Whiteshift

Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities

Abrams Books

Contents

The Century of Whiteshift

We need to talk about white identity. Not as a fabrication designed to maintain power, but as a set of myths and symbols to which people are attached: an ethnic identity like any other. The big question of our time is less 'What does it mean to be British' than 'What does it mean to be white British' in an age of ethnic change. The progressive storyline for white majorities is a morality tale celebrating their demise, and, as I hope to show, much of today's populist reaction stems directly or indirectly from this trope.

Yet whites can no more hold back demography than Canute could command the tides. In the West, even without immigration, we're becoming mixed-race. This is not speculation, but is virtually guaranteed by the rates of intermarriage occurring in many Western countries. Projections reveal that faster immigration may slow the process by bringing in racially unmixed individuals, but in a century those of mixed-race will be the largest group in countries like Britain and America. In two centuries, few people living in urban areas of the West will have an unmixed racial background. Most who do will be immigrants or members of anti-modern religious groups like the ultra-Orthodox Jews. The reflex is to think of this futuristically, as bringing forth increased diversity, or the advent of a 'new man', much as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Israel Zangwill or Time magazine predicted for the United States. But, if history is our guide, things are likely to turn out quite differently. Many people desire roots, value tradition and wish to maintain continuity with ancestors who have occupied a historic territory.

This means we're more likely to experience what I term Whiteshift, a process by which white majorities absorb an admixture of different peoples through intermarriage, but remain oriented around existing myths of descent, symbols and traditions. Naturally there will be contestation, with cosmopolitans lauding exotic origins; but most people will probably airbrush their polyglot lineage out of the story to focus on their European provenance. This is rooted in Gestalt psychology, in which the brain simplifies sense-perceptions into a unified whole, screening out a great deal of information. We see this process of selective forgetting and remembering time and time again among ethnic groups in history. In Turkey, for example, many groups in the ethnic majority's DNA have been forgotten. Most Turks trace their origins to Central Asia, neglecting their Byzantine Christian ancestors and the large number of immigrants who arrived from far-flung parts of the Ottoman Empire.

Whiteshift has a second, more immediate, connotation: the declining white share of the population in Western countries. Whites are already a minority in most major cities of North America. Together with New Zealand, North America is projected to be 'majority minority' by 2050, with Western Europe and Australia following suit later in the century. This shift is replacing the self-confidence of white majorities with an existential insecurity channelled by the lightning rod of immigration. No one who has honestly analysed survey data on individuals – the gold standard for public opinion research – can deny that white majority concern over immigration is the main cause of the rise of the populist right in the West. This is primarily explained by concern over identity, not economic threat. I explore this data in considerable detail in the first part of the book. Not everyone seeks to maintain connections to ancestors, homeland and tradition, but many voters do.

The loss of white ethno-cultural confidence manifests itself in other ways. Among the most important is a growing unwillingness to indulge the anti-white ideology of the cultural left. When whites were an overwhelming majority, empirically unsupported generalizations about whites could be brushed off as amusing and mischievous but ultimately harmless. As whites decline, fewer are willing to abide such attacks. At the same time, white decline emboldens the cultural left, with its dream of radical social transformation. The last time this blend of ethnic change and cultural contestation occurred, in fin-de-siècle America, the anti-WASP adversary culture was confined to a small circle of bohemian intellectuals. Today, the anti-majority adversary culture operates on a much larger scale, permeates major institutions and is transmitted to conservatives through social and right-wing media. This produces a growing 'culture wars' polarization between increasingly insecure white conservatives and energized white liberals.

The Western tradition of opposing one's own culture begins with the so-called 'lyrical left' in the late nineteenth century, which lampooned bourgeois values. After the First World War, the cultural left turned against the nation, to the point that by 1930, according to the liberal George Orwell, essentially all English intellectuals were on the left and 'in left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman'. In the more diverse United States, the lyrical left's critique took the form of an attack on their own ethnic group, the Anglo-Protestant majority, whom they saw as oppressing European immigrants and enforcing puritanical laws like the prohibition on selling alcohol. In the 1960s, this countercultural movement, which I term left-modernism, developed a theory of white ethno-racial oppression. Its outlook superseded the logical, empirically grounded, left-liberal Civil Rights Movement after 1965 to become a millenarian project sustained by the image of a retrograde white 'other'. Today, left-modernism's most zealous exponents are those seeking to consecrate the university campus as a sacred space devoted to the mission of replacing 'whiteness' with diversity.

