Eric Kaufmann | You're Not Allowed to Say This

Timothy Allen: I was listening to you speaking with Jordan Peterson. I was very interested. I’d love to go really deep like that. Obviously we can’t. I think it’s quite funny that you’re both Canadians and you’re both kind of social scientists, I suppose, isn’t quite the way to describe it. Just before we get into the conversation, you must really tread a very tightrope walk in your profession. Is that right? I mean, you are in the belly of the beast, and you’re one of the, a bit like Jordan Peterson, but obviously you’re in the UK, probably a lone voice. Is that right, in the institutions that you’re in?

Eric Kaufmann: I’m one of very, very few. Now, obviously, I am now at the University of Buckingham, which is probably the freest environment in the UK in terms of academia. But for 24 years, I was at the University of Southampton for four, and then Birkbeck, University of London, for 20. Those were environments where there was a very strong progressive conformity amongst faculty. So you essentially kept in the closet for the most part.

Timothy Allen: Forgive me for not investigating this a bit deeper, but have you tried to be cancelled? Have you had all that stuff happen to you?

Eric Kaufmann: I have. So my cancellation story really starts around 2016. I started to come out of the closet, almost without even thinking about it. I’d done a book called Whiteshift, which was all about populism. And that wasn’t why I got cancelled. But I started to become a bit more outspoken on social media. And all of the cancellations really had to do with me essentially either making light of, or making fun of, the social justice movement, the Great Awokening. So when Justin Trudeau couldn’t pronounce, after three tries, LGBTQ, and he stumbled, I retweeted that and joked about it. That’s the kind of thing that would go on your record. Someone would put in a complaint, and then you have to show up at a hearing, and they’d find you guilty. Well, what’s the punishment? Well, if you do it again. They won’t specify it, because if they get legal, they’re probably going to lose. But still. So I faced a number, I think four internal investigations, between about 2018 and 2022. Some of it was in the higher education press. There was one social justice warrior right out of central casting, the youngest member of staff in our department. She was a complete rabid nutjob. No one liked her, but that’s beside the point. She left the department, claiming I was the reason she left, and wrote this great big whine in the Times Higher claiming I’d pushed her out of academia. It’s ridiculous. And the reason was that I made her feel unsafe, because of what I wrote. Not because of anything I’d done directly, but because I was very critical of the kind of critical race theory, scholar-activism that she was engaged in. The reality is she got a job across the street at SOAS, and didn’t tell anybody, because she wanted the story to be, oh, I got pushed out, poor me. But yeah, just all these kinds of pressures. And because of the stuff that had been in the press, all my colleagues were aware of where I stood. They were perfectly cordial for the most part, but on the other hand a number of them would tacitly support these internal investigations against me. It was getting weird. It wasn’t anything that was going to push me out, or where I really feared for my job. But at the end of the day, I thought, Buckingham has got this free speech founding tradition, and that’s more where I wanted to be.

Timothy Allen: Forgive me for making the comparison again, I’m always coming back to Jordan Peterson, it’s unavoidable, but you seem a lot more lighthearted than him. He’s a bit of a black-piller, I think, sometimes. And you appear to be someone who can talk about these things. I can’t wait to discuss some very controversial things with you, because what you write about is incredibly controversial in this day and age. But I find it exhilarating to watch people have a normal conversation about things, speaking unemotionally, I suppose, is the right way to put it.

Eric Kaufmann: Well, yeah, and that’s probably the biggest difference. I’ve been in rooms where Jordan Peterson will cry at the drop of a hat. He was talking at a Penguin sales force meeting, something as dry as that, and he got into some story and started crying. That’s the kind of guy he is. He’s just so emotional. And that is one approach, and it’s one of the reasons he’s so effective. But on the other hand, that’s not really my style.

Timothy Allen: So let’s zoom out and look at culture currently. Over the last, let’s say in my lifetime, 50 years, I’ve obviously noticed it change. I’m sure you can point me in a much more specific direction of what exactly has happened over that period. But can you generally describe the situation we find ourselves in now? It seems unusual to me, but I’m not even sure, historically, whether this isn’t just a cyclical thing, a bit like a pendulum that swings backwards and forwards.

Eric Kaufmann: Boy, that’s a really good question. So I think the first thing to appreciate is that we are living in the aftermath of the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, whose full flowering wasn’t clear at the time. It was, to some degree, but it’s taken a while for the logic of the cultural revolutions of the ’60s to fully unfold. And what we’re living through is the late-stage post-’60s culture, and what it really means. That’s one of the reasons why, in my book Taboo, my argument is that it’s actually not as new as you think. It’s just that it was much more self-contained. It was contained on campus, and within the campus it was in the gender studies department, the black studies department, maybe the sociology department. But now it’s everywhere. It’s off campus. It’s in the newspapers. It’s in the government. It’s in the institutions. So what occurred in the 2010s, with what Matthew Yglesias calls the Great Awokening, is this massification, the spread off campus. That’s due mainly to a couple of things. One is social media, because social media allows academics and journalists to talk to each other and feed each other ideas. The second is the new media moving away from classified ads towards clickbait, which means driving emotions on social media is key. And so all of a sudden the media is sucking all of this ideological stuff out of gender studies, which had been talked about in academia for decades. So it’s not new. If you were in a gender studies or women’s studies seminar in the ’70s or ’80s, you wouldn’t notice that much difference between then and now. It’s just that if you were in engineering or medicine, then you would notice a big difference, because the stuff has spilled into your sphere and you’ve got to do DEI now and talk about trans and all this kind of stuff. So that’s the culture. And I actually think that the source, the big bang if you like of our moral universe, was the anti-racism taboo that emerges in the mid-1960s in the US, particularly in polite society. Which, you know, it’s good to have a norm against racism, but when you get to a taboo, that’s a very black and white thing. There’s no nuance, there’s no grey zones, and all of a sudden this is a powerful piece of kryptonite that somebody can weaponise. So they’re incentivised to stretch the meaning of the term racism to include, oh, you criticise immigration levels or multiculturalism, you’re a racist. Or you want to talk about the grooming gangs, you’re a racist. So by stretching this taboo, it gives a lot of power to the cultural left. And they’ve used it, and institutionalised it as DEI. And it’s just exploded more recently because of social media and the new media, which has allowed for the rapid takeover. However, I want to say that, as somebody who came of age in what I call the second awokening, late ’80s, early ’90s, with political correctness and dead white males and all that, it was very evident already then that this was happening, if you knew where to look. But it just hadn’t hit. The scale was just, the New York Times was not all over it the way it was in the 2010s.

Timothy Allen: That’s interesting. I was at university 89 to 93, in Leeds. And my version of this was, there was a very small group, probably selling the Socialist Worker, do you remember? And there were demonstrations about pretty much everything, but they were very small. They were into the politics of the universities, very politically active, but they really didn’t have a voice. There was a small group of, say, four of them outside the union when you walked past, shouting about something. So what I want to know is, why did it take off so much? I understand that social media and clickbait have facilitated it. But why did it take off? Most people, the general population, would pass it and think, quieten down, you’re being a bit over the top, this is a bit extreme, a bit unnecessary. So why is it taking hold the way it is?

