people's actions, and also in terms of friendship networks and who people marry, a lot of the behaviors actually belie the fact that actually people are preferring their own, not entirely, not exclusively. But it's just to say that, you know, it's a, you know, some people have a preference for more change in diversity. So what that then means is when it comes to something like immigration policy, you can't go out there and just say, we must celebrate diversity and if you don't, you're a bad person. Because actually people are wired differently.

Now we don't want to necessarily go to the other extreme and say diversity is bad. We don't actually. But what we want to do is say there's differences in the population. We have to respect those differences to some extent. If you try and kind of push this idea that everyone must prefer diversity. It's a bit like saying everyone must prefer to go on holiday so we're new each year. Actually, you're going to run up against a problem, which is that you're actually going to rankle people. And Stenner's work shows that, in fact, by pushing a diversity narrative, you're actually triggering a lot of these what are called authoritarianes in the literature who prefer that order and stability, they react negatively to that message. So if you're actually

going to diffuse, if you're going to actually diffuse that threat or diffuse the populace, what's driving populism, you need a different message, which might be, it might be one of saying, well, immigrants are coming, but they're assimilating, and things aren't changing that much. That would be more the kind of message that would work for people who like stability. But again, you don't want to say that to people who like change in diversity. So you've got to have different messages. It's just to say that there is nothing innately better about preferring difference in change to preferring stability.

And this is one of the things, again, one of these fuzzy lines that people get wrong is they collapse the difference between tolerating difference, which we must in a liberal society, and preferring difference, which is what I would call, well, Isaiah Berlin, the liberal theorist, would call positive liberalism, where you're actually saying, this is the ideal we want everybody to push towards. And that's when I think things get polarized, because if you're starting to push people towards something that they don't believe in, then you are actually going to polarize society. And I think that's one of the mistakes actually that progressors have made, is this assumption that if you don't love diversity change openness, that you must be a terrible person. I mean, you raised that point,

and we were talking about white indigenous cultures. I used to work a lot in the east end of London. And one thing that I noticed, like you said, a lot of them would be pro-Brexit or leave voters white working class. But what I also notice as well is that there tended to be a sort of resentment because they would notice that people, so immigrants would be coming in, they'd be in an area for a period of time, and then they would move on.

Whereas the white, essentially, the white population would remain in that area. Do you not think a lot of that as well is that resentment, that they feel that they're not getting a good end of the deal, as it were. and what they want is a politician to come and come in, like Trump, and redress the balance. Well, it depends what you mean by a deal. I mean, in the Brexit vote, it is true that people who are poorer were somewhat more likely to vote leave. So there's some truth to it in the Brexit vote, whereas in the Trump vote, there's almost zero evidence for that. What I would say is that it's true that there is some of that, but by far, 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? You know, these are much deeper questions in terms of getting at that cultural attitude. 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.

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 rights. So again, it's tapping a more cultural orientation rather than material orientations. And even when it comes to, for example, resenting politicians or the system, that too is not a predictor of populist right voting.

So you'll, you know, Brexiteers, voters for the Green Party, votes for the Labor Party, especially for Corbyn, 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 or remote. 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. 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. 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. Death penalty is the clearest one, because that gives you a much stronger take on whether someone voted for leave, or voted for leave, then something like class. Oh, really? So if you agree with the death penalty, you're far more likely to be a leave voter? Absolutely. Yeah. Wow. And is it a mark of, like, conservatism or authoritarian Yeah, so it's a mark of what they call authoritarianism, which I think, you know, somewhat unfortunate term, you know, reflects the orientation of academia, which is fine. I mean, of course, we can think what we want about the death penalty, but it's a rough,

it's also links to views on child rearing, strict versus permissive. So strict child rearing, views on death penalty would be another one. 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. All right. Well, we are where we are. With this, right, with immigration. So, and with the whole conversation, if we accept everything that you say in the book, which is that's what's driving it, what do you project going forward if we keep doing what we've been doing? Right. Well, here's the thing, right? So in the book that the other part, and I mean, the book's entitled White Shift and the

The first part of white shift is really about whites declining as a share of the population across the West. In the extreme case might be Canada where it's sort of, in 2006, it might have been about 80% white, 20% minorities. 2,106, it's going to be 80%, roughly non-white, 20%. So that's kind of, that's the most rapid change. You know, it won't be that quick. In Britain, it'll still be about 50% white by the end of the century and in the US.

