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Eric Kaufmann is a professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham, where he directs the Centre for Heterodox Social Science. Kaufmann is the author of The Third Awokening (entitled Taboo in the UK), Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities, and Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Eric Kaufmann discuss why much of mainstream liberalism has become unmoored from its classical principles; how we can push back against identitarianism and move towards a non-zero-sum framework for interethnic relations; and whether (and how) humanity might reverse the global decline in fertility.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I've read a lot of your work and have been in conversation with you for a long time. You're somebody who approaches the growth and influence of what some people call wokeness, what I call the identity synthesis, what you and your recent work have called the Third Awokening, from a social scientific perspective.
Where do these ideas come from? How did they gain so much currency and why are you concerned about them?
Eric Kaufmann: Obviously you in your book, The Identity Trap, give a pretty good account of one route, I think, towards this, which is sort of the whole idea of strategic essentialism that came out of left-wing intellectual thought. I know yourself and Francis Fukuyama and Chris Rufo and others have sketched out its development out of essentially the post-Marxist left. What I try to do in my book, The Third Awokening, is to look at the more liberal humanitarian, if you like, prong of this, which runs through psychotherapy and gets us towards a kind of humanitarian extremism. And so I put a lot of emphasis on this idea of cranking the dial of humanitarianism.
We're not just worried about harms; we're worried about emotional harms. We're worried about microaggressions and things that are very, very small. We're assuming fragility. So this really comes from humanistic psychotherapy starting in the 1960s—Carl Rogers, people like that—and then it metastasizes. The point I also make is that without the support of left-liberals or so-called bleeding heart liberal humanitarians, I don't think this movement would get very far. I trace the line all the way back to the liberal progressive movement of the first decade of the 20th century, people like John Dewey and Jane Addams, who are taking a very protective view towards certain kinds of minorities. At that time, it was more European ethnic groups rather than racial minorities, but it evolved to become this protectiveness around racial minorities. And that really burst forth in the sixties.
I kind of see the anti-racism taboo of the mid-60s, which many people commented on at the time, as kind of the big bang of our moral universe. And it is the center of our moral universe. And in a way, without addressing that, the strength of these taboos—the way they can then be borrowed by initially feminists and then by the LGBTQ movement—the power of these taboos means that they have the ability to shut down conversations, to make you radioactive. They underlie cancel culture. And I see this as a kind of steady metastasization of these taboos, which were not really formed by post-Marxist intellectuals. There's no question that the intellectual left is playing a role, but I also think this humanitarian liberal left, I would say, is in my view more important in setting the emotional moral terrain on which the debate happens.
Mounk: So there are a few different issues here. I think the influence of certain psychological strains is something that I agree with you on. And that's something that, for example, Jonathan Haidt has written about well. A place where perhaps we have more disagreement is the role that the 1960s play. Which is to say, in the debate over anti-racism, for example, there are people who say that term has now become so associated with people like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X Kendi that we should really abandon that term. But my instinct has always been to say: no, we should continue to fight for the term anti-racism. Certainly the rejection of racism stands at the foundation of my own political outlook. But we should make it very clear that a coherent liberal form of anti-racism would not at all agree with the worldview of prescriptions of people like Kendi or D'Angelo. And in a similar way, when it comes to those kinds of taboos in the 1960s, you might say, well, in the 1950s there was segregation and it was openly defended and so on, and we recognized that this was a very big political and moral mistake. And we built a society in which open advocacy for those forms of racism came to be morally disqualifying. That's not the problem.
The problem is that 50 years later a very different kind of ideology claimed that things that really aren't racist—things that really aren't objectionable—should not be said in polite company. And that brings us, I think, to another potential area of disagreement, which is whether you should think of these new ideas as standing in opposition to liberalism or as being an outgrowth of liberalism.
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That’s what I'm most interested in hearing your answer to. Why do you think that this is a kind of liberalism gone wrong, rather than a tradition that from its inception has explicitly—in the work of people like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw—been opposed to liberalism?
