Whiteshift Quotes

“Cosmopolitanism must manage the contradiction between its ethos of transcending ethnicity and its need for cultural diversity, which requires 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 childlike minorities, who would be urged to embrace their heritage in the strongest terms.”
― Eric Kaufmann, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities

“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.”
― Eric Kaufmann, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities

“Demography and culture, not economic and political developments, hold the key to under- standing 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, immi- grants can only become ethnic Swedes through a multi-generational process of intermarriage and secularization.”
― Eric Kaufmann, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities

“The values of large cities, espoused by evangelist mayors like Rahm Emmanuel in Chicago or Sadiq Khan in London, are considered so self-evidently superior that only a bigot could reject them. Large cities are ethnically and socially diverse, are constantly changing, and tend to have low social cohesion and high inequality. Ethnic ties to neighbourhood are always provisional, until the next wave of immigrants moves in. In terms of tradition, 'all that is solid melts into air', to quote Marx. Thus the only approach to life, especially for whites or those of mixed background who lack an ethnic enclave, is modernist: namely, to be an individualist, seek immediate experience, suppress the desire for continuity with previous generations and eschew ethnic ties to the landscape. The goal of left-modernism is a kind of New York-writ large: to universalize the metropolitan condition. All else is darkness. The problem is that the metropolitan version of nationhood alienates conservatives who prefer stability and order-seekers who prefer higher cohesion, reducing their trust in society and politics.”
― Eric Kaufmann, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities

“Traditions of immigration, along with Anglo settler societies' materialism and economic liberalism, help explain why New World countries are somewhat more open to immigration. However, all but English Canada are subject to increasing populist agitation, with growing pressure on the 'politically correct' consensus that multiculturalism and immigration should not be politicized. These societies will experience some of the fastest rates of white decline in the West over the coming decades.”
― Eric Kaufmann, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities

“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.”
― Eric Kaufmann, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities

“The double standard inherent in Bournian multiculturalism lauds subaltern ethnicity while decrying majority ethnicity. Völkish native authenticity is championed for aboriginal groups against European migrants to the New World but downplayed for aboriginal Europeans in countries receiving non-European immigrants.”
― Eric Kaufmann, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities

“All Western countries have been trying to promote civic conceptions of nationhood to include immigrants, but the populist right shows that limiting nationhood to ‘British values’, the American Creed or the French Republican tradition doesn’t address the anxieties of conservative voters. These universalist, creedal conceptions of nationhood are necessary for unity, but cannot provide deep identity in everyday life. Ethnic nationhood, which restricts citizenship to members of the majority, is clearly a non-starter. But things aren’t so black and white. There is a third possibility, ethno-traditional nationhood, which values the ethnic majority as an important component of the nation alongside other groups.”
― Eric Kaufmann, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities

“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.”
― Eric Kaufmann, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities

“Repressing white identity as racist and demonizing the white past adds insult to the injury of this group's demographic decline. This way lies growing populist discontent or even terrorism.”
― Eric Kaufmann, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities

“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. ...

From a modern perspective, the most important figure to emerge from this milieu is Randolph Bourne. Viewed as a spokesman for the new youth culture in upper-middle-class New York, Bourne burst onto the intellectual scene with an influential essay in the respected Atlantic Monthly in July 1916 entitled ‘Trans-National America’. Here Bourne was influenced by Jewish-American philosopher Horace Kallen. Kallen was both a Zionist and a multiculturalist. Yet he criticized the Liberal Progressive worldview whose cosmopolitan zeal sought to consign ethnicity to the dustbin of history. Instead, Kallen argued that ‘men cannot change their grandfathers’. Rather than all groups giving and receiving cultural influence, as in Dewey’s vision, or fusing together, as mooted by fellow Zionist Israel Zangwill in his play The Melting Pot (1910), Kallen spoke of America as a ‘federation for international colonies’ in which each group, including the Anglo-Saxons, could maintain their corporate existence. There are many problems with Kallen’s model, but there can be no doubt that he treated all groups consistently.

Bourne, on the other hand, infused Kallen’s structure with WASP self-loathing. As a rebel against his own group, Bourne combined the Liberal Progressives’ desire to transcend ‘New Englandism’ and Protestantism with Kallen’s call for minority groups to maintain their ethnic boundaries. The end product was what I term asymmetrical multiculturalism, whereby minorities identify with their groups while Anglo-Protestants morph into cosmopolites. Thus Bourne at once congratulates the Jew ‘who sticks proudly to the faith of his fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his’, while encouraging his fellow Anglo-Saxons to:

"Breathe a larger air . . . [for] in his [young Anglo-Saxon’s] new enthusiasms for continental literature, for unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton philosophies of power, he feels himself a citizen of a larger world. He may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at least found the clue to that international mind which will be essential to all men and women of good-will if they are ever to save this Western world of ours from suicide."

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.”
― Eric Kaufmann, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities