EricKaufmannWhiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White MajoritiesNew York: Abrams Press, 2019. 618 p. $35.00.

In contrast to the vast transformation of demographic regimes in the less developed world over the past half century or so, the demographic experience of the West could seem comparatively quiescent: its history still eventful enough, but with population matters taking a minor place. For example, in Postwar, Tony Judt's magisterial history of Europe since 1945, those matters are limited chiefly to the demographic resorting of World War II's displaced persons and the later progression of the baby boom cohorts and their dwindling successors. The growing immigrant presence is acknowledged, of course—the appearance of “a visible and culturally alien minority,” with Muslims a significant segment—but more in the nature of an observation than to identify an operative feature. Only at the end of the book, when Judt considers how “Europe's burnished new image, scrubbed clean of past sins and vicissitudes, would survive the challenges of the coming century,” he allows that “it would depend a lot on how Europeans responded to the non-Europeans in their midst and at their borders” (p. 799). Over the same decades in the United States, Canada, and Australia, foreign-born proportions rose steadily from the low levels of the prewar years. Policy reforms in all three countries saw major diversification of migrant origins but, in the short run, without generating much popular resistance. Illegal entry, rampant in the US case, was of course frowned upon, but seemingly mostly as an affront to orderly process. The emergence—strictly, the reemergence—in the West of immigration and ethnic change as subjects of intense public attention and policy concern has been relatively recent. One of the significant contributions of Eric Kaufmann's Whiteshift is to uncover the deeper origins of this salience—indeed, to demonstrate just how much of postwar Western political history can be revealed through the lens of immigration and ethnic change. Kaufmann is a Canadian political scientist at Birkbeck College, University of London. A previous book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, was reviewed in PDR 37 (4) by Dennis Hodgson. Whiteshift is more focused geographically—chiefly, on the Anglosphere—but is much broader in ambition. The neologism of the title is the author's term to describe “the turbulent journey from a world of racially homogeneous white majorities to one of racially hybrid majorities” (p. 18). In a nutshell (p. 7): “Ethnic change—the size and nature of the immigrant inflow and its capacity to challenge ethnic boundaries—is the story.” The book is long; a bit repetitive but not long-winded. Large swathes of it consist of social histories of Western societies, tracing the course toward the populist struggles of today. If somewhat casual as history, these accounts are analytically sharp, generally persuasive, and always readable. Nearing the present, Kaufmann moves into social science mode, mining evidence from Gallup and Pew surveys, his own investigations (opt-in surveys on Mechanical Turk, searches on Google Trends), and the recent social psychology literature, building empirical support for his argument. Lastly, he sketches what he sees as plausible alternative ethnic futures for Western societies and offers his own preferences and predictions. The book is organized around what Kaufmann identifies as the “four main white responses to ethnic change,” briefly termed fight, repress, flee, and join. The first of these, taking the most space, describes the initially hesitant and eventually strident opposition to large-scale immigration in most Western countries. Chapters on the United States, Britain, and mainland Europe point to the many parallels in this experience; one on Canada, to the occasional exceptions (multiculturalism's continued strength). The second response to ethnic change refers to the repression of “ethnic instincts” by white majorities seeking to avoid the charge of racism. The flight response encompasses various routes of white withdrawal from ethnic engagement, such as retreat into denser white enclaves or to online networks and communities. Finally, whites can “join” by eroding ethnic barriers through intermarriage or, over a longer span, habituation and generational succession—or, in Kaufmann's central argument, through expanding the concept of whiteness. Actual history, of course, blurs these response categories and distributes them differently across countries and political alignments. But there is a unifying pattern in the “polarizing dynamic” that characterizes the recent experience of the West. The student uprisings of the 1960s serve as a point of origin, becoming by the 1980s a “near-universal left-liberal hegemony among non-STEM faculty and administrators” (p. 346). “[The left-liberal] belief system polices norms by establishing what is sacred, namely subaltern racial and sexual minorities, and deviant—those who violate norms of racial and sexual equality or question liberal cosmopolitanism” (p. 298). But a liberalism which “lauds subaltern ethnicity while decrying majority ethnicity” (p. 341)—in which attachment to that majority ethnicity is considered racist—in turn generated a rightist response. Political parties took sides, sometimes requiring a realignment. In the United States, for example, the espousal of multiculturalism and pro-immigration sentiment by progressive Democrats left the anti-immigration sentiments once associated with the Old Left to an increasingly Trumpian Republican Party. The Right's appreciation of the power of anti-immigration sentiments grew after the abortive 1999 Reform Party campaign of Pat Buchanan (“a Donald Trump avant la lettre”, p. 92). In recent political debate in the West, this reaction has seen the successive breaching of the taboos about ethnic minorities erected by left-liberalism, shifting “the center of gravity of acceptable public discourse.” First to go was the taboo against criticizing multiculturalism, then against criticizing immigration, then against criticizing Islam and its manifestations such as minarets and burkas, and finally the twin taboos proscribing white nationalism and Christian identitarianism—the last breached thus far only in Eastern Europe (pp. 348–350). The present situation is one of sharply divided white populations. “A critical demarcation across all Western countries,” Kaufmann writes, “is between the 63–80 per cent of whites who believe there is such a thing as a legitimate white self-interest on immigration and the 20–36 per cent of whites who think this [view] is racist” (p. 372). To the extent he is judgmental, it is in favor of the former group: of the acceptability of feeling and expressing racial self-interest, even by the majority. “If politics in the West is ever to return to normal rather than becoming even more polarized, white interests will need to be discussed” (p. 371). A fortiori in the existing circumstances of white demographic decline. (On white decline in the United States, see the article by Kenneth M. Johnson in this issue.) A hoped-for outcome of that discussion would be to reach a compromise on migrant numbers and origins, striking a balance between liberal support of diversity-increasing immigration and conservative insistence on diversity-abating assimilation of newcomers into a majority cultural identity. But what is the nature of that identity? On this topic the conventional demography of ethnic change, with its reliance on rigid categories, can be highly misleading. The US Census Bureau's assessment of when America will become “majority minority” is an evident case in point. For the country as a whole, the currently projected year is 2045; for the under-18 population, 2020. But aside from the absurd degree of precision, the calculation ignores the blurring of ethnic boundaries that inevitably takes place—in particular, “whiteshift.” An important historical instance of the expansion of majority ethnic/cultural boundaries, recounted by Kaufmann, is the mid-twentieth-century incorporation of immigrant Catholics (Irish and Italian) and Jews into the formerly Anglo-Protestant ranks of the American majority—shifting the conception of that majority from “WASP” to “an ecumenical whiteness” (p. 62). “Protestant” as an identifier was replaced by “Judaeo-Christian.” Kaufmann's contention, drawing in part on the sociologist Richard Alba, is that “today's white majorities are likely to successfully absorb minority populations while their core myths and boundary symbols endure” (p. 12). How this might occur is the subject of an intriguing chapter, “The Future of White Majorities,” offering a subtle discussion of culture, identity, and color in the demographic future of the West. The familiar melting-pot image is Kaufmann's expectation only for the long run—he has in mind a century or two. Present-day Belize, he suggests, might illustrate this kind of destination; English Canada (“a kind of Toronto-writ-large”, p. 292) may be well on the way. In the shorter run, however, his preferred metaphor is a salad bowl: a greatly diminished but tight-knit white presence amid other distinct ethnicities (like Mauritius, for instance). Charts of sweeping population projections over the next century show falling shares of both whites and minorities and burgeoning growth of a mixed-race or hybrid population, even with substantial further immigration. Left open is the degree to which the “myth of descent” constructed by this emerging majority will explicitly recognize its non-European heritage. “Unmixed” whiteness might survive in pockets, such as within fundamentalist religious sects. These are often strongly pronatalist and in-marrying groups such as Orthodox Jews or, demographers' favorites, Hutterites, within generally low-fertility majority populations. Whether such pockets will ever expand into substantial population shares, as Kaufmann's earlier book argued, now looks less plausible. Kaufmann's future is not one of smooth sailing but, on a timescale of decades, it would place today's “populist moment” as a passing phase of Western history. Demographically, natural increase has halted or (thus far, gently) reversed but a country's right to limit immigration is not being seriously challenged, despite the hints in that direction in the new Global Compacts for migration and refugees. Population aging and labor shortages might add some conservative backing to the left-liberal push for more open borders, but a balance with culturally-rooted insistence on slowing the pace of ethnic change should be able to be struck. What can go wrong? The main caution, the obvious one, is that little has been said about the rest of the world: where another three billion people will likely be added this century, aspirants to the world's middle class, where much of global geopolitics will play out, and where the transformative power of environmental change will be most felt. Demographic history has decidedly not ended.

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