Kaufmann: Well, the first thing I'd say is, of course it's a good thing that racism is frowned upon in society—the direct kind of racism that was occurring, say, in the 1950s in the United States South or even in the North. The problem I have is with the guardrails on people accusing others of racism. I'll take a couple of examples that happened quite early, which we might call early instances of cancel culture. One is the report by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat to the Johnson administration on the black family, which was shelved in 1965. It was a warning about the growing issue of fatherlessness in the black family. Ironically, the fatherlessness rate then was lower than the white fatherlessness rate today, but that topic was seen as offside. That was kind of the first time that we could already see the emergence of the taboo, with false positives and overstepping happening.
Other examples would be James Coleman, president of the American Sociological Association. I think it was in 1976, there was a movement to essentially censure him, people on stage calling him a racist, because he questioned busing and said that it was leading to white flight. He was an impeccable liberal just trying to do empirical research. And then they tried to have him investigated on the basis of that. I mean, we're already seeing in the ‘60s and ‘70s the beginning of this kind of cancel culture. Because, at least in my view, there were no guardrails on the application of the accusation of racism. And I just don't think there ever was much good resistance to the false positives.
Mounk: So let's double click on this. I agree with these examples of people being very unfairly treated because there were no agreed-upon guardrails. But to people who are saying, “Well, what about political correctness in the early 1990s? What about these other kinds of moments?” I think there is nevertheless a clear quantitative and qualitative difference in these ideas. Daniel Patrick Moynihan remained a Democratic senator from New York after he published that report and, today, the one non-ugly part of Penn Station is named after him. I don't know exactly what the fate of Joshua Coleman was, but that is within a relatively narrow academic association and so on.
What seems to be different about this moment is, first, that at least until a couple of years ago, much milder forms of disagreement with a certain kind of progressive consensus could easily be portrayed in the mainstream as being due to racial or sexist or other kinds of animus. And second, that these ideas really have conquered the mainstream in a way that wasn't true at the time. My hunch would be that The New York Times back in that time would have been much more critical of that kind of calumny than it was around 2020.
Kaufmann: I think you definitely have a point. I was in university during the late 1980s, early 1990s. And I would say it was pretty strong as a force. You could say there were 300 speech codes in American elite universities by 1991, regulating what people were allowed to say. Affirmative action was a major policy, already in operation. You had attacks on the curriculum talking about Eurocentrism, going well beyond common sense changes. I don't think the ideas were that different, but I think the scale was different. And the other thing that was really different is that the mainstream media was not where academia was. David Rosado, who does big data work, has looked at 175 million academic abstracts and 25 million newspaper articles between 1970 and 2020. And what you can see is that the three awakenings—the late 1960s, the late 1980s and early 1990s, the mid 2010s onward—were very clear in academia, but they're not that clear in the media. Only the last one shows up. And that's because what social media does is it brings the radicalism of academia into contact with the mainstream media. And at the same time, the mainstream media is going through its own evolution towards a clickbait model, and therefore they need this emotional stuff trending on Twitter. And all of a sudden the mainstream media converges with academia in the 2010s.
Mounk: So let's get to the question about whose fault it is. Is it a development within liberalism or is it a hostile attack upon liberalism? Give us a case for why we should think of this as a perversion of liberalism itself.
Kaufmann: Well, I think you and I would agree to disagree with people like Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen. If liberalism means John Stuart Mill and classical liberalism, then I don't think it's the fault of classical liberalism that we got here. However, if liberalism, to some degree, means the left-liberalism of the 20th century, people like John Rawls, but especially moving towards multicultural liberalism, people like Will Kymlicka and others, then yes, I think that liberalism is complicit—liberalism as it actually is, not classical liberal principles.
Who identifies as being a liberal? These are people who are very invested in ideas of equality. And not just equal treatment, I would argue, but certain structural aspects of equality and also humanitarianism; in a way, there's no limit to how humanitarian we should be to those who are subaltern or in a way marginalized. And so therefore, I think there is the idea that majorities are to be feared, minorities are to be protected and are virtuous. And I think that kind of emotional makeup underlies the liberal identity. Now, that's not the only factor, but I think it is an important factor.
