"White Identity Concerns, Not Economics, Are Behind the Rise of Right-Wing Populism"

"He attributes this idea to an ideology that he calls 'left-modernism,' which can be thought of as a more precise term for what people mean when they say political correctness. Kaufmann traces the origins of left-modernism to the bohemian counterculture of early 20th-century New York, when WASP intellectuals like Randolph Bourne began to argue that 'white ethnics' like Jews and Catholics should remain distinct rather than assimilate to the American mainstream. At the same time, he called on WASPs to abandon their own stultifying culture and become cosmopolitan individualists—a view Kaufmann dubs 'asymmetrical multiculturalism,' since the dominant culture is not considered one of the multiple cultures worthy of being preserved. After the civil-rights movement, this framework was updated, with whites taking the place of the WASPs and blacks, Native Americans, and newer nonwhite immigrant groups taking the place of the old white ethnics. And as both left-modernism and anti-racism norms expanded via higher education and the mass media, Kaufmann argues that the two fused: 'racism' came to describe not only acts of overt prejudice, hostility, or discrimination, but any violation of the left-modernist expectation that whites eschew group attachments and become cosmopolitans.
"Kaufmann thinks this latter step was a mistake."

Park MacDougald at New York reviews Kaufamann's Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities.