Eric Kaufmann's Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities Review
Are the only options fight, repress, flee and join?
Some books arrive as arguments, Whiteshift arrives as a test. The test is whether a liberal reader can linger, for longer than feels comfortable, inside a proposition that has been morally pre-sorted out of respectable discussion: that many citizens in Western democracies experience large-scale ethnic change not chiefly as an economic event but as an alteration in the texture of home. At the start of the book, Kaufmann asks that white identity be considered “not as a fabrication designed to maintain power, but as a set of myths and symbols” to which people are attached. That sentence explains both the power of the book and the liberal resistance to it.1 He is asking whether majority attachment has any legitimate standing in a plural liberal society at all.
Kaufmann’s central claim is plain and intentionally abrasive: the populist surge associated with Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the wider nationalist right is not best explained by wage stagnation or deindustrialisation alone, but by immigration-led demographic change and the felt decline of historic white majorities. He writes that “today’s populist earthquake has little to do with economics”.2 “Whiteshift”, in his own account, has two meanings. In the short term, it names the decline of white majorities and the polarisation that accompanies it, in the longer term, it names a process by which those majorities blur, expand, intermarry, and eventually absorb mixed populations into a new, looser majority identity. The book organises white responses to this transition under four headings; fight, repress, flee and join and its political ambition is to move readers, however reluctantly, towards the last of these.
What makes this more than a culture-war provocation is that Kaufmann refuses two consolations at once. He rejects hard ethnonationalism, because he personally does not want racial purity, closed membership, or the expulsion of minorities (which makes sense since he is half Jewish, one-quarter Chinese and one-quarter Costa Rican); but he also rejects the dominant liberal manoeuvre of treating identity-based concerns among majority populations as either morally illegible or straightforwardly racist. His own term for the politics he wants to name is closer to “ethno-traditional nationalism”: a wish to preserve the historic preponderance of majority groups through much slower immigration and stronger assimilation, without excluding minorities from national membership.