Mounk: What you're saying is that there is a kind of left-liberal milieu. And a lot of what determines politics is the fight over which ideas they embrace. And at certain moments, for certain reasons, they are largely informed by the tradition of philosophical liberalism; at other moments they get tempted by these more extreme, identitarian ideas that in their essence are illiberal.
But if you're saying that there's something about the ideas of John Rawls, for example, that really explains this kind of identitarian thinking, I guess I'm a lot less convinced. I've read not every word Rawls has written, but a lot of it. I went to grad school for political theory and have a PhD in that. And I just don't see anything in A Theory of Justice or in Political Liberalism that justifies what significant parts of the Democratic Party embrace today. I'd love to hear what you have to say in response.
Kaufmann: If we're talking about John Stuart Mill, a classical liberal, I agree with you. The issue is a couple of things. One is egalitarianism and the other is humanitarianism. These are strands which come down to us through the Enlightenment or even before. And the question is how do they manifest within liberalism or the liberal tradition? We know Rawls didn't like identity politics. But on the other hand, obviously, egalitarianism is not just equal treatment. And more than equal treatment is part of his political theory, which I agree with when it comes to economics and certainly the idea of a mixed capitalist system. But what about when we move to culture and we're talking about egalitarianism and humanitarianism? And that’s where I don't think there are any guardrails on the modern liberal who's brought on board a lot of egalitarianism and humanitarianism.
For example, to say that 50 percent of people on academic boards should be women—the Swedish Social Democrats are pursuing this agenda to some degree, but to what extent does that come out of a liberal tradition? I think it comes out of a tradition in which a notion of equality means that we should have 50-50 of the sexes in parliament. And then there’s humanitarianism: the idea that we're all about caring for the weak. It's very easy for that to slip into the idea of speech harming the weak. That rhetoric follows, I think, from this sort of ethic of what Jonathan Haidt would call the “care-harm” moral foundation. And so I guess I see that the equality and care-harm moral foundations are there in the movement, in liberalism.
Mounk: What do you think can be done to contain the influence of the most damaging of these identitarian ideas?
Kaufmann: I think there are two problems. One is the long term battle of ideas. Will ideas around equal treatment beat ideas around equal outcomes? Is it free speech, or is it going to be emotional harm protection?
But there is also, I think, a shorter-term imperative, and this is where it's a bit more controversial. I've done surveys in the United States, Canada and Britain, and they all show by roughly a two-to-one margin that the public opposes what we might call the woke agenda. And I think, by the way, that woke has a tight definition, which I defined as the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups. But in any case, the elite institutions for the most part are upholding this agenda. And so I think there's a short-term democratic issue with trying to reform institutions. And the way I see it, actually, is that government is elected by the majority, and they have a right to reform the institutions, to use government to reform the institutions. For example, there should not be political indoctrination in the classroom. I think the government can legitimately punish people who are engaging in it.
Systemic racism, or unconscious bias—those should be labeled as political concepts, which should not be taught as consensus values in the classrooms. I'm also in favor of political neutrality in schools and in government, in public bodies. I think it is legitimate to want to get rid of DEI training, DEI funding, critical race and gender ideology, that kind of thing, where it is clearly a political agenda and they're trying to pretend it's not. Now it's different at universities because academics have academic freedom. So if people want to teach things and students want to learn things, then I think they should be allowed to do it. But governments are, I think, within their rights to sort of say, “Well, we're not going to fund certain things.” Universities can fund them, but they're going to have to cross-subsidize it from other revenue that they make. I think that's legitimate.
Mounk: I assume you acknowledge that—whatever popularly elected governments are going to do to ensure that there's not state funding for indoctrination—this needs to be contained by the basic liberal principle that we as individuals have rights that must persist in the face of the disagreement of the majority as well.
Kaufmann: Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. I actually think, though, that the individual rights framework and the democracy framework are working in the same direction. So, for example, indoctrination goes against freedom of conscience rights, compelled speech. These sorts of things are violations also of individual rights. I have this tripartite view of society. It's not just government and citizens; it’s government, institutions and citizens. And I think that you can get private censorship coming out of institutions and that creates a role for government to reform those institutions to protect the liberty of citizens.