It'll be somewhere in between. That's kind of white shift one, which is leading to this, you know, these decline in security in the white population, which is fueling populism, making immigration such a key issue and polarization. But if you actually go sort of 50 years beyond, so trailing that initial white decline is the second meaning of white shift, which is what I'm arguing is going to happen, is that the white majorities are actually going to absorb large numbers of non-white groups, essentially through intermarriage, voluntary intermarriage.

already happening. The fastest growing group is the mixed-race group. And so if you just look at projections of the mixed-race group in Britain, going way out, and of course with all the caveats about these long-term projections, assuming that the rate of intermarriage remains the same, regardless of what happens to immigration levels, you know, by the end of the, you know, by the mid-century it's only about 7% or so mixed race. By the end of the century it's like almost 30% and then 50 years later it's like 75%.

So you get this kind of exponential curve, simply because anyone who's mixed, a mixed-race background, myself might be an example of that, a quarter of Chinese, so anyone I marry then, you know, my kids will be counted as mixed rate. The secondary question of how they're treated, whether they're treated as white or not is a secondary question. But still, the proportion of the population

that has some non-white background in Britain will begin to include. exponentially. The question then will be, well, how does that mixed-race majority, which I'm arguing will kind of take over as the majority? How do they identify? And I'm kind of arguing that they will mainly or they will selectively tend to emphasize their European ancestry simply because at the global level that's what's going to be distinctive about them. Whereas the non-European parts of the world which will be economically much more powerful and also demographically much more powerful, I mean

there will be more of a sense of that is going to be the distinctiveness. But what it does, of course, mean is that, yes, the typical, quote-unquote white person will be, you know, will have darker features, will be more, you know, look more like what we would call mixed race today. So that's kind of the very futuristic take on this. So the three of us are a good example of the future. Yeah, maybe. Yeah.

Because I find it very interesting you're talking about people's fear and that's never been a fear of my, number one, because my mother is Latin American. Number two, I spent a lot of time in Latin American. That's essentially what the population is like. Do you think that it's right is probably the wrong word to use for it, but do you understand why people have this fear that, you know, that we are going to become an inverted commas less white?

Because to me, that's just my family, that's how I've grown up. So for me, it's nothing to fear at all. Right. So two things on that. is that Latin America, you're right that that's what's happened there, but there are, it's not necessarily the direction that we would want to go, even though we probably, we may be moving in that direction, because Latin America has a racially stratified system where lighter-skinned, people tend to be overrepresented in politics, top jobs, etc. More of a model, I think,

are what, you know, what you see with the Maori and the Hawaiians and Native Indians where, you know, whether you are more or less purely Native Indian doesn't mean you're more or less, you know, your class, your income, your opportunities aren't affected so much. I think you can have that kind of a society. 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. And that doesn't seem to be the basis for social stratification. So, yeah, I would hope we could avoid the Latin American model, if possible. But the other thing... We don't want to be like that. I'm a quarter of Costa Rican, too. But no, the...