Eric Kaufmann: Well, there’s a couple of things. I do think that when you can just press a like button from anywhere in the world to dogpile somebody and cancel them, that gives a lot more mobilising capacity to a movement. What I’d also say is that you certainly had cancellations going back to the ’60s. Take an example: in the mid-1970s, James Coleman, president of the American Sociological Association, wrote some papers saying that busing does contribute to white flight. That was seen as critical of the policy of racial integration through busing, and people went on stage calling him a Nazi and a racist, and there were people scheming behind the scenes to have his professional ethics questioned. And then in the ’90s, similar things were happening. In 1988 the UCLA student newspaper made fun of affirmative action and it was shut down by the university. So this idea that cancellation wasn’t happening is wrong. And the idea that there was a lot of robust protection against it is also wrong. The doors were open, but the number of people to push the doors open was not that high. It wasn’t so easy to mobilise. But the sacredness of race, the sacredness of sex, the sacredness of the homophobia narrative, which later becomes the transphobia narrative, all of those symbolic touchstones of this new religion were already in place. It’s just a matter of expanding the scale and power of them. So this is where I differ with some other people who think this is all new. I don’t think it is new. And this is one of the reasons we’ve got to go back to the beginning if we want to fix it. If you look at Trump’s executive order rescinding affirmative action, affirmative action was an executive order from 1965. So that’s how far back this rot goes. Or what’s called disparate impact: if you have a test for a firefighting department and men do better on it than women because it involves carrying people around, then that is indirect discrimination against women, so you’ve got to get rid of the test. That kind of stuff, 1971. So this goes back a long way. Canada is another example: they had laws on the books that you could discriminate on the basis of race in the name of some kind of positive action, but it just wasn’t used. And then suddenly somebody starts using it, and it gets used more and more. Now jobs are advertised openly saying we want somebody who isn’t white or male. That is now legal and it’s happening all the time. So a lot of the potential was there, it just hadn’t been fully realised. This is why I think there’s an unfolding logic that was already nascent. We didn’t have immunity against it. It’s only now that it’s gotten so bad that we’re starting to develop the defences.

Timothy Allen: But the thing I don’t understand is the woke you’ve just described, the hiring on the basis of characteristics you don’t have. That seems obviously antithetical to the origins of what DEI should be. As I understand it, it’s people wanting to be nice to other people. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that’s where it stems from. So what do those people think when they look at that? Doesn’t it cause a glitch in the thought process when they see it? How does it work?

Eric Kaufmann: You’d be surprised, people can convince themselves of all sorts of things. The original letter of the affirmative action executive order was about non-discrimination on the basis of race. It’s really about affirmative action to prevent discrimination. Within the span of a few years, it became goals and timetables for equality of outcome. So you go from equality of treatment to equal outcome within the span of a few years. Why? Well, there were some riots, the government says, oh yes, we’ve got to deal with inequality, with racism, and then there’s this blurring between non-discrimination and equal outcomes. We need equal outcomes, so we’re going to discriminate against whites and men. So you went from it being illegal to discriminate on the basis of race to, as Richard Hanania puts it, it becoming illegal not to discriminate on the basis of race, within a few years. And that was all justified as being within the spirit of the law. So it’s a shell game, where they keep the label of equality, empty out the more classical liberal meaning of it, and replace it with the more radical, I guess you could call it cultural socialist, critical race type approach.

Timothy Allen: Do you think that’s acknowledged at a high level? Do you think the distance between the original intention and what it’s become is so far now that it’s obvious, and people just go, look, it is what it is, let’s keep doing it because it benefits us?

Eric Kaufmann: There were a lot of contortions. They changed it to, well, okay, it’s not about reparations for a past injustice, it’s about diversity. So they tried to change the rationale. But what you’ll get with the academic left is a kind of word salad that goes something like this: unless we discriminate against whites and men, minorities aren’t going to feel welcome enough to have the freedom to be treated equally, so therefore we have to treat unequally in order to have equal treatment. So it’s a complete word salad, a word game. It’s what George Orwell talked about, where you empty the meaning of words and change them into something political. So the word anti-racism no longer just means not discriminating on the basis of race, it means that whenever whites are doing better than blacks, that’s racism. We’re not going to look at family structure, we’re not going to look at savings behaviour, we’re not going to look at anything else, we’re just going to call that systemic racism. So it’s this redefinition of words on the basis of ideology, and then believing your own propaganda. And I think that’s where we are. Now, when there’s a big challenge, what’s interesting is, when Trump goes in, when the Supreme Court in the US outlawed the use of affirmative action, basically racial preferences, which were actually discriminating a lot against Asians as well, in order to engineer the makeup of these universities’ student bodies to reflect the population. In the public it was about 70 to 30 in favour of getting rid of these sorts of things. And what’s interesting is that even on these university campuses there’s a grudging acknowledgement that there was a problem. In fact, some people were quite quietly pleased at what Trump was doing, because they themselves never really bought into it. So they actually haven’t resisted. The attack on DEI in the US has really not been resisted to the nail, I’d say. It’s largely been acquiesced to, which shows it was pretty soft.

Timothy Allen: Something I learned this morning, listening to you speak with Jordan Peterson, which is relevant here. You were talking about the possibility, or Jordan was talking about the possibility, that the evolution of woke has gone hand in hand with a certain feminization of culture. And one of the things Jordan pointed out was that in a feminized culture you tend to go with the consensus. So if the consensus from the top down is, right, DEI is off the table now, then you’re far less likely to resist it. Is that a fair, correct understanding of what you were talking about?

Eric Kaufmann: Well, that’s interesting. The debate we were having was that a lot of professions, because women have been getting degrees and entering professions, have become a lot more female just in their demographic makeup. University academics is one example of a profession that’s become majority female. Teaching is more extreme, medicine is another. And one of the questions is, does that demographic shift explain the rise of woke, which is really about, oh well, we want to care for people, we don’t want to make them feel offended or not included by confronting an argument they don’t like, that’s more important than truth and freedom. So one of the things we were debating was whether this was about the demographic entry of women into the professions. My argument is that it’s actually not so much about that, but much more about feminine ideas. Ideas that say emotional safety is more important than free speech, for example. That’s a feminine idea, in the sense that it prioritises things that, in women’s evolutionary makeup, they would tend to prioritise. However, I think the feminization of ideas is different from the demographics. If you take a convent, where you have very strict, all-female-run institutions, they are certainly not touchy-feely in the way they’re running it. So the ideas are not very feminine, even though the demography is. I think what we’ve got now is, yes, the institutions are more demographically female, but the bigger issue is not that. You can have DEI in the police, you can have DEI in the military. It’s not necessarily the personnel, it’s the ethos and the culture, which has moved in a feminine direction. So that’s where I felt, whereas Helen Andrews, her argument, which I think Jordan was mentioning, was really that it’s all about tipping points, with women making up over 50% of the staff and then pushing the university to essentially be a daycare rather than pursuing truth. So I’m not saying there’s nothing in that. Women are more woke on average, particularly younger women. So there’s no question that female makeup will make a difference. But I don’t think it’s enough. You take a university, it’s gone from 60-40 male to 40-60, or 55-45. I just don’t think that on its own is enough to explain where we went.

Timothy Allen: So the feminized ideas, would they necessarily appeal to a man? And what’s the appeal, if it’s not to do with that? By the way, I fully acknowledge that people are going to listen to this and go, what the hell are you talking about?

Eric Kaufmann: Yeah. It’s hard to follow, I know.

Timothy Allen: But I like challenging my own ideas about things like this. I never actually thought about it until I heard you talking about it. But it makes a lot of sense to me.

Eric Kaufmann: It does, and you obviously back this up with data, that you’re more likely to be woke if you’re a young woman.

Timothy Allen: We see that anecdotally, but I understand it’s absolutely true as well.

Eric Kaufmann: Just to give you one example, there’s a survey taken of American undergraduates every year by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, about 70,000, a massive sample. You take a question like, should somebody who says trans is a mental disorder be permitted to come onto campus and speak? And women are 20 points less likely than men to say yes. And that’s across the political spectrum. So right-wing conservative women are 20 points less likely than right-wing conservative men to say such a person should come and speak. So there’s no question that women are more likely to want to emphasise protection from speech than freedom of speech. But still, most of the variation is left to right. Whether you identify as very left-wing versus very right-wing matters a lot more than whether you’re male or female. The other thing to say is that we, as a world, have gone through the ending of cruel punishments and blood sports and duelling. You could call all of that more feminine ideas, if it’s about the prevention of cruelty. So to some degree this is part of the process of civilization. But of course these things are independent of whether you’re male or female. Although I think there’s a degree to which, if you have more females in a profession, then just because women are more likely to support some of these ideas, they’re going to be more powerful within the rank and file.

Timothy Allen: Okay, let’s talk about civilization then. Does that mean, and I’m looking for the correct answer here, not just an answer, does that mean that if we believe in free speech, we’re necessarily excluding the feminine? Are we excluding women? If we want to enact free speech, how does that work? Who’s right, who’s wrong? How do we include everyone? Is inclusivity even necessary?