Let's just say there are conservatives who say, we need to replace the woke indoctrination with our religious or Christian public religion. I would be opposed to that as well. Some people say “you can't do neutrality, it's always political.” To some degree it is, but I think you can aim at neutrality, actually. And I think that's something worth doing. You can take the example of Southern universities that didn't want to admit black students. Many of us would say it was legitimate for the federal government to desegregate those institutions in order to give liberty to southern black Americans to attend the universities they wanted to attend. I think it's a similar logic at the institutional level right now. I really believe in reforming the public school system and that's got to be a critical imperative.
Mounk: I want to touch on another concept that you've developed in earlier work: “asymmetrical multiculturalism.” What do you mean by that, and how has that shaped some of our cultural assumptions about these questions?
Kaufmann: This is a term I actually used in my first book, which is way back in 2004. It’s the idea that members of ethnic majorities should not be attached to their ethnicity, whereas members of minority groups should. So ethnicity is a good thing for minorities. It's a bad thing for majorities. Majorities should be post-ethnic and cosmopolitan minorities should be ethnic. And this really goes back to Randolph Bourne in the 1910s, the young Bohemian intellectuals in Greenwich Village. He took some ideas from Horace Kallen, a Jewish-American writer, and sort of twisted them around and came up with this idea that the proud Jew should stick to his faith and people should remain in their groups, and people who tried to assimilate he called “cultural half-breeds.” On the other hand, the Anglo-Protestants should slough off their insular tradition and breathe the cosmopolitan air. I think that template by and large is the template that persists to this day; that is, the idea that members of the majority should be cosmopolitan, but minorities—keep your culture and don't leave it. And there's a whole set of double standards, clearly, if you say you're proud to be black or proud to be Chinese compared to being proud to be white.
Mounk: So I half agree with this and I half strongly disagree. As a purely descriptive matter, you are correct that in our broader culture there is a strong encouragement from many establishment institutions for people to identify in terms of their race, gender, or sexual orientation, particularly when those are minority identity characteristics or ones that have historically been underprivileged. And then when it comes to dominant groups, the tune is very different. And you see this in things like affinity groups—when schools split up kids by race. And you look at the justification for that in progressive educational circles, and it absolutely is meant to strengthen racial self-identification for minority groups. But of course, among white students, the idea is then that you're going to be lectured on white privilege and the bad things that white people have done and so on.
Now, there are two kinds of coherent takeaway you can draw from that. One of them I would describe as my view, which is that precisely because it's unsustainable to have this kind of asymmetrical multiculturalism, precisely because a lot of the practical effects of splitting kids up into these kinds of groups is going to be that the white kids don't become great self-flagellating anti-racists, but rather they eventually conclude that the most important thing about them is that they’re white, and that they should own that identity and be proud of it… that to me is one of the reasons that has set me against some of these identitarian ideologies, and it makes me really, really skeptical of this overall view of trying to split America up into the two groups of whites and people of color and the whole epistemological lens that comes with that.
Now, as I read you in Whiteshift in particular, you take the other implication: You say, “Look, we're not going to be able to get rid of these forms of cultural pride and so on. So actually the remedy is to make it more socially acceptable and perhaps to encourage members of the majority to take pride in their identity as well.” Why is that the better solution? And aren't we just condemning ourselves to zero-sum conflict between these different groups in a way that's always going to tear society apart?
Kaufmann: Really good question. I wrote an article in 2000 in Ethnic and Racial Studies, an academic journal, called “Liberal Ethnicity,” where I said you can have a liberal ethnicity, where you have intermarriage and assimilation and people moving between groups. And you can have a very fixed illiberal kind of ethnicity: For example, it's very difficult for Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland to intermarry, or for Hindus and Muslims in India to intermarry. Those are very rigid ethnic boundaries. Whereas in other places like Trinidad, between black and the Indian people or in the United States, maybe, between whites and Hispanics, whites and blacks, this is much more acceptable. If we were to move to this idea of a post-ethnic world of just individuals, I guess I don't see that as realistic. If we look at human history, is this in accord with human nature? It is with some people. But I don't think you're going to get rid of ethnic identity. And I think trying to do that is actually gonna cause more problems.
