Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

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My name's Toby Young and I'm one of Quillett's London-based editors. Today I'll be talking to Eric Kaufman, a professor of politics at Birkbeck College at the University of London,

and the author of White Shift, immigration, populism, and the future of white majorities,

which came out both here in the UK and in the US last year and

no doubt elsewhere too. Errik you've written an essay for the most well you wrote it earlier this week for Colette called the Great

awakening and the second American Revolution. Do you want to just briefly summarize what your thesis in that essay is for us?

Sure Toby. Yeah, so basically I, partly with the help of some survey work that I did, I was basically arguing that the drive for cultural

equality is leading to an upending, if you like, of various traditions of American nationhood and these cultural traditions

include things like statues the writing of history, it includes place names and also the way the

national identity is articulated.

And all of that, which we see very much from a lot of the what I would consider

culturally revolutionary activity around statue toppling that's come in the wake of the

Black Lives Matter movement and And this is very much on the ascendant,

this mood of kind of cultural iconiclasm. And I was kind of interested really quite by accident in the lengths to which

particularly left-wing Americans were willing to go to to remake the culture.

...