Eric Kaufmann: Well, these values are in tension. The woke left will pretend they’re not, and say, oh yeah, we believe in free speech and we believe in emotional safety and there’s no contradiction. Of course there is. All of these are tensions. So even to say something like, I think immigration should be reduced because we don’t want the culture to change so quickly, and someone says, well, that’s offensive to people who aren’t white, because they make up most of the immigrants and most of the natives are white, there’s an ought in there. So you can’t say that. So there’s a couple of things. First, there is a clash, but in a classical liberal society, the values that made the West great are essentially freedom of speech, so ideas can collide, the best ideas win, a truth-based order. And then in your private life, this is where there’s a difference. In your private life, if my mother-in-law has put on a lot of weight, I’m not going to point that out.

Timothy Allen: You’re not going to plead free speech in that conversation.

Eric Kaufmann: No, that’s where regard for not offending somebody trumps free speech in a private setting.

Timothy Allen: But you obviously still have the free speech. You’re not worried about the government telling you off, free speech in that sense.

Eric Kaufmann: You do, it’s a personal choice. But you might be worried about norm violations. So even though it’s not government, it’s some sort of norm that’s socially upheld. But then if you try to transpose that into the public realm, which is what the left has done, to say, well, we want to be nice, and just like being nice to your mother-in-law, being nice is going to mean not telling Aboriginal Canadians that there are no mass graves. The claims that there are all these bodies buried around the residential schools is crap, it’s a complete hoax. So we’re not going to say that, because, well, they’ve had a hard time and we don’t want to upset people. That’s the wrong approach, because what you’re now saying is, we no longer have a truth-based society, we no longer have a free space. So in the public realm it’s got to be free speech and truth. If we want to solve problems and get ahead as a society, we need free speech. And the other thing is, who sets the taboo? Because we don’t care what white working class people think, or conservatives, or religious people. So there are certain groups we want to be nice to, and certain groups you’ve got to be mean to. White males, it’s open season on them, and the meaner the better. So it’s not empathy towards everybody, it’s empathy towards groups approved of by the cultural left, essentially historically marginalised race, gender and sexual minorities. Those are the sacred groups in the system, the ones who have the oppression points. And those who have very few points are the whites, the male, the conservatives, at the bottom. So you want to dehumanise those people, call them just faceless whiteness and agents of systemic racism in a shameful past. So the point is, it really isn’t empathy, it’s very selective empathy.

Timothy Allen: That’s what I was about to say, it is selective. So what would be the correct way to be in the world, according to you, according to the data? The correct way to govern, the correct way to exist? And particularly here, from a male-female perspective, because empathy is good, we know that, but when it’s selective it can be not good. So how do we marry these two things together? Because, maybe I’m wrong, but my interpretation of history is that there’s an evolution happening. It’s easy to see it as a pendulum, swinging one way and then the other, and I think that does happen, but I think it also tends to evolve a bit. So what happened in the ’60s was a big movement, individualism, feminism, all these things, obviously a good thing as well. There’s an argument that it’s just a pendulum, swinging to the individual side, then the collective, then the individual. But I’m at least under the impression that there’s an evolution going on. So as we reach 2026, we’ve got an opportunity to look back and say, right, what do we learn, how should we exist, culturally as a group, or as individuals? What would your take on that be?

Eric Kaufmann: A couple of things. First, I think we’re in a period of overreach and diminishing returns, particularly to group-based equality and emotional harm protection for groups. Those ideas, which at the beginning in the ’60s really did have some merit. It was true, when you had real racial discrimination, looking at who applied and who got hired was a useful starting point. If 50% of applicants for a construction job were black and none of them got it, that’s pretty good evidence there’s some discrimination going on, because it’s very hard to prove discrimination exactly without getting inside people’s heads. But on the other hand, this thing solidifies and becomes a quota and becomes racial preferences. So you have to be able to say, we had an arc here, where these things did good and then they overreached and went past the optimum point. And that’s really the place we’re at. The other thing is, I’m not so sure about this pendulum idea. If you take attitudes on cultural issues, the left has not lost anything in the last 60 years, until the last two or three years on trans. This is their first defeat in public opinion. Public opinion has gone about 20 or 30 points against the trans activists’ position, natal males in female sports, female prisons, all that. So that’s a battle they’ve lost. But it’s the first one they’ve lost in 60 years. And many of the things in the early part of the ’60s, civil rights, were very laudable: black rights, women’s rights, gay rights. But the trans rights thing is really a clash of rights. People wanting to enter women’s sports, women not wanting them there. You can’t just say, oh, trans rights. It’s women’s rights versus trans rights, and a democracy adjudicates who wins, not the courts. Now, if we take not wanting to marry a black person, or not wanting women to work, or not allowing people to be gay, on all these issues opinion got more tolerant. So the general direction has been favourable to left-liberalism. But on certain issues, immigration, affirmative action, racial preferences, what’s happened is you’ve seen a polarization of opinion, not this unidirectional liberalization. And I think there’s now a loss of, for a long time the cultural left thought, we are the direction of history, we are on the right side of history, we have to overcome obstacles, it’s almost like a messianic, quasi-religious heading to the promised land. And this is one reason it’s so difficult for them to give up on any one prong of this movement. For them to say no to trans, oh well, people don’t want trans women in women’s sports, we’ve got to give up that one, we lost it, it’s not possible, because this is religious. If you pull one strand out, the whole thing comes apart. So they can’t give on anything, because it’s such an all-encompassing belief system. And so I think we’re in a really interesting place, because the progressive post-1960s thing has really come to a stall. You see it in the failure of progressive cities, with homelessness and drug use out of control and crime, clearly not the utopia. And there’s now a rethink. The smarter progressives, I had a piece in the Wall Street Journal on this, what I call post-progressivism, that we’ve come to the end of the progressive era, 1960s to the 2020s. So I think we’re entering a new period, and the taken-for-granted, oh, we are the future, this is where right-thinking people have to go, that’s finished now, and we’re now in a period of polarization where these ideas are finally being contested.

Timothy Allen: I’m wondering whether that just isn’t the free market marking the boundary between people. I’ve often thought there’s 50% left-leaning people and 50% right-leaning, and it changes with age and so on. Maybe it started to annoy more than a certain percentage of the other 50%, so now they just push back, and up until that point it wasn’t really an issue. I don’t know. Do you believe that?

Eric Kaufmann: I think progressivism and conservatism are personality types, basically. They tend to incorporate a bunch of things that are personality types. And as a result you get a pretty even distribution of those types.

Timothy Allen: I think if you look across age as well, because when you’re younger you’re obviously much more progressive than when you’re older. As soon as you take on certain responsibilities, you start realising, okay, idealism isn’t as good as I used to think, because now I actually have to deal with it. That’s certainly what happened to me. Just to give you an anecdote, we’re at a Margaret Thatcher event here. I grew up thinking Margaret Thatcher was an ogre. Literally. I only really, in the last five years, went back to that and addressed it, because I’d been pumped full of propaganda that this lady was evil and selfish.

Eric Kaufmann: But that’s a really important comment you just made, pumped full of propaganda. So it’s not just personal. Personality differences are real and they really do matter, which I’ll come to in a minute, but what also matters is the content of the youth culture, of the education system. So in Britain, the young people in this country are far more left-wing, particularly on cultural issues, than has ever been the case since the records we have, which go back to the 1964 British Election Study. We can look at under-25s versus over-65s, and there was never much difference in whether they voted Conservative or Labour. It starts to expand in the 2010s. And also at that time young people’s views on immigration got a lot more liberal, where they weren’t in the past. So young people in the 2010s start to move in this very cultural-left direction. And then you had Brexit, which the way it was framed by the youth culture kind of radicalised the young. And so now what you have in Britain is, maybe 10% in some YouGov polling I’ve seen of people under 25 would vote for either Reform or the Tories. In Canada, which in many ways is a very similar place culturally, the population under 25 is more conservative than the population over 65. And the woke indoctrination there is as severe, probably more severe, than here. So that on its own isn’t enough. There are many dynamics. One is, who’s been in power? Stories develop based on who’s in power. In Canada it’s the Liberal Party, so the stories are, oh, the Liberals, they’ve screwed the young people, they’ve brought in all these immigrants, they’re the problem. In Britain it might be the Tories, it’s Brexit, that’s why I have my problems. And so that becomes the storyline that shapes the generation. So these environments and storylines are quite important in shaping the consciousness of generations. Now, personality, though, is important. We know from psychology, do you see change as exciting or as a loss, culturally? Do you see difference as stimulating or as disorderly? The people voting for the populist right don’t want immigration changing their societies the way it’s changing them. For them, change is loss, difference is disorderly, predominantly. And that is a third to a half heritable, studies have shown. Your belief in whether there should be a dress code at Wimbledon, and at all tennis tournaments, is linked to your views on immigration. And that’s kind of what I mean. So personality is there, but I also think these cultural environments are important.