But no, the question about fear, no, I think, yeah, I think we have to address that fear, because no, everybody, this is the point about white identity and also what I call the white tradition of national identity, which is this idea that I'm attached to being American, let's say, America has a traditional ethnic composition, which is a white majority, a black minority, etc. Or Britain has a traditional ethnic composition, which is a white British majority and minorities. And conservatism, a lot of these things, things are conservatism rather than racism, being attached to ethno-traditions that tend to give a country part of its uniqueness. And so that people don't want to see those particularities

erode, or they want to see them erode more slowly. So there are many shades of gray. It's like, okay, I'm okay with a certain amount of change, but not rapid change. And all that nuance tends to be crushed out in an argument where it's either you're for openness or you're closed. You know, actually a lot of people are in between. They're okay maybe with some change, but they want to slow it down. I mean, that's sort of where a lot of people are on the immigration question. So, yeah, I think that's understandable. I don't think the fears.

I'm not actually sure how much of this is fear as much as a sense of loss. You know, one of the best questions for predicting immigration attitudes is things in America were better in the past. You know, that kind of thing. But people are attached to the way things were when they were 20 years old growing up. They see, you know, another question would be, I don't recognize my country anymore, you know, these sorts of things. And that's just tapping into that cultural conservatism, which I do think has to be distinguished from, you know, I hate Latinos or I hate Muslims, which is a clearly very racist thing. So I think a lot of this is actually people's expression of a kind of conservatism. Now, the question is, what do you do with that?

And part of my, what I'm saying is part of it is you have to, you have to listen to that and you have to say, okay, that's the question. a valid, because some people are driven by culture, some are driven by economics. That's a valid concern. You're not going to get everything you want because we're a democracy, and some people want more immigration, and there's the economy, which needs immigrants, and so on. So we're going to come to an accommodation. And I actually think that would be better, because people would feel, okay, I've been heard, I haven't been shouted down as a racist, but I can't have everything I want because we have

to pay the pensions and so on, or some other reason. So I think you can actually get at those fears. And also the other thing is I think you need to have a vision for what's going to happen to the white majority. If you just say, you guys are going to shrink, we're going to get more diverse, celebrate that. 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. 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. 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. No, we're not just yesterday's news. 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. 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.

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. So if we've got a problem of, the problem is that the narrative of change and diversity is dominant. 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. And the Afro-Caribbeans, half of them marry out, and the mixed-race offspring marry mostly whites. 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. I mean, that's the kind of thing that you want it to emphasize.

So it's completely under the radar. All of that knowledge about how much voluntary assimilation is going on. 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. So a lot of French Muslims are actually secular, and they're marrying out, and nobody knows that. 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. So part of what I advocate is moving to a different style of political communication, especially for conservative whites.

You have to have different messages. You can't go to minority groups and say, hey, you guys, you're being assimilated. Isn't that great? But that's okay. I mean, I think politicians do this all the time. They have slightly different messages. But sorry, I just want to finish on that. But you would also, if I please correct me, if I'm.

I'm wrong, you also do say in the book that immigration levels need to come down. Well, yes. Well, I don't, I'm not making a prescription. 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. I'm saying that maybe when the majority gets comfortable with this idea that of a similar, that they're growing through assimilation, then maybe they'll relax a bit.

and then maybe those numbers will come back up again. But one of the problems that I see, particularly with that left narrative that says, this is, you know, it's racist to be in favor of reducing immigration, especially reducing immigration because you're uncomfortable with the ethnocultural consequences. I mean, that is still essentially a taboo. I mean, even Steve Bannon, you know,

was interviewed when he had that interview with The Economist, and he was saying, I'm an economic nationalist, which is nonsense. Actually, if you look at the support base and what drives the Trump vote, it is not economic nationalism. It is essentially a sense of cultural loss. So because of that taboo over what I would call sort of this idea of casting ethno-traditional conservatism as racism, attachment to your own group if you're white as racism, because of that narrative, it prevents open discussion of this. And I actually think it makes things worse in many ways.

I mean, I think the Brexit vote, for example, to some extent, the Brexit vote was an outcome of people who are upset at immigration. More upset at non-European than European immigration, by the way. And if you actually look at the survey data on this, they couldn't actually express themselves. No politician could articulate that fear directly. So this kind of got diverted into punching the EU. Now, I'm not saying that there weren't grievances around the EU and Brussels being bureaucratic and remote. and free movement and everything. But still, that was an acceptable narrative,

is to hit the EU. And so it all, you know, because they're immigrants are white, we can go after that, we can claim they're putting pressure on services or they're competing for jobs and whatever. And actually, the outcome of that might be quite negative for the British economy. That's one example.

