ISN'T IT SIMPLER TO SPEAK OF BOURGEOIS NORMS?

Or perhaps, where people from different backgrounds find themselves in more frequent interactions with each other, to have concepts such as diplomacy (for the leadership classes) or simple good manners?

A political scientist called Eric Kaufmann coined the expression "whiteshift" to refer to the current evolution of those norms, when the modal ancestry of the polity is shifting.  It's not enough to sell a book of that title, his "How Can We Manage the Process of Western ‘Whiteshift’?" is for Quillette subscribers only.  Fair enough, an academician has to earn a living too.

I have the book, and it's in the stack of stuff to read and review, if perhaps in the "this is not off to a compelling start and I'm not obligated to stay current with stuff that makes me sleepy" part of the stack.

Michael Barone read, or at least skimmed, the book, in order to see if there's any punditry to do.

Kaufmann, a Canadian who teaches in Britain and is of Jewish, Chinese, and Latino ancestry. His most recent book is called Whiteshift, which he defines as “the mixture of many non-whites into the white group through voluntary assimilation.”

As he points out, something like this has happened before. A hundred years ago, Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish immigrants pouring into Ellis Island were considered to be of different “races” by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elites.

Half a century ago, their descendants were regarded as still culturally and politically distinctive in Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s description of New York ethnics groups, Beyond the Melting Pot. A “balanced” ticket in those days had to include Irish, Italian, and Jewish candidates.

Today, all these groups are lumped together as “whites,” even though there are still perceptible, though muted, differences in political attitudes and perspectives between those with different ancestries.

I vaguely recall some of that writing about "unmeltable ethnics" during my adolescence in Milwaukee. Although Americans All was a rallying cry during Woodrow Wilson's war, the existence of a Croatian soccer collective different from the Serbian soccer collective still meant someone not conversant with the past millennium of feudin' and fussin' in the Balkans ought be circumspect.

These days, though, Bavaria can play Polonia and the kids on the teams could be models for It's a Small, Small World.  There's nothing quite like having to rub along together to turn coexistence into cooperation.

That’s a template for an expandable polity — one that gives us and other Anglosphere nations a useful model as we experience ethnic change.

In the short run, things can seem rocky. Kaufmann argues that a majority ethnicity facing minority status can respond in four ways, and is likely to do so successively over time.

The first way is to fight, to shut off immigration and bar asylum seekers, as Hungary and Poland have done, or just to enforce existing immigration laws. Donald Trump’s call for a “beautiful wall” is shorthand for the latter course, even if he hasn’t managed to follow through.

Another alternative is to repress opposition to change. Democrats’ knee-jerk opposition to Trump’s measures, almost indistinguishable intellectually from an open borders policy, is an example. “Cosmopolitanism and what I term ethno-traditional nationalism are both valid worldviews,” Kaufmann writes, but “imposing either on the entire population is a recipe for discontent.”

The third response is flight — and indeed in Britain as well as America, young families flee multiethnic central cities for mostly white suburbs, while rural and small town folks (doing surprisingly well in the Trump economy) tend to stay in place.

The fourth response is what Kaufmann thinks will be decisive in the long run (50 to 80 years) — intermarriage, which “promises to erode the rising diversity which underlies our current malaise.” He notes that Hispanic-white intermarriage rates are high. And it’s been a championship season for part-Asian Americans, from Tiger Woods to (as blogger Steve Sailer points out) Jeopardy whiz James Holzhauer.

Intermarriage rates for American blacks remain considerably lower, which raises, in my mind at least, the question of whether people of Hispanic or Asian “race” should have been given the panoply of racial quotas and preferences accorded blacks by the Nixon and Reagan administrations. Yes, you can find limited examples of systematic racial discrimination against Latinos near the southern border in the past and, yes, there was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Theodore Roosevelt blocking Japanese inflow to Hawaii in 1907. But Hispanics never experienced slavery here or anything like the legally and violently enforced segregation of blacks in the Old South. And the only invidious discrimination Asians have suffered in the last half-century, so far as I can discern, is at the hands of Ivy League and other selective college admissions officers.

Who, back in 2019, had the cosmopolitans engaging in the fight?

Instead, supposedly “racist” conservatives are now empowered by minority voters worried more about shared class concerns than skin color. They are concluding that if there are American racists, they are most likely the rich bicoastal elites, never subject to the consequences of their selfish agendas, and their own self-appointed, self-interested, and ossified diversity industry.

That's Victor Hanson, and his primary focus is the upcoming national election, which he hopes is a larruping for the Donks. A jape that he gets off, though, is germane to the ongoing whiteshift. "Remember, minorities who vote conservative are excommunicated from the Left and no longer considered genuine minorities, as adjudicated by wealthy white professionals."  That's about leftists who abuse anybody who disagrees with their aims, including, now, people being excommunicated from the rainbow coalition.  Richard Samuelson sees the same situation, noting "Protected classes were never supposed to collide."  But they do ...

Yes, seriously, some city council members in Los Angeles said some things that were nyekulturny, and New York Times racial columnist Charles Blow blew a gasket.

It is a theory that worries me and that I have written about: that with the browning of America, white supremacy could simply be replaced by — or buffeted by — a form of “lite” supremacy, in which fairer-skin people perpetuate a modified anti-Blackness rather than eliminating it. White supremacy benefits those who are white, or those are white-adjacent in both appearance, culture and affect.

Yes, that's why the coastal cosmopolitans are respectful to Barack Obama and dismissive of Herschel Walker.  And if you believe that for a second, can I interest you in this miracle cancer cure?

In an environment where university diversity weenies treat "Asian" as an aggregate for box-ticking, and as "white-adjacent" in programming, perhaps it is that emergent expandable polity, and perhaps the brain-brothers of Mr Blow ought take a second look at their foolish notions of authenticity.  There are such brain-brothers and Red State's Brad Slager properly nails them.  "Someone who can benefit from identity politics for being in a minority is caught exhibiting some of the crudest forms of racism, and she is able to offload her hate as being the result of whites."

National Review's Nate Hochman also chastises Mr Blow.

It’s always somewhat amusing to watch a certain kind of anti-racist progressive reckon with the fact that various non-white groups can dislike one another, and that the way that that animosity manifests is — at least in the contemporary United States — often far more bitter and explicitly racist than white racism itself. Blow doesn’t explain how or why the anti-black racism of the Latino L.A. councilmembers is “the work of white supremacy” — these are the kinds of things that are asserted, not argued — but then again, recognizing that ethnic conflict and tribalism exist everywhere, across time, place, and race, would be deeply inconvenient for a number of progressive premises about America and the logic of intersectionality.

The fact is that non-whites are often every bit as racist as whites, for reasons that have far more to do with the brokenness of human nature than any abstract system of white supremacy.

Naming and shaming the apostates from the rainbow coalition seems to be a thing, of late.  Joy Reid apparently discovered false consciousness among Hispanic voters in Florida.  A Fordham law professor sees sellouts everywhere.

Some people within the Latino community do achieve whiteness, one, because they are white appearing, they favor more our European ancestors, and depending on their accent, their educational level, whether they actually have a recognizable Hispanic surname, that all those things that enable a person to, I wouldn't call it passing, but seemingly — just — and seamlessly being able to pass into whiteness, or white Anglo-whiteness, just as they have whiteness within Latin America and the Caribbean. Um, so, I guess what I want to say is that despite this idea of all Latinos being brown, you know, some browns are browner than others and some whites are whiter than others. There are Latinos who are white, whether they have that personal identity or not, that's their socially ascribed race from others outside, and they get to move in that privilege as well.

Meanwhile, the mockery of the fleeing remnant continues.

A shrinking white share of the population is a hallmark of the congressional districts held by the House Republicans who voted to challenge Trump’s defeat, a New York Times analysis found — a pattern political scientists say shows how white fear of losing status shaped the movement to keep him in power.

The portion of white residents dropped about 35% more over the past three decades in those districts than in territory represented by other Republicans, the analysis found, and constituents also lagged behind in income and education. Rates of so-called deaths of despair, such as suicide, drug overdose and alcohol-related liver failure, were notably higher as well.

That suggests some combination of nostalgia and despair motivating the strongest Trump loyalty.

Because they are more vulnerable, disadvantaged or less educated white voters can feel especially endangered by the trend toward a minority majority, said Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at George Mason University who studies the attitudes of those voters.

“A lot of white Americans who are really threatened are willing to reject democratic norms,” she said, “because they see it as a way to protect their status.”

That may help explain why the dispute over Trump’s defeat has emerged at this moment in history, with economic inequality reaching new heights and the white population of the United States expected within about two decades to lose its majority.

Many of the objectors’ districts started with a significantly larger Black minority, or had a rapid increase in the Hispanic population, making the decline in the white population more pronounced.

Of the 12 Republican-held districts that swung to minority white — almost all in California and Texas — 10 were represented by objectors. The most significant drops occurred in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs and California desert towns, where the white percentage fell by more than one-third.

That noted, it is hard not to see in the behavior of the diversity hustlers their own protection of their status, even if that involves saying nasty things about people who aren't on board with the program any more.

The reality might be simpler.  "The residents of Democratic districts, on average, are better educated and earn significantly more."  Which means it is those residents, for all their talk about diversity, who are forting up, and doing a bad job with their power.  “These people aren’t against brown or Black people. They just don’t like the way Democrats are running the country.”

That's what deconstruction of bourgeois norms gets you.

(Cross-posted to Chicago Boyz.)