Mark R Reiff writes:

Why are so many white people throughout the liberal democratic world moving to the illiberal Right? The conventional explanation is that they are being driven by fear of the ‘demographic shift’. That is, because of immigration, both legal and illegal, and differing fertility rates among the relevant groups, white people of specific ethnic and religious backgrounds will soon no longer make up the electoral majority in the regions they currently dominate. Losing their majority status, in turn, is understood as meaning that the days of white privilege and political dominance in liberal democratic societies are now numbered.

An alarming number of whites, however, are not prepared to allow a commitment to liberalism to stand in the way of resisting the threat that the demographic shift seems to pose to their self-interest. They are accordingly embracing nationalist, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-feminist and other anti-liberal attitudes, and the parties and politicians that express them, in an effort to retain their social, political, economic and cultural dominance.

This view of what is driving whites to the Right has lots of adherents. The demographic shift explanation is offered by those on the Right as well as those on the Left. It appears in serious books, respected media outlets and the reports of non-partisan think-tanks, not just in outlets of the far-Right fringe. Those on the Left frown on the fact that people seem to be allowing their perceived self-interest to interfere with basic liberal values. Those on the Right see this shift toward anti-liberal values as morally commendable, as a way of a defending whites against erosion of what they see as their deserved political, social and economic position. But both sides agree that the upcoming demographic shift has real explanatory power. Indeed, the demographic shift makes the white move to the Right seem not only predictable, but almost reasonable. After all, who hasn’t been tempted to let perceptions of one’s self-interest overcome the better angels of their nature?

But the demographic shift explanation is in fact both unconvincing and dangerous. It is unconvincing because it is built on a series of what are in fact highly implausible presumptions. It is dangerous because it disguises the fact that what is really going on is not a battle with what philosophers call akrasia, or weakness of the moral will – the struggle to live up to our moral ideals when doing so seems contrary to our self-interest. Rather, the battle is over what moral values society should embrace. It is a battle over whether society should remain committed to liberalism, even if imperfectly so, or whether it should reject the aspirations of liberalism entirely and embrace illiberalism and all the consequences that flow from this. [Continue reading…]