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Eric Kaufmann Biography

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“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.”

Diversity
Book:Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities
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“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.”

ImmigrationMulticulturalismEthnic Conflict
Book:Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities
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“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.”

ImmigrationMulticulturalismPluralismEthnic Conflict
Book:Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities
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“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.”

ImmigrationMulticulturalismEthnic ConflictIdentity Politics
Book:Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities
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