Another example is to say, OK, people are upset about immigration. It's because of pressure on public services. So if you are an immigrant, you have no access to public services, you know, for five years, or whatever it is. So any attempt to tighten up, and all that just does is injure an immigrant who wants to go to the hospital or wants to get, who needs maybe income support. So basically what you're saying is we're having a fake conversation.

We're talking about the economy. We're talking about immigrants taking jobs or taking hospital beds. Where really that isn't the core concern that's driving the populist right. Exactly, exactly. And it's somebody who, you know, typically someone will be a against immigration first and then they'll look for the reasons that are acceptable. It might be pressure on services. So Jonathan Haidt has this idea of the elephant and the rider.

The elephant is the driver and then we tell ourselves a story that's the rider. So I think this stuff about services and jobs is a bit of a rider's story. Not to say that it has no impact, but if you look for example, you ask people, is immigration a problem in your local area? 20% say it's a problem. Is it a problem nationally, 70%. Now, that kind of tells you that this is much more of a national level issue, then it's not about local.

Local concerns do matter, in some cases, Boston, in Lincolnshire, or some of the Midwest United States towns that have rapid increases in Hispanic population, then yes, you will always see this jump in support for populist right. But for most people, it's what's going on nationally that counts. Yeah. Because you were talking about, so, you know, the worries about. was for instance Muslim immigration or the rest of it. Isn't a lot of this based in aesthetics?

I'll give you an example. I was going to, my dad is from Wigan, which is a very poor part of, obviously, for those of you who are watching, obviously, is a very poor part of North of England. And I was going to watch a rugby league match, which was everybody from up north came to Wembley to watch a rugby match.

And the supporters were talking to me and they were going, I can't recognise London anymore, before it used to be filled with cockneys like you. And, right, right, and on one hand, right, I'm, you know, I'm born in London. But if I'd taken more from my mother's side of the family, I doubt we'd be having that conversation.

Right. So, do you see, I just think... Yeah, but, okay, what I would say, though, is... So, so what's your... Yeah, but I'm saying that a lot of it is just... Isn't it a lot of it that just people see something completely different to them and recoil in fear? And it's almost an emotional response.

Okay, so it depends. as if they see people who are different and fear them or hate them, then that's racism, and I think that's deplorable. 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. I don't think that is. 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. You can imagine, you can see it, so we can look at, say, African-American Americans in Harlem or Black Britons in Brixton here in London. 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.

So you might be an Afro-Caribbean in Brixton saying, I miss the way Brixton used to be. And my view is, actually, that's just conservatism. That's not that you hate white people, right? So that's the kind of subtle differences that I think we need to talk about. But if you're saying, I hate those white people, then that's different. That then is... So that's why I think we need to make these distinctions.

And actually, if you do surveys and you ask liberals and conservatives, their views of why people don't like immigration, you will tend to get liberals thinking that it's the conservatives hate minorities. And the conservatives will say, no, they just are attached to their own group. So we're getting people kind of talking past each other and kind of seeing the other in a negative light. And I actually don't think that's necessarily the case. This episode is brought to you by Ultima Replenisher.

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Shop Ultima on Amazon or in store at Target and Whole Foods Market. How do you think we got here, Eric? How do we get to this point where expressing those concerns that might be conservative about the way things used to be or things are changing too fast? When did that become racist? And how did that become racist? 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. 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. We only have five minutes. Okay, five minutes. Okay. So what I mean is you have no more time to die. Yeah, yeah. I'm just trying to keep it. All right, I'll try, I'll try and make it short. So basically there's a fusion of two ideas. One is, is what I call, well, not me, but other sociologists have called modernism, which is this idea of anti-tradition.

