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.
If you’re white you may think, ‘I don’t identify as white, only as British.’ This arises because being white in a predominantly white society, like being heterosexual, doesn’t confer much distinctiveness. Even groups which are minorities, like WASP Americans, may have a weaker identity because their ethnicity forms the national archetype and thus is confused with it.
Ethnic majorities thereby express their ethnic identity as nationalism.
As the white share of nations declines, a thin, inclusive, values-based nationalism is promoted by governments which sidelines symbols many whites cherish, like Christopher Columbus or Robin Hood. In addition, some minorities challenge aspects of the national narrative like empire or Western settlement. This lifts the fog for many whites, making them aware of their exclusive ethnic symbols by separating these out from those that are inclusive, like the Statue of Liberty. Combined with falling white population share, this raises the visibility of white identity, drawing it out from beneath the shadow of the nation.
Stepping back from the tide of history, we can see that ethnic majorities in the West are undergoing Whiteshift, a transition from an unmixed to a mixed state. This is a process that is in its early stages and will take a century to complete. Until the mixed group emerges as a viable majority which identifies, and comes to be identified, as white, Western societies will face considerable turbulence. American history offers a preview of what we’re in for. We should expect a civilization-wide replay of the ethnic divisions that gripped the United States between the late 1880s and 1960s, during which time the Anglo-Protestant majority declined to less than half the total but gradually absorbed Catholic and Jewish immigrants and their children into a reconstituted white majority oriented around a WASP archetype. This was achieved as immigration slowed and intermarriage overcame ethnic boundaries, a process which still has some way to run.
97% of the global population growth takes place in a tropical belt from Central America through Africa and into West Asia.
In 1950 there were 3.5 Europeans and North Americans for every African. The UN’s medium projection tells us that by 2050 there will be 2 Africans for every Westerner in 2100.
Demand for labour to staff hospitals and manual jobs and pay the taxes needed to meet growing pension bills will exert a powerful migratory pull. In the global South, a continuing population boom combined with low wages is exerting a corresponding migratory push. While fertility is dropping quickly across most of the developing world, the population growth gradient between the global North and South will remain steep into the 2050s. In the decades to come, as young populations grow, we should expect significant migration pressure. The 2015 migration crisis showed the tragic lengths to which some in the developing world were prepared to go to reach Europe.
Among whites, ethno-demographic change polarizes people between ‘tribal’ ethnics who value their particularity and ‘religious’ post-ethnics who prioritize universalist creeds such as John McWhorter’s ‘religion of anti-racism.’
I chart the four main white responses to ethnic change: fight, repress, flee and join. Whites can fight ethnic change by voting for rightwing populists or committing terrorist acts. They may repress anxieties in the name of ‘politically correct’ anti-racism, but cracks in this moral edifice are appearing. Many opt to flee by avoiding diverse neighborhoods, schools and social networks. And other whites may choose to join the newcomers, first in friendship, subsequently in marriage. Intermarriage promises to erode the rising diversity which underlies our current malaise.
Events moved more quickly in Europe in the 1990s, where populist-right gains in countries such as France, Italy and Austria prompted mainstream politicians to abandon the rhetoric of multiculturalism. Where left-modernism was formerly able to portray national identity as dangerous, clearing the way for multiculturalism, political change desacralized multiculturalism, permitted it to be debated, whereupon it was swiftly replaced by civic nationalism.
With each passing census, the rural West is becoming a different planet from the cities. This raises difficult questions about whether countries are bifurcating ethnically, culturally and politically between ‘metro’ centers and ‘retro’ hinterlands, with little common ground.
Immigration will need to be slower than is economically optimal, but the result should be a more harmonious society.
Eugenics, despite its scientific patina, was based on a slipshod methodology which confirmed pre-existing ethnic stereotypes. For instance, when it was discovered that African-Americans were under-represented in the prison population, eugenicists improvised an ad hoc argument that this was only because blacks worked on plantations so could not get into trouble.
Scientific racism fed into the 1911 Dillingham Commission report which warned that the present American immigration policy would introduce a lower quality population stock to the country, leading to criminality and endangering democracy. It thereby concluded that the country must reduce immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. What’s interesting is that Anglo representatives did not make their case in ethno-communal terms, nor did they invoke the country’s historic ethnic composition. Rather they couched their ethnic motives as state interests. Instead of coming clean about their lament over cultural loss, they felt obliged to fabricate economic and security rationales for restriction.