Timothy Allen: We’ve mentioned immigration there. From my observations, albeit anecdotal, immigration is becoming one of the biggest talking points in the Western hemisphere. I don’t know whether it’s true on the planet, I’m not sure. But certainly in the Western hemisphere, and it seems to be propelling almost everything people talk about in the political realm, spilling over into absolutely everything. And that’s obviously, well, is it? Let’s decide that first. Why is it that, and I know you’ve written about white culture, which I find fascinating, because number one, I can feel people clenching up even at the mention of white culture.

Eric Kaufmann: Absolutely.

Timothy Allen: It’s a beautiful thing to talk about, because no one talks about it. And I feel it myself. It really does make me feel uneasy. But there are other reasons, not just the “you shouldn’t say that” reason. I wonder this about people who talk about black culture as well. White culture, for me, doesn’t really exist. I’ve got Bulgarian friends I was visiting recently in Bulgaria, and I don’t think of their skin colour in any shape or form as being the thing that unites us. So we’re both, in inverted commas, white, but I don’t interact at that level, and I’ve never had a reason to. So if people start talking about white identity, I’m a bit suspicious of it, somehow. Number one, because it doesn’t make sense to me. I can imagine a cultural identity. And for me personally, because I’ve heard the murmurings in the UK now of some parties saying there’s a white identity, which is a British identity. As someone who grew up in a very white Britain, I still don’t think of my identity as white, because we had Indian people living in our community, a small number of black people, we did have all that. So when I think back to that time, they were very much British, part of Britain. It was a British person who was part of the, you know, everyone, we all take the mickey out of each other, everyone’s got a caricature of themselves. So all those things make me a little bit suspicious of it. Now, I know you’ve written a lot about it, so tell me more about white. You’ve written a whole book about it, right?

Eric Kaufmann: Well, the book was a lot about the rise of populism, which is really about the immigration issue. And the immigration issue is, I’d argue, first and foremost about ethnocultural change, at least in relation to the speed of assimilation and melting. The ethnocultural change through immigration getting way ahead of the melting. So if you look at voters for the AfD in Bavaria, there was a poll taken, 100% of them agreed with the statement that Germany is gradually losing its culture, compared to 20% of Green and SPD voters. Or One Nation in Australia: do you want immigration to reduce? It’s like 97%. Sweden Democrats, 99%. So by far and away, immigration is the engine of right-wing populism. To my mind it’s just an open and shut case. Even the Brexit vote, the top issue for Brexit voters was immigration. Economic inequality, sovereignty, it depends what we mean by sovereignty, but basically the engine of the Brexit vote was immigration. I know there are people who don’t want to admit that, but that’s really what people were talking about. And now there’s a view that this is racism, that if you don’t like the pace of ethnocultural change then you’re a racist. And this is one thing I’d push back on. There’s a difference between saying “I don’t like Hindus and Pakistanis, I don’t like that,” which is racism, because you’re saying something negative about a group, hating a group, thinking you’re superior, discriminating. So attitudes to out-groups, that’s something different from attachment to in-group, or attachment to an ethnic composition you’ve grown up with and are familiar with, that forms part of your view of what the nation is. The psychology research shows attachment-to and dislike-of are separate dispositions. They develop at different ages, when you’re younger attachment-to comes from attachment to the mother. So they are separate things, and yet the left-liberal society has managed to ostracise them as being the same. If you like the way London was, if you’re attached to that, you’re a racist. Well, no. Your attachment-to is not the same as your hatred-of. In the survey data, if you take white Americans who are asked, and this question’s been asked for a long time, how do you feel towards whites on a zero to 100 thermometer, how do you feel towards blacks on a zero to 100 thermometer, the whites who are warmer towards whites are not colder towards blacks. If anything they’re slightly warmer towards blacks than the whites who are cold towards whites. So the first thing to say is that attachment-to is not racism. Unless it gets to be about race purity, then it is. But it’s just about, no, we want to keep this slow, manageable. The other thing is white culture, and this is a trickier area. I wrote a piece recently commenting on the US case. The US is a bit different, in the sense that what’s occurred there is extensive intermarriage between Irish, Italian, British, so almost nobody is just one thing anymore. In that situation, what also happens is that popular culture becomes attached to a group. Country music might be associated with whites, hip-hop with blacks. That doesn’t mean nobody who isn’t white listens to country music or plays hockey, and it doesn’t mean no white people listen to hip-hop. So the cultural products can be consumed by other groups, but they are associated with the groups who originated them, and disproportionately indulged in by that group. So these symbols are appropriated by different groups in different ways. Pizza, yes, it’s Italian culture, it’s eaten by many people, that doesn’t mean it’s no longer Italian culture. This gets into a lot of hair-splitting, but I think it is meaningful to talk about white culture, black culture, and so on.

Timothy Allen: It’s meaningful.

Eric Kaufmann: It’s meaningful, even though members of different groups can consume across that boundary.

Timothy Allen: So what is white culture?

Eric Kaufmann: White culture would be practices that originated with whites, are disproportionately associated with them, and have become part of how they are identified. As I say, black culture, white culture are clearly consumed across the divide. These groups do exist, these identities. Again, if we take the US case, where it’s clearer, because in Britain there’s a difference between, say, East Europeans and white British. The Irish have largely assimilated into the white British. But the East Europeans are assimilating, they haven’t yet completely done so. Whereas in the US it’s complete; the white category is really the most meaningful one, not Irish, Italian, which are heavily diluted in any case. And these identities, if you look at surveys, I think it was in the 2010s, there was a book called White Identity Politics by Ashley Jardina, which looked at a lot of the survey data. Most whites in America have some identification with white identity, it means something to them. And what you actually notice is that the strongest predictor of whether you say “I feel strongly attached to being white” is whether you say “I feel strongly attached to being Italian-American.” So it’s just an outer, if you like, pan-ethnic skin to ethnicity. That’s all it is. It’s not that sinister or mysterious. And as the white share declines, in the counties where whites are a smaller share, there’s higher identification with being white, because you’re a smaller minority. And in fact in Britain, the higher the Muslim share, the greater the likelihood of a white British individual to identify as Christian rather than non-religious, in response to that perception of being a minority. So these are facts. It doesn’t mean people don’t mix. It doesn’t mean there isn’t also a British culture that is trans-racial. But there’s a deep discomfort with formally acknowledging it, although the discomfort isn’t so much with acknowledging black culture or Latino culture, there’s a reluctance to accept white culture. As whites are declining, marriage patterns and friendship patterns remain heavily, not totally but heavily, within group, and that’s true for white people too. If we take the city of Los Angeles, the average white person, if we allocated friends randomly, should have, of their five friends, one or two white and the rest from other backgrounds. And the reality is just incredibly far from that. So we can kid ourselves, but it’s human nature, to some degree, not to be totally exclusive. This is where the ethno-nationalists go off the deep end, it’s not about having race purity, but most interactions are more comfortable within group than outside it. But there’s still going to be mixing outside the group. So yes, the mixed population is going to increase as a share of the total, and we could be in a different position in a hundred years, but right now, this is where we are.