New and different is better, essentially. That's what we're about new and different. And if you look at modernist intellectuals in the United States, for example, their view was that the WASP, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture was stifling, boring, and you know, that you had the prohibition of alcohol in 1920. So they reacted against that, and they said, well, look at these expressive groups like African-American. Americans with their jazz and Greeks and how wonderful are these exotic people and how how boring and awful are our group. And that's kind of like the beginnings then of this kind of trope, which is sort of a bit of an academic word, but this narrative of kind of being against your own group, the adversary

culture. Now, it's not a bad thing to be critical of your own group. You don't want to be just completely saying my group's the best and that's it. So you have to have that and you need cosmopolitans. I mean, I actually think that you have to have space for people to be citizens of nowhere or whatever. But essentially that criticism, that critique of the majority culture actually then becomes the dominant culture in the high culture. So this starts to happen. You know, even in the 50s, you know, you had the beatnecks and you had a number of intellectuals who were again talking about square white culture and all of this.

But it didn't quite have the same edge of, you know, white privilege, you're awful. but it was a similar sort of sentiment, and then we get into the 60s and 70s with the expansion of television and the university sector, and this becomes the dominant motif in the high culture. And once that happens, and then it becomes something that you have to buy into, because academia then changes,

and we talked about this earlier, where the left-right ratio amongst the professori it goes from something like 2 to 1 in 1962, Particularly in the social sciences and humanities, it's kind of 10 to 1 or something like that. So you get a complete domination over time because of the baby boomers moving into academic positions. And something similar happens in parts of the media,

but it's never quite the same in the media. It's really academia where you get this complete changeover. And then they bring their mores with them, and one of them is this idea that white identity is racist, worry about ethnic change is racist. It's never actually, you will never find, a clear statement or a political theory defense of this in philosophical terms in any of the literature. You will find it in the critical race, the radical stuff, which is basically ideology dressed up as academic research.

But in terms of the respected top journal political theory, you won't find a statement of this. But that all of a sudden it becomes the case that talking about immigration is a racist thing. It was less the case in Britain. Britain actually had a more open conversation, but U.S., Sweden, Germany, many countries you really didn't have, it was seen as very taboo. And this is part of the reason why we see the sort of sudden emergence of the AFD in Germany or the sudden emergence of the Sweden Democrats, because there simply was nobody willing to touch those issues politically. Now, you've said that sort of harking back in this nostalgia and wanting the country, as it used to be, isn't racist. Do you think Trump and this right-wing populism is here to stay?

And do you think it's going to be a factor? Or do you just think it's a political blip, as it were? Yeah. I mean, I should say that conservatism isn't racist, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing to do so. But I just think it's a perspective we should be debating. The populism, is it here to stay? I think right now it is, because the ethnic shifting is making the majority insecure.

It's bringing cultural issues more to the... the surface and this is actually cutting across the old left-right political divide, which used to be about redistribution versus free market. That's becoming less important, whereas the cultural wars, if you like, around more or less diversity and change versus tradition and continuity. That's becoming a bigger issue. Yeah, if you look at the European case, in nine out of ten European countries after 1996, you look at the migration numbers.

look at the rise in media stories about immigration tracking that. And tracking that is support for the populist right and concern about immigration. So, and so actually the numbers are very solid in showing how immigration is very much the driver. Now, if immigration falls as it has, that will take some of the steam out of the populist right. And it has actually, if you really look at the numbers, these numbers peaked at the peak of the migrant crisis, have fallen back a little bit. But I think underlying this are all these unanswered questions about who are we, what's the future of the country in terms of its traditional ethnic composition? And that's why I think actually if politicians were honest and addressed that and said, that's a valid concern. There is