It's important to have people criticizing their own group: what Daniel Bell termed the 'adversary culture' spurs reform and creativity when it collides with the majority tradition. But what happens when the critics become dominant? In softer form, left-modernist ideology penetrated widely within the high culture and political institutions of Western society after the 1960s. This produced norms which prevented democratic discussion of questions of national identity and immigration. The deviantization of these issues in the name of anti-racism introduced a blockage in the democratic process, preventing the normal adjustment of political supply to political demand. Instead of reasonable tradeoffs between those who, for example, wanted higher or lower levels of immigration, the subject was forced underground, building up pressure from those whose grievances were ignored by the main parties. This created a market opportunity which populist right entrepreneurs rushed in to fill.

Ethno-cultural change is occurring at a rapid rate at precisely the time the dominant ideology celebrates a multicultural vision of ever-increasing diversity. To hanker after homogeneity and stability is perceived as narrow-minded and racist by liberals.

Yet diversity falls flat for many because we're not all wired the same way. Right-wing populism, which champions the cultural interests of group-oriented whites, has halted and reversed the multicultural consensus which held sway between the 1960s and late 1990s. This is leading to a polarization between those who accept, and those who reject, the ideology of diversity. What's needed is a new vision that gives conservative members of white majorities hope for their group's future while permitting cosmopolitans the freedom to celebrate diversity. Cosmopolitanism and what I term ethno-traditional nationalism are both valid worldviews, but each suits a different psychological type. Imposing either on the entire population is a recipe for discontent because value orientations stem from heredity and early life experiences. Attempts to re-educate conservative and order-seeking people into cosmopolitanism will, as the psychologist Karen Stenner notes, only generate resistance. Differences need to be respected. Whiteshift is not just a prediction of how white identity will adapt to demographic change, but a positive vision which can draw the sting of right-wing populism and begin to bridge the 'nationalist-globalist' divide that is upending Western politics.

We are entering a period of cultural instability in the West attendant on our passage between two relatively stable equilibria. The first is based on white ethnic homogeneity, the second on what the prescient centrist writer Michael Lind calls 'beige' ethnicity, i.e. a racially mixed majority group. In the middle lies a turbulent multicultural interregnum. We in the West are becoming less like homogeneous Iceland and more like homogeneous mixed-race Turkmenistan. But to get there we'll be passing through a phase where we'll move closer to multicultural Guyana or Mauritius. The challenge is to enable conservative whites to see a future for themselves in Whiteshift – the mixture of many non-whites into the white group through voluntary assimilation. Unmixed whiteness is not about to disappear and may return in the long run, but this is getting ahead of the story, so I hope you'll read on.

The Western media was shocked when the frontman of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), Jörg Haider, won 27 per cent of the vote in the late 1990s and the leader of the French Front National (FN), Jean-Marie Le Pen, got 18 per cent in the second round of the 2002 French presidential election. When the centre-right Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) entered into coalition with the FPÖ, the EU was so outraged it moved to sanction Austria. Fifteen years later, the goalposts had shifted: both parties achieved nearly twice their previous vote share. The FPÖ under Norbert Hofer narrowly lost in the 2016 presidential election with 49.7 per cent of the vote while Marine Le Pen of the FN was defeated in the second round of the 2017 election on 34 per cent. This time the Western media breathed a collective sigh of relief, their outrage having long since ebbed away. Later in 2017, the FPÖ entered into coalition with the mainstream ÖVP, part of an established European pattern which aroused little controversy. Indeed, the news bookended an annus horribilis for Western liberals. On 23 June 2016, Britain voted to leave the European Union. Several months later, Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States. Following the 2015 migration crisis, populist-right parties in much of Europe built on previous gains to post record numbers. The floodwaters were creeping up. It seemed the radical right was either in power or on the cusp of it.

These political earthquakes have their roots in a growing disquiet over ethnic change which began with a tripling of far-right support in Western Europe between 1987 and 2002 and the passing of California's anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in 1994 over elite Republican objections. Today's populist earthquake has little to do with economics. As white majorities in the West age and decline, their place is being taken by non-Europeans. This shift pervades the popular imagination across Europe, North America and Australasia. While cosmopolitans embrace the change, populist-right movements feed on anti-immigration sentiment. Elites stand helpless as immigration soars to the top of white voters' agenda. Mainstream politicians hector or dismiss populists, trying – and failing – to deflect white angst onto the familiar terrain of jobs and public services.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DATA

A chorus of analysts have attempted to divine the reasons behind Trump's victory, the Brexit vote and the post-2015 surge of right-wing populism. Most offer what social scientists dub 'overdetermined' arguments, throwing a kitchen sink of explanations at the problem (economic stagnation, racism, distrust in politicians) without using data to distinguish which ones matter and which don't. The manager of the Oakland A's baseball team, Billy Beane, in Michael Lewis's Moneyball showed that large-scale datasets could reveal truths that scouts acting on gut instinct failed to see. On-base percentage mattered more than how athletic a batter looked or how many big hits he had. The scouts, like all of us, think in terms of vivid images, which lead us to make what Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky term 'fast-thinking' decisions. These can be misleading. In approaching populism, many have been seduced by stories of 'left-behind' working-class whites, the opioid crisis and rusting factories, so we've had numerous media 'safaris' into Trumpland which tend to simply confirm reporters' biases. Journalists have been mesmerized by election maps.

Looking at fine-grained surveys of individual voters produces a different picture, in which values count far more than economics or geography. Maps often obscure what's going on. Why? Whites and those without degrees are more likely to vote for Trump than nonwhites and university graduates. Since minorities and well-educated whites cluster in cities, maps show cities as anti-Trump and the countryside as pro-Trump. Thus many commentators conclude, incorrectly, that something about the culture and economy of rural areas makes whites like him while the dynamic diversity of the metropolitan experience leads urban whites to reject him. The proper way to address the problem is to look at whites of similar age, education and other characteristics living in cities and rural areas and compare their voting behaviour. This reveals they back Trump at similar rates.

I take Beane's approach, trying to stick wherever possible to multivariate models based on representative surveys of individuals. Data doesn't have to be quantitative to be valid – It might consist of large numbers of interviews, or accounts based on historical documents – but, in order to make causal claims, information needs to be as representative as possible. Where I don't have large-scale representative data I run small opt-in surveys on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) or Prolific Academic, which aren't too expensive, contain enough cases to compare between groups and are widely used by academics. These aren't as good as mass surveys but are better than anecdotes and impressions. There isn't the space in these pages to present everything, so I encourage you to visit this book's companion website.

We hear a lot about populism, and some analysts encompass its left, right, Western, Eastern and non-European variants. I'm less ambitious. While there are common threads, I think the Western situation has unique features. So I distinguish what's happening in Western Europe and the Anglosphere from developments in Eastern Europe. Right-wing populism in the West is different for two main reasons. First, it is not about recovering from national humiliation or pining for a better time before democracy arrived when a strong leader gave society a clear direction. These were important motivations for inter-war fascists like the Nazis, Mussolini, Franco or the Hungarian Arrow Cross, and remain important in Russia, Greece and a number of Eastern European states. Second, immigration is less important outside the West because migrants tend to avoid or pass through Eastern European states. It's a factor in some ex-Communist nations (if inside the EU), such as Hungary, which are not used to it, but the issue often ranks lower on voters' priority lists. Many of the forces which matter in the East count for less in the West, and vice-versa.

Anyone who wants to explain what's happening in the West needs to answer two simple questions. First, why are right-wing populists doing better than left-wing ones? Second, why did the migration crisis boost populist-right numbers sharply while the economic crisis had no overall effect? If we stick to data, the answer is crystal clear. Demography and culture, not economic and political developments, hold the key to understanding the populist moment. Immigration is central. Ethnic change – the size and nature of the immigrant inflow and its capacity to challenge ethnic boundaries – is the story. Indeed, if history is any guide, we shouldn't be asking why there is a rise in right-wing populism but why it hasn't materialized faster in places such as Sweden or the US. Politicians say diversity is a problem for the nation-state, but it's actually much more of an issue for the ethnic majority. The real question is not 'What does it mean to be Swedish in an age of migration?' but 'What does it mean to be white Swedish in an age of migration?' The Swedish state will adapt to any ethnic configuration, but this is much trickier for the Swedish ethnic majority. While Sweden can make citizens in an afternoon, immigrants can only become ethnic Swedes through a multi-generational process of intermarriage and secularization.