Timothy Allen: It’s interesting. I was just thinking, as you were speaking, I definitely have a real discomfort in the idea, like you say. And thinking it through, for me, I struggle to match it to skin. I’ll give you an example. I grew up in a very white culture, obviously, there weren’t a lot of people, and it’s still where I live now, because I’ve moved far to the west of England. But if you were to ask me, is your culture white, I’d say no. There are certain things that would identify my culture, and one of them is the way we do Christmas. It’s very British, that’s British culture. So I could have an Indian neighbour, and if they put up a Christmas tree and celebrated, then they’d be British, because I’d recognise all the signals. If they didn’t, and they were doing Diwali, then it would be, this is a different thing. That would be my difference. So I do struggle to associate it with skin, with colour. Do you know what I mean?

Eric Kaufmann: I get why that’s a bit icky. But look, I don’t think you’d have a problem saying there is a South Asian culture, or a black culture. I don’t think a black person would be as reticent to talk about black culture. And what we’re really talking about is a kind of pan-ethnic thing. So across all the subgroups of black, African, West Indian and so on, is there anything in common there? The other thing is that it could be that a group which was more homogenous, like American blacks descended from slaves, created a culture when really every black person was descended from those slaves. Now you’ve got 10, 15% from Africa and the West Indies, although I’d say they’ve probably oriented towards, or assimilated into, the culture defined by the original black population. So there’s assimilation into this thing too. But look, what are we talking about? We’re not saying there’s some blood purity rule, that cultures can’t cross boundaries. You can have a British culture, common elements of British culture, and minorities who are heavily assimilated. And that may mean they then intermarry into the white British majority, and ultimately their descendants become part of that majority. The reason race matters, and of course East Europeans wouldn’t be part of the culture you’re talking about, so it’s not all whites, not the Hasidic Jew, they’re not part of this thing, so white is a bit of a shorthand, because it corresponds roughly, crudely, to the ethnic majority, probably better in the US than here, because there are other white groups that are quite distinctive here. But if we’re willing to talk about any prefix culture, Italian, Thai, whatever, you could say, well, pizza is from the south of Italy, that’s not really Italian. You can always strip these things down and deconstruct them. But if we’re going to allow any prefix to the word culture, then white increasingly does denote something real. Certainly in the US, and eventually I think here too, because the East Europeans will eventually assimilate into that group. Now, it’s also blurry. There’s going to be what Michael Lind calls a “beige,” people who are mixed will be part of this group too. Not everybody’s going to be 100% genetically white. But sociologically, the social scientist in me still finds it meaningful to talk about these things. And why do you find it uncomfortable? I think that reflects partly this ambient post-’60s public morality around white guilt, the idea that you want to run away from this identity because it’s seen as oppressive of other groups. So there’s this background music, an ambient public morality, which is almost like a weak form of wokeness. It’s not wokeness, but it’s one of the reasons wokeness is successful: it can key into your white guilt, and I’m not saying you have white guilt, but it can play on that pre-existing background music and therefore shut people up. And this is one of the points in my book, we’re going to have to revisit that background public morality, what it means to be a good person, beyond just being nice to people in minorities, or not of your sex or sexuality. I think that’s too narrow, and it’s led us into a cul-de-sac. So we not only have to limit woke in its extremities, we also have to come to a more multi-stranded, balanced public morality than we’ve got right now.

Timothy Allen: I suppose I was wondering whether the age we live in means that defining black and white and colour is actually outdated. We live in an age where travel and relocating and voting with your feet has never been more prevalent, and is getting more so. So I’d say it’s inevitable that the lines between race get blurred, you cannot stop that. So I wonder what even, from my perspective, I would stop at culture. I’d say culture is the important metric. Skin is not important, culture is. I’ll give you another anecdote. I lived in London in the 2000s in a very diverse area. Everyone was living there. But when I looked at my group of friends, I mixed along socioeconomic lines. If we were roughly at the same spending level, and if there happened to be an Indian guy or a black guy or an Asian lady, then that’s what happened. But that’s how we mixed. We didn’t mix with the guy down the road who had less spending power, or more. So I wonder whether that’s really not necessarily socioeconomic, but whether using skin colour is a bad idea, because in the end, like you say, you get stuck. How do you define what it is? But with culture it’s much easier, because it’s something you can express.

Eric Kaufmann: But there are groups. Culture is the outward expression. Identity is the inward attachment, which does link to ancestry in many cases. And I don’t think that will be superseded, because we’ve been through history and people have an inclination, not everybody, but an inclination, towards this. So when you say culture, if what you’re saying is there’s one British culture and that’s it, I just think that’s not reality. There are group-based cultures underneath that. Now, when you say blurring, there I agree with you. You have intermarriage. Again, it’s not as large generally as people say, but it’s happening for real. So if what you’re saying is there will be more mixing of DNA, yes. But that’s not going to lead necessarily to one undifferentiated culture. If you take a place like Brazil, or countries that are heavily multi-racial, most white Brazilians have some black or indigenous ancestry, most white Bermudians have black ancestry, but these groups have not just simply broken down into everybody’s brown. Now, in other countries, over a long period, like thousands of years, you do get an undifferentiated population, like Central Asia, where countries are an even mix of what we might think of as East Asian and Turkic, more European-looking people, who’ve blended over a very long period of mixing. So that can happen too. But being realistic, I think we are still going to have ethnic groups. Or pan-ethnic. When I talk about white, that’s a pan-ethnic, it’s like saying European instead of Irish or Italian. So that will exist, I’d argue. But of course the boundaries might be blurry. Somebody will be 50% Indian and 50% white British. One of my arguments in the book Whiteshift is that I think a lot of people of that mixed-race background will gravitate into the white identity over a long enough period, partly because that’s the established tradition, the longest-existing group in this country. But that doesn’t mean you’ll see the complete assimilation of all the other groups. There will still be Pakistanis and so on. But I don’t think there’s a contradiction between saying there are blurry boundaries but the groups will exist. That’s one of the standard theories in the study of ethnicity, that you can have people crossing these boundaries but the boundaries remain over time. They might shift, they might change, there may be reasons why.

Timothy Allen: Let me wrap it up in a sec, I’ve still got a couple of questions. I’ve never spoken about this before.

Eric Kaufmann: Oh, okay. Really?

Timothy Allen: Well, it is fascinating, because you seem to be much more concerned that it’s important than I do. And I’m wondering why, and whether I’m going to be forced to be concerned about it in the future. Like you say, in the States now race is a big issue, it always has been. One of the biggest things I noticed the first few times I went to America was how much people care about stuff like that. And I come from, this is a silly anecdote, but I’ve told this story before on this podcast. Where my children have grown up is very white. It’s rural Herefordshire. There’s no sign of anyone with any strange skin colours, everyone looks exactly the same, lots of the same surnames everywhere, people living on farms. Except, ironically, next door to us lived a black lady, and we became very good friends over the years. She’s the epitome of non-woke, she’s hilarious, I’ve interviewed her before. In fact, she was known locally, and this is going to make people shiver, as Black Carol. Because that’s how you denoted people where we live. If you’re fat, if you’re tall, whatever your characteristic is.

Eric Kaufmann: What happens if you lose weight?

Timothy Allen: No, I’ve been. Her name isn’t even Carol. She changed her name to Carol because she wanted to fit in more, her name is actually Yasmin. Anyway, Yasmin, if you’re listening, I love you. So my kids grew up next to her. She’s very black, she’s got dreadlocks, she’s unmistakably black. And one day, she babysits our kids, our kids have known her for years, my oldest daughter Alice came home from school, she was about eight, and she said, oh, we learned today that we should treat black people the same way we treat everyone else. And I looked at her, thought about it, and I thought, that’s ridiculous, this is the beginning. And I said, Alice, do you realise Yaz is black? And she had absolutely no idea that Yasmin was what she was being told about at school. There was no connection at all, after spending days and hours with this lady who’s got dreadlocks and very dark skin, and eight years of growing up experiencing her in our culture, a tiny little hamlet in the hills in Herefordshire. No concept of it at all. That’s kind of why I find it weird that maybe we should start thinking about skin colour, because my experience is a version of that. I’d never thought about it before. And then I go to America, having grown a bit older, and I start to notice, people really talk about it a lot here, it’s really a thing here. And then I go home and start noticing, oh, it’s becoming a thing here, we’re talking about it. So you seem to think actually acknowledging it is a good idea.