going to be change. We've heard you, we've taken your concerns on board. Immigration is actually going to be lower than might be optimal for the economy because we're listening to your cultural concerns. I actually think that would be the way forward. But that isn't happening, Eric. It's not happening. It's not happening at all. Are you concerned by the direction that we're going in? Well, what's happening is that these populist right parties have emerged and started posting these very high numbers and you've had Brexit and Trump. That's actually broken the taboos around some of these subjects. So in Sweden now all the parties are talking about reducing

immigration, which they have to, in order not to lose those voters to the Sweden Democrats. I think actually the breaking of some of those taboos is a good thing, but some of the taboos actually needed to be in place. So I think now you're seeing these burqa bans, you know, I don't agree with some of the anti-Muslim stuff, so particularly bans on freedom of religious expression. 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. That's the risk. And maybe Poland and Hungary, we even see some of the results of that. So you know, but I think this is the risk when you don't address these problems, let them

get out of control. Then they take on a dynamic of their own. So, you know, the politicians aren't, well, they're beginning to address it. I think I would say there's been an improvement in the sense that more countries are now willing to discuss levels of immigration, you know, and that wasn't the case before. So maybe we'll get to a stage where the center parties will take over this issue and say, okay, we will keep the numbers modest to what the population is comfortable with. Hasn't happened in Britain, though, has it?

Well, there's been a discussion about immigration in Britain. And of course, if you're part of the EU, obviously you can't control the numbers, but even the non-European numbers were quite high in Britain. So I do think it's partly happened in Britain. It's happened in Britain a lot more than in some other countries. So Britain was certainly having a more open conversation than Sweden Germany. And I do think that, you know, if their numbers continue to be higher than what people want, there will be pressure on the mainstream parties. The mainstream parties, I think, are somewhat

responsive. I think they will pay attention to that issue. So it's not the case, it's not the same situation as Sweden prior to 2014, where they said, we won't even, we're going to close our ears, and that's something we don't talk about. And, you know, that is a particularly bad situation. So I actually think the mainstream parties are learning and are kind, and that's the, and that's also on the left. The center left in a number of countries, Denmark would be one of them, are moving in that direction as well. But again, if there is a worry, I think it might be that, you know, the stigmatization of Muslims, which is something that is, I think, a toxic, bad thing. You know, it's one thing to be against, to say that the burqa is, you know, doesn't

allow a woman the right to express it. So I think that's fine to sort of make a cultural case for it, but to ban it legally, I think it's problematic. Well, you're a real liberal in a traditional sense of the word. You believe in freedom. Well, it's absolutely fascinating. We're almost out of time. Tell me, I always like to ask this question of people who work in a field in which they are not necessarily representative of the mainstream opinion.

What's it like being you in academia? Right. Well, come back to me after the books published. I won't see. I mean, I'd say already there is a sense in which, you know, Quite a few people are not pleased with some of the things that I say. But I think that in the field I'm in, which is quantitative political science, if you've got your numbers behind you, I think most of those people are actually pretty fair-minded.

And most academics, I think, are center-left. You know, there is a significant far-left group. I mean, I'm not going to gloss that. But you just have to say, well, I'm going to deal with the people who are civil. I can have massive disagreements with people politically, but we can still be civil, you know. And so I think that's... So in academia, you still can. At least in, I think UK academia is possible.

It depends. It's department to department. I would say in my department, yes. It's like west side story. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But I know that in some others, there's a lot of conformity. And so it's probably harder if you have... All it takes is a few very outspoken individuals to sort of chill

and make it a much more polarized, or at more difficult environment, I'd say. But I don't think the UK is yet in the same boat as the United States where you have. have these completely rabid departments. And there are the climate, that kind of climate like Evergreen State and Middlebury, and you know, there hasn't, as far as I'm aware, there hasn't been anything quite that extreme in Britain. Let's hope it doesn't get there.

