A review of Eric Kaufmann’s Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities

REVIEWED BY GEORGE MICHAEL

New York: Abrams Press, 2019, 624 pp. $35. ISBN: 13: 978-1468316971

What is reshaping the political landscape in the West? In a provocative new book, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities, Eric Kaufmann, a Canadian professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, argues that the populist surge is fueled not so much by economic factors, but rather by a nascent white identity politics.

Immigration, demography, and cultural and ethnic change are central to understanding the current wave of populism. Previously, populist movements in America and the West have been ephemeral and episodic; but Kaufmann predicts that this emergent incarnation will principally define politics for the foreseeable future. For him, the big question of our times is not so much “What does it mean to be an American,” but instead “What does it mean to be white American” in an age of substantial racial and ethnic change. He sees a period of severe cultural instability on the horizon. Kaufmann’s book is organized around four broad white responses to ethnic change that he charts. First, whites can fight ethnic change by voting for populist parties or committing terrorist acts. Second, whites may repress their anxieties under pressure from political correctness and the anti-racism taboo.

Third, whites may opt to flee by avoiding diverse neighborhoods, schools, and social networks. And finally, whites may choose to joinminorities, first in friendship and later in marriage, thus resulting in a new racial amalgamation he designates “Whiteshift.” Whites have periodically fought against ethnic change throughout American history. In the late 19th century, Nativism emerged as a reaction by rural Protestants to the new immigrants who settled in urban areas. This movement culminated in the Johnson– Reed Act of 1924, which substantially curtailed immigration. A provision known as the National Origins formula mandated immigration quotas that were designed to maintain the ethnic composition of the population at the time when the law was enacted. Inasmuch as the United States had absorbed many immigrants at the turn of the century from diverse backgrounds, including Southern and Eastern Europe, it was believed that this measure would give time for assimilation to prove effective.

It was largely white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who settled the American nation, shaping its culture and major institutions. The WASP ideal served as a kind of default or natural identity to which white Americans aspired. Up until around the end of World War II, for many WASPS in the United States their ethnicity and national identity seemed coterminous. This was reflected in a dialogue Kaufmann mentions from the 2006 film The Good Shepherd, set in the 1940s when an Italian Mafioso played by Joe Pesci tells a WASP CIA operative played by Matt Damon: “We Italians, we got our families and we got the church. This Irish, they have their homeland. The Jews, their traditions. Even the Niggers, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Watson, what do you have?” Damon’s character replies, “the United States of America, the rest of you are just visiting.” But by the 1950s, the concept of the melting pot had gained much salience in American public discourse.

Talk of immigrant “contributions” were romanticized, as in John F. Kennedy’s 1958 book A Nation of Immigrants, which was commissioned by the Anti- Defamation League’s One Nation Library book series. Increasingly, the American creed was promoted as colorblind, which it was hoped would win hearts and minds in the developing world during the Cold War. This new dispensation paved the way for the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which dismantled the National Origins formula and as a consequence, engendered massive immigration from Asia and Latin America, thus drastically transforming the demography of the United States.

One of the main reasons why it took so long for a Rightist populist movement to emerge is because of a strong anti-racist taboo that militates against any semblance of white racial advocacy. Beginning in the early part of the 20th century, Liberal Progressives, including John Dewey, Franz Boas, William James, Felix Adler, and Horace Kellen, called for the “de-WASPing” of America. Adler, for instance, enjoined WASPs to welcome diverse peoples into their nation and celebrate their ethnic identities. In exchange, WASPs would terminate their own identity.