Eric Kaufmann: Yeah, I think it is. And look, I’ve got Chinese in my background, Hispanic in my background, so I’m a product of the melting pot as well, and I’m not saying those processes aren’t going to go on. But it’s one thing to have a few minorities in your neighbourhood or social circle. There is going to be much more significant ethnodemographic change in this century than has been experienced for a thousand years in this country. Why? The world is going through a global demographic revolution, this transition from high birth rates to low birth rates, but it’s happening very unevenly. So the number of people migrating from the global south into the white West has increased dramatically. The US will be majority non-white, and Canada and New Zealand, after 2050. In Europe it’ll be later in the century. These are very important changes. So when you’re talking about system-level shifts, it’s very hard for me to see this not becoming more important. Now, how does it happen? In the US case, it’s not actually the case that racial antagonism has gone up, it’s gone down. One way you can see it is that voting is less along racial lines now than it was 10 or 15 years ago. But what this ethnic change does is split the white population, between people who like the change, or don’t mind it, and people who don’t want it to happen so quickly. They’re not race purists, they just want things to be the same, or not change so rapidly. And I don’t think that’s really a problem. I think it’s a legitimate preference in a democracy, which is currently stigmatised as racist. I think that will have to go, because to the extent it’s stigmatised, there’s going to be a backlash, people saying, no, I don’t have a problem with black people or anybody else, but I kind of want there to be a majority. Or that could be a melting, a majority that has also absorbed members of different groups into it. But to give up on a majority, if you look at the world, 70% of countries have an ethnic majority of at least 50%, 80% at least 40%. We’re now talking about the West, by the end of the century, going into that 20% minority of countries, which is associated with less economic development and more voting along ethnic lines. So I think it’s a very legitimate topic. But you’re right, it doesn’t mean you treat people differently by skin colour. The relationship between pure skin colour and group membership and identity will probably break down over time, so it’ll be blurrier and you won’t know automatically, it’s like in Brazil, you don’t automatically know which group somebody fits into. The last thing I’d say is, you talk about who you associate with in your friendship group being socioeconomic, but even when you control for socioeconomics, we know people’s friends are not a random draw from the ethnic demographics of their area. They’re very, very non-random. So when it comes to marriage and friendship and residence, these things do matter quite a bit. Again, we need to be able to talk about it. There’s a certain degree to which it’s human nature, birds of a feather flock together, but not totally, we also have mixing, and that’s real too. So can we get away from this binary, where you have to be, oh, I don’t care at all, it doesn’t matter what colour the country becomes? I think that’s very unrealistic, given where most people are.

Timothy Allen: I suppose my concern is that it creates a new divide. I was thinking about my friend group, and for example I have friends that are very Asian. They are Asian, but they’re very British. They were brought up here, lived here their whole lives, there’s no sign of difference. I’d never think of them as Chinese or Asian. But if we define ourselves along skin colour, I might then notice a difference between us. Is that bad? Is that a bad thing? When people talk about white culture, are we talking about a symbolic thing, or is it literally about colour?

Eric Kaufmann: No, no. And that’s the whole point, these cultures can be consumed across ethnic, racial lines.

Timothy Allen: Right, like you say, if you’re into hip-hop, you’re into black culture.

Eric Kaufmann: But that doesn’t mean you have to be black. That doesn’t mean you can say, no, you can’t call hip-hop black culture. Well, then we can’t call anything anything. Italian culture, pizza, you can’t have, it’s ridiculous. So yes, we can use these prefixes, they are real. It doesn’t mean they’re hermetically sealed. But I also think it’s not necessarily accurate to say that you just treat them as British and you don’t notice their background. Even to notice that they’re Asian is, in a way, noticing that there’s a difference. That doesn’t have to be the most salient part of your interaction. It could be a low-salience, not very important part. But it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. And some people are going to want to attach more to that, some less. It’s like extended family: some people care about extended family, some don’t, that’s a choice. Some people care about their ethnic heritage, others won’t, that’s a choice. One’s not better than the other. But if someone chooses to attach to that, I don’t think, and similarly with the pan-ethnic, what we might call racial, I don’t think that should be stigmatised, until the point someone says, no, I’m a purist, I believe in pure races and not mixing. Okay, then we can talk about racism. But as long as somebody has an identity, I don’t think that in and of itself should be stigmatised.

Timothy Allen: Sorry, sorry.

Eric Kaufmann: Yeah, yeah.

Timothy Allen: We’re overshooting a bit here, but like I say, I do find it fascinating. And what I’m fascinated by is the fact that you consider it important. Because you’re an academic, you’re obviously not a racist, you’re a very nice gentleman, you’re also, like you say, full of different races.

Eric Kaufmann: Exactly.

Timothy Allen: But you seem to think it’s something that needs to be addressed, so my ears are pricking up. Okay, let’s finish. Can you give me some insight into the next few years of culture? Or maybe, let’s say, 30 or 40 years. What can we expect? You seem to think the age of woke is coming to an end, or at least has reached its limits, people are pushing back on it now. So where do you think we’re going from here?

Eric Kaufmann: God, it’s really, I do think we are entering into an interregnum. We’ve reached the end of what I’d call the progressive era, where essentially equal outcomes and emotional harm protection from minority groups is the dominant value. I think that is over. It’s not that we’re going to go back, it’s not gays back in the closet, women back in the kitchen, we’re not going to do that. But I think we’re in a period of polarization and contestation, which will continue. And I do think the left bears more responsibility, because they’re in power in the institutions. They’re very reluctant, as I’ve talked about, to split off dislike of out-groups, which is racism, from attachment to one’s own. They’re not willing to accept attachment to one’s own group, only for whites, or also for men, other categories. Only if you’re a subaltern category do you get to have an identity. Cultural appropriation: it’s fine if you’re a minority and you appropriate quote-unquote white culture, but not the reverse. So there are a whole set of double standards. I think that’s going to feed resentment and create polarization, but I don’t think the left is yet willing, or knows how, to back off some of its very religious beliefs in the sacredness of minorities, the indigenous as a kind of, you cannot offend an indigenous person if they claim they underwent genocide and residential school, you just must honour that and be an ally. That kind of mentality, the white guilt mentality, very deep-rooted, I don’t see it going away. So I think we’re going to be in a standoff. Now, the public opinion, US, Canada, Britain, where I’ve studied it, is two to one against the woke positions. So what we’re going to see is probably the right, if it focuses, using this as a wedge issue to essentially win elections and force the left off. And we’ll see. In the US the Democrats think they can win without addressing, say, the trans issue, continuing to be trans-activist. But over time, if they keep losing, they’re going to have to back off that. It’ll be interesting to see whether they’re pragmatic enough to do it. But that’s where the culture is, very polarized. The thinking people, the ones who care about truth on the left, and they are there, and there may be more of them, the Noah Smiths and Matthew Yglesiases of this world, are saying, look guys, we’ve gone overboard, we have to row back. So there are some saner voices on the left. Will they prevail? Not now, but I’m hopeful at some point, because if they can rein in the radical progressives and the whole race-gender-sex worship on the left, that will start a process of de-radicalization, and we can get to a better plane. But it’s going to have to be the left. The right, of course, can go off the deep end, and we’ve seen it go off the deep end in certain ways. But as long as the left is radical and in control of institutions like schools and universities, this is not going to work, and it’s going to be a battle. So polarization, and battling over cultures. One interesting thing, young people are more polarized on cultural issues than older people. And I think that’s a portent of where we’re going. These issues are going to be more important for politics, deciding elections. And they have to be decided in a democracy. Is someone who’s born male going to go into the women’s prison? That’s a democratic issue that has to be decided by a democracy. The attempt to shame everybody into letting them in, by claiming it’s trans rights and you’re against rights for a marginalised group, that’s been the strategy, using courts and bypassing the democratic process. I don’t think that’s going to work. The right realise they can make these things political, which they should. So culture wars should be in politics, and this idea that it’s ungentlemanly to raise them I think is dead wrong. Now, of course, the other part of culture is this ongoing demographic shift. We’re in a period where ethnic majorities in the West are declining, and that’s going to create more fuel for populism. So I’d say populism is going to be an endemic feature of politics, up until the time we can get rid of these taboos and have a normal conversation. How fast do we want this change to occur? And if I say slower, I’m not just put into the racist box, where no one will invite me for dinner. We’ve got to get away from that culture to have a more open conversation. If we can do that, then I think we can get past the polarization. But if we continue as we are now, I don’t see it.