Yeah, let's hope. Because that is a big, like in terms of what's happening outside of academia, that is such a huge problem, is the inability to have honest, genuine conversations. It's like when I talk to somebody that I disagree with, face to face and we actually have a genuine conversation and we both come away from having learned something. I'm almost surprised every time because that's so counter to the kind of conversations that we're now used to having on Twitter, on Facebook, on

whatever. Right. You know what I mean? Oh no, I think you're absolutely right and this gets to the heart of this problem with these taboos because you get people who are so committed to this what I call left modernism and this vision of you know equality and diversity, this kind of utopia. And if you're in the way of that, you're not an ally, and somehow we've got to get you out of the way, and so I can't tolerate you, I got to suppress you. And part of it also gets to a belief that human beings are blank slates, and that if we can just choke off the supply of messages that are countering our utopia, you know, if we can just silence those people, then we won't have a problem, because we know people are essentially clay to be molded,

and so if we can control the information supply, then we can get what we want. And so the focus is always on shutting down and controlling. And actually, I just think that's just not human nature. I mean, you've got differences in some people. People aren't just blank slates, you know, and they're not going to be fooled. So I think, you know, I think it's a self-defeating strategy. Some people are blank slates. I've met a few in my time. I've taught a few as well. Well, listen, Eric, it's been a fantastic interview. Thank you very much for coming to speak to us. The question we always like to ask at the is what is the one issue that no one's talking about that we ought to be talking about? Um, minority supporters of populist right parties. So minority Trump voters would be one.

My mother being one. Oh really? My mother's a Latino Trump voter. Oh really? She loves him. Well, almost 30% of Latinos voted for Trump. Um, here's a, here's an interesting one. A question was asked after the Charlottesville riots, uh, which, which hopefully our viewers will be familiar with, which was around this, uh, Judging by Confederates, a couple of them with that. Right, okay, okay. So the Charlottesville, right, they asked a number of questions like white Americans are under threat in America today, something like that. Whites are under threat in the country today.

Seventy percent of Latino and Asian Trump voters replied yes to that question, which is not that different from white Trump voters, answer to that question. Or it's very important to protect and preserve the European Christian. heritage of the United States. You know, Asian and Latino Trump voters, something like 55% said yes. So there's actually quite an interesting phenomenon of ethnic minorities who are patriotic. And part of their patriotism is an attachment

to the way the nation is culturally. So it's really a mistake to think that minorities are automatically going to go in favor of multiculturalism. They're going to split. Most of them actually will support multicultural vision, but actually there's a polarization there as well. Very interesting. Eric, thank you very much for coming on.

Your book is called White Shift. It's released on October 25th in the UK, not till the end of January in the United States. All right. Well, as Francis takes a massive sneeze at the perfect time as we're about to end the episode. Get the book when it comes out. I've read it. It's absolutely fascinating. It's a great, great book.

I think, as I said to you before we started the interview, you're probably going to to get slammed from the left and from the right, which is exactly where we are. And I think that probably means you're doing something correct. I was going to say doing something right, but you're doing something correctly, which is trying to be in the middle, is what we try and do in the show.

It's like, you know, the right is going right, and the left has gone wherever it's gone, it's gone crazy as well. 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 make society, you know, make society more harmonious as we move forward 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 so thank you very much for come and speak to us get the book if you enjoyed it obviously as always subscribe to the YouTube channel click that bell button do you want to do the social media stuff yes yep if so if you're enjoying it please follow us on trigger pod at Instagram on Twitter trigonometry on Facebook and I think that nice to get us about it. That's it. And Eric, before we let you go, your Twitter handle is at EPK-A-U-F-M, EP-K-K-F-M. We'll get that in the video, so make sure you follow Eric.

You're always tweeting and retweeting interesting articles, so plenty of stuff for you to get into. Thank you very much, and enjoy your week. We'll see you in a week's time for another fantastic episode. See you later. This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart? Well, that's Tova's reality. An elderly widow working at an aquarium, Tova forms an unlikely friendship with their crumudgeonly, Marcellus, whose remarkable intelligence leads her to a life-changing discovery.

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