Rather, Jonathan Haidt has this distinction between “common enemy” and “common humanity” versions of identity. So you can have a white identity or a black identity that is open to intermarriage, that is self-critical, that is not zero-sum in the sense of saying that whatever the other group gets means I get less, but is actually generous. And I think that is a more realistic way of moving forward. Again, there will be people who want to completely detach, and that's fine. It's like extended family. Some people are into it, some aren't. One of the things we know from the data is if you take something like white identification in the American National Election Study, “0 to 100, how do you feel towards white people?”—a white person who's really warm towards white people is not colder towards black or Hispanic people than a white person who isn't warm towards white people. And in fact, this is a finding in the broader psychological literature that you don't have these zero-sum relationships between a lot of identities in peace time, in normal times. Where you have a zero-sum relationship is that if you feel really warm towards the Republicans, you feel very cold towards the Democrats, and vice versa. That is a zero-sum identity.
So I actually think you can have moderate kinds of identities. And I also think this is relevant too when it comes to the debates over what's happening around immigration in the West, whether in Europe or the United States. I don't think it's realistic to assume that people will just not have it, that the majority of people will just be able to detach from ethnicity. But I think we can say that ethnicity should be of the liberal kind.
Mounk: People like Kmele Foster say that they don't identify as black because they believe that this is a completely arbitrary distinction we should overcome as a society—that’s deeply admirable, and he's somebody I admire personally in terms of his political position, but to take that as a recipe for where America should move on a mass basis, I think is probably doomed to failure for the reasons you outline. And that's true not just for the African-American community, but for many other communities in the United States as well.
At the same time, I take it now that we agree that we should be very careful about institutions, particularly the institutions that are meant to be common and shared, and in some senses neutral or objective, trying to encourage people to lean into those identities. What schools, the military, all kinds of shared institutions in society should be doing is to emphasize the things we have in common, is to emphasize our common Americanness, Canadianness, Britishness, whatever the national context. And so then the question is how to sustain a society in which, of course, many people are going to give importance to the community they’re from, in which we're going to have some awareness of their ethnic ancestry, in which hopefully that is something that can help to provide them with cultural practices and give meaning to their lives above and beyond the shared national characteristics, but in which, nevertheless, the direction we're pushing in as a society is towards more recognition of commonality above and beyond those forms of belonging. I'm interested to hear whether you agree or disagree with that.
Kaufmann: Yeah, I think I largely agree with this idea of emphasizing commonality over difference, the idea of institutions should be colorblind. I think Coleman Hughes puts it pretty well, saying “Of course I notice race, but you should try not to think that way when you're dealing with people, particularly in a public context.” I think that's absolutely right. I think where I would disagree is when some people say that we shouldn't collect any racial or ethnic statistics. I think sometimes you may need to collect those to monitor different kinds of progress or whatever. It's more what you do with that data, I guess. I'm not as much sold on the idea that just collecting it creates the identities. I don't really buy that. I think Richard Hanania and many others have made that argument. But I think you can kind of treat people in a colorblind way as individuals, but at the same time realize people in terms of where they live and who they marry and their collective memories—it's going to be somewhat influenced by these things. The ethnic shifts that are taking place in Western countries, to say that doesn't matter at all, I think, is not accurate. There are traditions of the ethnic composition of a country—now that of course can change over time, but it's part of the tradition, and it's not just a tradition that members of the ethnic majority are attached to. One of the things that we're finding out is that ethnic minorities are also attached to the traditional ethnic composition of the country as they knew it. I did a survey of Sikhs in Britain who were similar to Brexit voters in the kinds of things that they were attached to about Britain, which included its ethno-racial composition. And likewise with Hispanic and Asian Trump voters—just looking at some 2017 data, they were no less likely than white Trump voters to say that white people are under attack in America, some things which are exaggerated. You see this in Canada also on immigration where minorities are, if anything, as or more likely to want less immigration than white Canadians. And I think this is all connected to parts of the national identity that have to do with the ethnic morphology.
Now, of course, that will change over time. But each generation is used to a different mix and it can only change at a certain speed and going too quickly I think leads to populist backlashes and polarization.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Eric discuss how birth rates are changing globally–and how this might be turned around.
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