Timothy Allen: So a choppy few years?

Eric Kaufmann: Yeah.

Timothy Allen: And then a happy ending?

Eric Kaufmann: Yeah, in the long run I think it’ll be happier. But that could be 100 years. I don’t think in the next 20, 30 we’re going to be there.

Timothy Allen: So arguably it’s just the time we live in, the time of the internet, of all these crazy inventions we’ve had recently, which have forced certain things, especially ideas, into the forefront of everyone’s minds. That’s the age we live in. It’s a turmoil, like you say, it may last a long time, but I hope it doesn’t last 100 years. Many thanks, and sorry I’ve run over a little bit. It’s really fascinating talking to you. I appreciate your candid speech, because, even the simple fact that I feel myself tensing up when I talk about this, and I’m really open-minded, I think it’s great to discuss it. I’m not sure I understand it all, I need to let things sink in.

Eric Kaufmann: I should say that academically I’ve taught nationalism and ethnicity for 25 years, so I’m interested in all these subtle nuances, like culture versus identity. I’ll give you an example: a Pakistani militant celebrating the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks while wearing a Chicago Bears t-shirt. What does that image tell us? The culture suggests globalization, the spread of a common culture. The identity clearly is anti-Western, but clearly not a global identity. So that’s one wrinkle, culture versus identity. Then there’s ethnicity versus race versus pan-ethnicity, all separate, and then all the mixing, and boundaries versus cores. So there’s a lot of complexity. And when I hear people talking about, “is Rishi Sunak English?”, I just tear my hair out, because it’s such a crude way of approaching it. The question should be, is he a member of the English nation? I’d say yes. Is he a member of the English ethnic group? No. That’s a separate category. So you have to be quite forensic about what you’re talking about.

Timothy Allen: Or even the idea of British and English.

Eric Kaufmann: Well, there’s a British nation, and within that there’s an English nation. So there’s a lot of complexity, and a lot of the commentary is a bit low-resolution, so it can’t really answer the question properly.

Timothy Allen: Yeah, I understand. My contention is, why even have a high-resolution conversation about it? That’s the bit I’m stuck on. Issues get addressed, and then I start thinking about them for a long time, and slowly I start wondering and looking into other things. But I agree it’s almost certainly something that will need to be addressed. Because, in the case of, when you talk about white culture in the UK, the way I see it is that mostly what’s pumped in the mainstream is Islam versus English people. So how are you going to define the opposition to Islam? Oh, let’s call it white people, because it kind of is. It’s Christianity. And where it’s most obvious is in traditionally ethnic neighbourhoods that have become Islamic. So it’s easy to say it’s white and Islam, or white and whatever you’d call that subgroup. I mean, it really is Islam, I think, because a lot of the issues you hear talked about in the mainstream political realm are to do with that. And even the one I was talking about yesterday, halal slaughter. I recounted this experience to one of my guests yesterday. I live in a rural community, I was down the pub the other day, and we were talking about Rupert Lowe, because I think he’d just come out and said he’s going to ban halal and kosher slaughter, or whatever. And everyone got very animated about that, said, yes, this is a thing, because they’re farmers, and they care about it. Their sheep now get shipped off to slaughterhouses in Birmingham, which is a long way away, because basically the biggest trade for lamb is halal, and lots of the local slaughterhouses have closed down. You can sell halal lamb to everyone, if you’re non-halal you still eat it. But the local farmers around my way really hate that, they hate the thought, because they look after their animals and they don’t want them killed that way, they consider it inhumane. So I was amazed. There’s one aspect of British culture that, animal lovers, British people are animal lovers, we care deeply about animals, so that one little issue about how we kill our livestock animated our whole pub of people, yeah, this is terrible, this should be stopped.

Eric Kaufmann: It’s fascinating, because there’s this argument among people who study this stuff that there would be competing versions of British culture, competing versions of British national identity within the same country. So one version of British national identity, it’s a bit like, are British people quiet and reserved, or are British people kind of yobbish and loud? They’re both true, they’re different versions of Britishness. So it’s very hard to nail down to one version. You could call it competing versions of Britishness. But the reality is, in terms of how people live their lives, who they marry, who they’re friends with, where they choose to live, if we did this all randomly, Britain wouldn’t look the way it does, and England. Like 80% of wards are 90% white or more. The number of very deeply diverse ones is actually quite small. So it’s very non-random. Friendship is very non-random, and I don’t think it’s enough to say it’s socioeconomic. But it doesn’t mean it’s exclusive. So what you’ll notice is, I live in London, gatherings will be mostly white, but there will be minorities there. It’s not going to reflect London. It might be 10% minority instead of 50%. So that represents a lot of non-randomness.

Timothy Allen: That’s a social, intellectual crowd, is that right? You’re probably mixing with people who are part of the universities. I’m just thinking about even this conference we’re at now, a lot of old people and a lot of white people. Almost exclusively, I think. You know, that’s conservatism. That’s the culture of conservatism, in a way, or at least the culture of people who want to come and talk about conservatism.

Eric Kaufmann: Right. But it would be the same on the left. So I don’t think you’d find it different.

Timothy Allen: Is that right?

Eric Kaufmann: Yeah, absolutely. A Green Party event would be the same. I don’t think it’s the ideology.

Timothy Allen: But I assumed the left was very diverse.

Eric Kaufmann: Well, no, not true. If you were at a Green Party event it would be old, but more hippie.

Timothy Allen: It’s just concerned white people, you mean. Who went on nuclear marches.

Eric Kaufmann: Well, no, that is absolutely true.

Timothy Allen: Yeah, that is true. I was a journalist for years in London, so I’ve gone to a lot of protests, and it’s true, most protests I went to were white people everywhere, in large quantities. They were the people who cared, it seemed, about the issue, whatever it was, and lots of the issues were in complete opposition to each other. But that was definitely the case.

Eric Kaufmann: Yeah, it’s a bit like going to certain kinds of music concerts, or rugby matches. There are certain things that are going to attract a heavily white audience. In London, I’d never been to a rugby game, and I went to my first one, and it was very undiverse for London. Similarly with a rock concert, same sort of thing. But if I went to some hip-hop event, it would probably be a lot more diverse.

Timothy Allen: But isn’t it really only one side of the aisle that cares about that? I don’t mind. For example, this podcast, our listenership, when you look at the data, is, I think, 95% men.

Eric Kaufmann: Oh, okay.

Timothy Allen: I’d love to have more women listen, but I don’t care. Men tend to be interested in this stuff a lot more. Our podcast, we talk about not just freedom, but free cities in general, independent jurisdictions, places that want to become independent. That’s very much a male thing. I don’t care if it is. It’s literally a free market of ears. Bring your ears, if you want to listen, you can. And lo and behold, it’s almost 100% men that listen, and it’s not because that’s what you’re aiming at.

Eric Kaufmann: It reminds me, I went on a population projections course in demography, and I was in this class of about 28 people, 26 women. And I thought, oh, okay, they’re really interested in demography. And then I thought, oh yeah, it’s because they have children, so that’s maybe why. It never occurred to me. But these things just happen. The only thing I’d say is, I do think ethnic identification, cultural identity, is a legitimate thing. I don’t think we should stigmatise it if people want to get interested in their history, their heritage, their ancestry. That’s perfectly fine. Of course, it also means those people are going to care about rapid ethnic shifting. And you just have to look at human history. Find me the society where nobody cared about this, or where it wasn’t a major driver of politics. In Scotland, when you had a lot of the Irish coming in between the wars, you had populist parties getting a third of the vote. So is it very surprising? I’d say, try and find me the time in human history where you didn’t get a response.