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Much the same is true today in the penchant for talking about immigrants’ pressure on services, taking jobs, increasing crime, undermining the welfare state or increasing the risk of terrorism.
Immigration restriction became a plank of the Progressive movement which advocated improved working conditions, women’s suffrage and social reform. This combination of left-wing economics and ethno-nationalism confounds modern notions of left and right but Progressive vs. free market liberal was how the world was divided in the late nineteenth century.
Bourne, not Kallen, is the founding father of today’s multiculturalist left because he combines rebellion against his own culture and Liberal Progressive cosmopolitanism with an endorsement – for minorities only – of Kallen’s ethnic conservatism. In other words, ethnic minorities should preserve themselves while the majority should dissolve itself.
Cosmopolitanism must manage the contradiction between its ethos of transcending ethnicity and its need for cultural diversity, which require ethnic attachment. Bourne resolved this by splitting the world into two moral planes, one for a ‘parental’ majority who would be asked to shed their ethnicity and oppose their own culture, and the other for child-like minorities, who would be urged to embrace their heritage in the strongest terms.
Pluralists also managed to reposition the Statue of Liberty from its original basis as an emblem of renewed Franco-American cooperation into a symbol immigration and pluralism. An 1883 poem, ‘The New Colossus’, by a Russian-Jewish emigre, Emma Lazarus, referenced the American asylum tradition in its lines ‘Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-toss to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’ In 1903, a plaque of the poem was erected in an interior part of the Statue thanks to a private contribution by Georgina Schuyler, but only in the 1930s did the Statue acquire its contemporary significance as a symbol open immigration.
It’s easy to forget how secure a WASP-dominated America seemed prior to 1970.
Ethnic social mobility and intermarriage to Protestants reconfigured the boundaries of the American majority, creating what leading sociologist, Richard Alba, terms ‘Euro-American’ ethnicity. This early version of Whiteshift, from WASP to white, seemed to suddenly emerge, but was rooted in slow but steady mixing.
Critical race theorists contend that white ethnics only ‘became white’ when they became useful to the WASP majority. […] I’m less convinced. The Irish, Jews and Italians may not have been part of a narrower WASP ‘us’, but they were perceived as racially white, thus part of a pan ethnic ‘us’. […] Post 1960s intermarriage led to an extension of American majority ethnic boundaries from WASP to white but the foundations for expansion were already in place. From 1960s on, the religious marker of dominant ethnicity came to be redefined from Protestant to ‘Judaeo-Christian’.
An influential study showed that towns which received cable – which came bundled with the right-wing Fox News channel – produced a small bump in Republican vote share and a major increase of as much as 28 per cent in turnout among registered Republicans.
[…] norms are the ‘accumulation of decisions made by the community over a long period’ which gradually gather moral force. ‘Each time the community censures some act of deviance … it sharpens the authority of the violated norm and reestablishes the boundaries of the group.’
Fascism and socialism lost out after the Second World War, but what of the victor, liberalism? The Allies’ victory did enlarge and protect the scope of negative liberty. But alongside this success a positive liberalism was smuggled in which advocated individuality and cosmopolitanism over community. Most, myself included, value individual autonomy, but one has to recognize that not all share this aim. Someone who prefers to wear a veil or dedicate their lives to religion is making a communitarian choice which negative liberalism respects but positive liberalism (whether of the modernist left or burqa-banning right) does not. This turns sour when those who fail to support a socially dominant positive liberal virtue like pursuing autonomy or preferring diversity are shamed, shunned or persecuted. This is acceptable in a voluntary organization such Scientology where you know what you’re signing up for, but not in a mainstream societal institution like a university, government bureau or large corporation. When mainstream institutions enforce positive liberal goals and punish deviation from sacred values, this shrinks the space for negative freedom in society.
America’s new federally directed state nationalism supported left-modernism by the early 1940s: the CIA even funded modernist art and the New York Intellectuals as a form of anti-Soviet propaganda.
But – perhaps due to the self-evident wrongs it had begun to right – left wing intellectuals began to sacralize identity politics. Negative liberal goals such as equal rights gave way to the desire to realize a positive liberal ideal of diversity and invert a perceived cultural hierarchy. Cultural minorities replaced workers as the exploited category and agent of radical transformation. Left-modernist eschatology replaced the Marxist workers’ paradise with the multiculturalist dream of equality-in-diversity. The New Left electrified the rising Baby Boom generation of intellectuals. Its tenets were less threatening to capitalism and thus, in softened form, more readily absorbed by large corporations, governments and a rising cohort of knowledge workers.
For Coleman Hughes, progressives have responded to the undeniable reduction in actual racism with concomitant expansion of its definition: it becomes ‘a conserved quantity akin to mass or energy: transformable but irreducible.’
Taboos are established in a Hobbesian manner in which the powerful and the ideologically committed set the tone.
Yet a larger share of minorities and smaller white population means the whites that remain will become scarcer, increasing the value of their cultural capital as a historic founding group to increase white privilege. Asians and Hispanics may fell fewer obligation to blacks than whites.
On the Great Plains, the Comanche were able to master the Western technology of horsemanship before white settlement and used this to brutally conquer other Amerindian groups, nearly wiping out the Apache. None of which means today’s Comanches should feel ashamed of their identity and dwell on the foibles of their ancestors.
It may also be the case that, as McWhorter writes for African-Americans, the focus on white guilt removes a sense of agency from aboriginal groups, worsening their plight. Victim status may bring lower resilience and worse social outcomes. As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt point out, the ideology of victimhood elevates precisely those habits of mind – such as viewing others’ innocent statements as malign or relying on emotional reasoning (‘I feel it, it must be true’) – which produce depression and anxiety. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is explicitly designed to correct such neuroses through building resilience, yet left-modernist ideology seems intent on doing the opposite.
The inverse relationship between diversity and solidarity draws on a substantial body of work showing that diverse countries are poorer and conflict ridden than homogeneous societies. Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, is the most ethnically diverse part of the world. Earlier we noted that ethnic diversity within African countries is high mainly because the typical African country has more geoclimatic diversity than countries in other parts of the world. […] In a famous article, the economists William Easterly and Ross Levine show that between 25 and 40 per cent of the difference in economic growth between 1960 and 1990 between East Asia and Africa can be explained by the fact that East Asian nations are among the most ethnically homogenous while Africa is among the most diverse.
As the West becomes more diverse, support for the welfare state and trust in the government will erode.
White-Asian marriage is common and those of mixed white-Asian background have higher income that either Asians or whites.
Indigenous authenticity forms part of the appeal of identifying as Native.
Invoking the history of racism to justify harsher treatment of whites reflects a Hatfield-McCoy theory of justice that leans on pre-Hobbesian notions of intergenerational culpability, collective punishment, eternal sin and retributive justice.
Elections in ethnic party systems are often a glorified census which makes ethnic demography a key battleground.
When conservative whites’ cultural interest in defending their ethnic identity is taboo, they will look for other reasons to reduce immigration. Attacking Muslims as a threat to Jews, homosexuals or free speech offers an acceptable liberal rationale for immigration preferences that are largely motivated by a desire for ethno-cultural protection.
The problem with civic nationalism is that it pursues two diametrically opposing goals: universality and particularity.
Ethnic nationalism has richness, but excludes minorities. Multiculturalism is rich and inclusive, but excludes the majority and can weaken commitment to the nation. My preferred alternative is multivocalism. […] Where multiculturalism draws people’s gaze back to a distant homeland, multivocalism orients them to the nation, albeit viewed through different ethnic lenses. This flexibility maximizes meaning and unity by harnessing the complexity of national identity.
Politicians should maintain what Kissinger called a ‘constructive ambiguity’ about the content of nationhood, validating many different conceptions instead of attacking multicultural and ethno-traditionalist ones. People hear what they want to hear, read what they want into statements.
Multivocalism is superior to both civic nationalism and multiculturalism. Instead of focusing on difference, or ironing everyone into commonality, governments should celebrate the different ways we identify in common.
I therefore favour Whiteshift, a model in which today’s white majorities evolve seamlessly and gradually into mixed-race majorities that take on white myths and symbols.
As assimilation speeds up, immigration can be increased. Clear measures like intermarriage rates can be tracked, as with rates of language proficiency, and used to reassure people and calm panics. An open majority will be more likely to view outsiders as potential recruits, removing the chance of zero-sum competition leading to the antipathy towards outgroups I define as racism.
Repressing white identity as racist and demonizing the white past adds insult to the injury of this group’s demographic decline.