MixedVoxWhat is it about the West today that makes it such fertile soil for right-wing extremism? On this point, Kaufmann is clearsighted ... There are some glaring omissions in Kaufmann’s diagnosis. Most notably, he gives short shrift to the vital role of anti-black prejudice and backlash to the Obama presidency in Trump’s rise. But his basic claim, that a root cause of Trump’s and the European far right’s rise is a sense of cultural dislocation on the part of native whites, is persuasive ... Kaufmann is mostly talking about research on race in America here—and he is presenting a straw man portrait of it ... Kaufmann does not engage with the literature in any sustained way ... the sense you’d get from reading Whiteshift’s middle chapters is that \'anti-white radicalism\'—his term—is a bigger problem in the modern West than actual racial discrimination ... Kaufmann ends up betraying the liberalism he set out to defend ... providing intellectual fuel to the far right’s arguments.