Timothy Allen: No, I agree. What’s definitely sure, though, is that it’s a contentious issue right now. Really, it’s becoming the issue. This is the hill people are choosing to die on, if you think about it. And, yeah, let’s see how it plays out. Anyway, Eric, thanks very much indeed for coming in. I’ve really enjoyed this, and I’ll definitely be committing some of the ideas to memory and seeing where they go. I need to look at more of what you’ve done, there’s a lot of stuff online, and you’ve got a lot of books, so I’m going to take a dive in. I like the academic approach to all this, because I’m fascinated by it. It’s just very difficult to discuss, I think.

Eric Kaufmann: It’s a whole thing, yeah. I’ve done a course with the Peterson Academy, actually, so you might enjoy that. What is a nation? What is a state? What’s an ethnic group? How can people have multiple ethnic identities? You could have the national, the ethnic, which is more important to you. All those kinds of things are important in thinking about this.

Timothy Allen: It’s so easy to call it racist, though. Just listening to you there, I’m thinking, if I were somebody else, that’s how I would deduce what you’re saying, and I’m almost certain someone will listen to this and think exactly the same thing, because it’s so easy.

Eric Kaufmann: Well, it is, and that’s what’s interesting, that’s also the cultural cringe in the society, and where does that come from? But I’m quite happy to get into the weeds. I was on Moral Maze, and Giles Fraser came out and said, so what’s it about, colour then? And I said, well, let’s look at this, because there are a lot of interesting wrinkles. If I say to you, I could say all accents are British accents, because if someone has a foreign accent but they’re committed to the country, then they’re British, so therefore all accents are British accents. On one level that’s true, you can have any accent and be British. But on another level, if I say my accent is a British accent, well, that’s obvious. So I think you have to be able to differentiate the membership criteria level, which should be very open, from the system level, which cannot be as open. So if we care about ethnic change at the system level, that doesn’t mean we’re excluding at the individual membership level. And that’s a really hard thing to get people to understand, that you can care about ethnic change, radical transformations, without being a racist at the individual level. It’s just so easy to collapse these. And the problem is, politicians don’t have the vocabulary to navigate these things. So they’ll go to what’s easy. Going after Islam is a lot easier, because anti-women, anti-gay, anti-Jew, whatever, it’s a much easier approach than to say, well, actually, the decline of the white British is an issue, and it’s not just about Islam, it’s a separate issue and it needs to be addressed. So I just don’t know, because it’s not an easy way, in our current climate, to get into that discussion, if you don’t really know your categories and all the fine details.

Timothy Allen: Sorry, one last question. Do you find anyone on the other side of the aisle understands what you’re saying?

Eric Kaufmann: Well, what’s interesting is, on Moral Maze, for example, I did get, I think the good-faith interlocutors are interested, because I think they know these things are true, that these are legitimate issues. So I do think there are people willing to engage. I could say, I sat down for an hour and a half with Owen Jones the other day.

Timothy Allen: How did he do that, for his conference?

Eric Kaufmann: Not on his podcast. He’s writing a book. Now, whether he’s always a good-faith interlocutor or not, what I’d say is.

Timothy Allen: He’s the antithesis. How was it? Do you mind sharing what the experience was?

Eric Kaufmann: It was perfectly nice. I don’t know what he’s going to write. Of course he’s of the left, a firm believer in all of this sort of stuff. But at least I give him credit for reaching out.

Timothy Allen: What did he want to ask you about? Wokeness, presumably.

Eric Kaufmann: Yeah, just where I’m coming from, the source of the ideas. He’s writing a book.

Timothy Allen: And he’s almost certainly going to frame you as.

Eric Kaufmann: Yeah, yeah.

Timothy Allen: Well, isn’t he? Because if he doesn’t, he’s platforming you and your ideas, which, from what I understand of those guys, platforming you is already a sin, isn’t it?

Eric Kaufmann: Well, let alone not bringing your ideas down, I think he will undoubtedly pass moral judgment. But I also think he’ll include a lot of what I said, and even though there’ll be some out-of-contexting, I think it’ll probably be okay. There is an element of wanting to understand. And the truth is, a lot of people on the right don’t really articulate it. They’d much rather say immigration, pressure on public services, Islam as a threat to women’s rights, all this sort of stuff. It’s just easier to go there, because you’re not going to get into uncomfortable terrain, than to talk about the decline of the white British. And I don’t think that’s actually the issue. It’s not just about Islam, even though Islam can sometimes be the lightning rod. We have to be able to have these hard conversations, because people, to some degree, are attached to their ancestry and to their group. Only now, some people are not. But we have to be realistic, and meet people where they are. And I think that conversation has to happen. The book, for example, I went on Ezra Klein’s podcast around the book, and I felt I got a reasonably good discussion. Now, granted, Klein is not known as an attack-dog reviewer, and he’s one of the smarter people on the left, so we had a good conversation. So I do think there are people out there who will have that good conversation, if you can elevate it into intellectual terms, that’s the problem, getting to that point. So the intellectuals who are honest and care about truth on the left, you can have a conversation with. Not the James O’Brien, the shock-jock types, I don’t think.

Timothy Allen: Eric, thank you very much indeed for entertaining my ridiculous questions.

Eric Kaufmann: That’s all right.

Timothy Allen: I’d love to talk about this another time, in a couple of years, when I’ve managed to mature my understanding of it. But thank you deeply for coming and speaking to me, I’ve really enjoyed this.

Eric Kaufmann: Thanks for having me, Tim, it’s been great.

Notes:

This transcript was reconstructed from the episode’s raw machine timestamps. Speaker labels, timestamps, repeated fillers, obvious false starts and ASR line breaks were removed or tidied for readability. The meaning, voice, swearing and main order of the conversation were preserved.

The “coming up” cold open, the Veritas Villages sponsor read, and Timothy’s solo episode introduction were omitted from the conversation transcript. The conversation as transcribed begins at Timothy’s first question and ends at the sign-off.

Proper nouns were checked against web sources. The following ASR errors were corrected: “Jordan Pinson / Jordan Beason / Jordan Peters” to Jordan Peterson; “University of South Hampton” to University of Southampton; “Burkeback / Birkback” to Birkbeck, University of London; “White Shift” to Whiteshift; “the great awakening / Greater Wokening” to the Great Awokening (the term is Matthew Yglesias’s); “Matthew Iglesis / Matthew Galatius” to Matthew Yglesias; “SoS” to SOAS, University of London; “time’s hire” to the Times Higher (Times Higher Education); “UCL-A” to UCLA; “Richard Hennaniya” to Richard Hanania; “Margaret Fatcher” to Margaret Thatcher; “AFD” to AfD (Alternative fuer Deutschland); “won nation” to One Nation (Australia); “Ashley Jardina / Giardino” to Ashley Jardina, author of White Identity Politics; “Michael Lin” to Michael Lind (the “beige” reference); “Rishi Sunnag” to Rishi Sunak; “Rupert Low” to Rupert Lowe; “Recline / Cline” to Ezra Klein; “UGA polling” to YouGov; the survey body is the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE); the panel programme is the BBC’s Moral Maze; and the dataset Kaufmann cites is the British Election Study (running since 1964). James Coleman, the American Sociological Association, George Orwell, Helen Andrews, Justin Trudeau, the Sweden Democrats, the Chicago Bears and the Peterson Academy were transcribed correctly.

One proper noun could not be fully confirmed and should be checked against the audio before publication. The Moral Maze panellist who challenged Kaufmann (rendered by the ASR as “JAWS Fraser”) is given here as Giles Fraser, a regular Moral Maze panellist, but the identification is inferred and should be verified.

The Brexit “top issue” figure Kaufmann cites was garbled in the ASR (“percent immigration top issue”) and the exact number has been left out rather than guessed.

Personal names in Timothy’s anecdotes (“Black Carol” / Yasmin, and his daughter Alice) are transcribed phonetically from the audio and cannot be externally verified.

No external fact-checking has been applied to factual claims made by either speaker.