Date:
Location:
THIS EVENT IS CANCELED
National Populism and Polarization in the US, Canada, and Europe Since 2014
Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics, Birkbeck College, University of London
There has been a surge of national populism in the West since 2014. Along with this has come an increasingly polarized cultural and political climate. I argue that the backdrop to this shift is the decline of ethnic majorities in western countries. Immigration is the critical issue, not necessarily due to its effects, but because it is a symbol of ethnic change. Cultural progressivism is also a critical part of the story. The post-1960s power of this ideology has partially contributed to unprecedented demographic shifts, and is interacting with ethnic change in important ways. The power of ideas of diversity and cultural equalitarianism in elite institutions is both a cause of populist backlash and a force reacting against the rise of populism. National populism in turn responds to progressivism, in dialectical fashion. The result is a realignment of politics from the material cleavages of the twentieth century to a more cultural axis. This is accompanied by growing polarization, especially over immigration. This is as true of English Canada, where populism is ostensibly weaker, as it is of the United States, Europe and Australasia.
Eric Kaufmann is Professor and Assistant Dean of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities (Penguin/Abrams, 2018/19); Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth (Profile Books 2010), The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America: the decline of dominant ethnicity in the United States (Harvard 2004) and The Orange Order (Oxford 2007), among others. He wrote a report for the think tank Demos entitled Changing Places: mapping the white British response to ethnic change (Demos 2014). He is co-editor, among others, of Political Demography (Oxford 2012) and editor of Rethinking Ethnicity: Majority Groups and Dominant Minorities (Routledge 2004). An editor of the journal Nations & Nationalism, he has written for the New York Times, Newsweek International, Foreign Affairs, New Statesman, National Review and Prospect and his work has been covered in major newspapers and magazines in the UK and US since 2007. He may be found on the web at www.sneps.net and on twitter @epkaufm.