The strange innocence of Professor K
Or how the New Right pretends to be something else
Last week the new Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham, Eric Kaufmann took to X (formerly known as Twitter) in an indignant accompaniment to three graphs. Each figure showed recent legal immigration lines for the UK, Canada and Australia, though no contextualisation or explanation of any kind was provided for them. The professor’s post read “The progressive-neoliberal elite will try and ramp up immigration to the maximum it can unless the electorate kicks back”.
This struck me as distinctly unprofessorial consisting as it did of the vaguest of assertions shackled to what seemed to be a political hope. In other words its intention was not so much analytical as propagandistic. And a very particular kind of propaganda at that.
Let’s unpick this. Kaufmann’s implied hypothesis is that in three major countries on three separate continents there is an elite which is both “neoliberal” (ie economically right-wing) and “progressive” (ie socially left-wing) which actively and consciously seeks higher immigration at almost all costs, and despite its protestations to the contrary. Professor Kaufmann can hardly be unaware that since 2010 the stated aim of successive British prime ministers and their governments has been to bring immigration down. Yet somehow this aim has been subverted by an elite of which presumably the elected governments were not part. Furthermore this elite would try and “ramp up” (ie actively seek to increase as far as possible, as a matter of policy) immigration, and only a revolt by the voters can stop them.
You don’t have to be a student of modern right-wing populism to realise that this is an idea with some resonance in certain quarters. Variants on the Great Replacement Theory – the idea that global elites are seeking to “replace” indigenous white populations with malleable foreigners – are ubiquitous. There are French versions in which Muslims push out Christians, US versions in which Latin Americans get to dominate WASPs and WASCs, economic versions in which cheap labour is brought in by multinationals to undercut “our own” workers, German versions in which German culture is being deliberately destroyed by global elites who do not value local and national traditions. Most GRTs are amalgams of these accusations.
Some time ago – and coinciding with an era of international mobility and high migration - this thinking jumped the species barrier between the racist far right and the nationalist wings of conservative parties and movements. What had been the preoccupation of fringe groups and outlets started being taken up by more mainstream writers and commentators. Trumpism is a mixture of nationalism and conspiracism, and Trump’s election and effective takeover of one of the two dualithic political parties gave permission to (and indeed increased the earning potential of) figures like Tucker Carlson to embrace extreme theories. Trump’s own stump speech this week referring to immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” (he had previously used the term in an interview) and addressed to millions, can hardly be dismissed as colourful language. It is pretty much an incitement.
And indeed, in the X-tail of replies and likes for the prof’s post were a number of people who readily and happily made the GRT association. “White erasure” said one, “is the ideology of these regimes. Destroying the people and identity of the West is what they are doing, so it must be what they want consciously”.
With no innocent intention, I sought clarification. “Who”, I asked professor Kaufmann, “precisely is doing what precisely to achieve what precisely?” And added, “I ask because (as can be seen from the replies) we are in far right Great Replacement territory here”.