Woke's 1960s Origins, the Race Taboo, and the End of the Progressive Era

– Eric Kaufmann is a Canadian professor of politics at the University of Buckingham, where he directs the Centre for Heterodox Social Science. One of the most prominent academic voices on nationalism, national identity, and political demography, he is the author of Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities (Penguin, 2018) and Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution (2024, published in the United States as The Third Awokening). After two decades at Birkbeck, University of London, he left in 2023 for Buckingham, Britain's self-described free speech university, following what he calls five years of steady hostility and being "cancelled by a thousand cuts."

Timothy Allen sits down with Eric in the UK for an honest, often uncomfortable conversation about race, identity, and the things you are no longer allowed to say out loud.

They move from Kaufmann's own cancellation story across two decades in British academia, through his central argument that woke is not new but the late-stage unfolding of the 1960s, to the claim that the whole edifice traces back to a single sacred taboo around race that formed in the mid-1960s and was then stretched and weaponised. Along the way: how affirmative action quietly mutated from equal treatment into enforced equal outcomes, whether woke is driven by women entering the professions or by feminine ideas, the survey data on who actually holds these views, and the hardest stretch of the conversation for Timothy, immigration, identity, and the contested idea of white culture, where the two men disagree openly and calmly. They close on Kaufmann's forecast that the progressive era has peaked, but that years of polarisation and populism lie ahead before anything settles.

In this conversation:

• Kaufmann's cancellation story: four internal investigations between 2018 and 2022, and why he left a twenty year University of London post for Buckingham
• His core thesis from Taboo: woke isn't new, it incubated on campus for fifty years before social media and clickbait media blasted it everywhere
• The "big bang" of the modern moral universe: a good instinct against racism that hardened into an absolute taboo with no nuance
• How a sacred taboo becomes a weapon: stretch the meaning of racism and you can shut down almost any argument
• The quiet shift from equality of treatment to enforced equality of outcome, and the Orwellian word games that justified it
• Whether the rise of woke is about women entering the professions or about feminine ideas (emotional safety over free speech)
• The survey data on who is actually woke, broken down by age and sex, and why it is surprising
• Why Kaufmann rejects the simple pendulum theory, and why trans is the cultural left's first real defeat in public opinion in sixty years
• Attachment to your own group versus dislike of out-groups: why the psychology research treats them as separate things
• The contested idea of white culture, where Timothy pushes back hard and argues culture matters, not colour
• The coming demographic shift, and why Kaufmann thinks race and identity will matter more in the decades ahead, not less
• The distinction between the membership level (which should be open) and the system level (where caring about the pace of change is not racism)
• His forecast: an interregnum of polarisation and populism, and why he thinks de-radicalisation has to come from the left

Timestamps (audio version, includes Timothy's episode introduction):

• 0:00:30 - Introduction to episode
• 0:11:02 - Start of conversation: Jordan Peterson and treading the academic tightrope
• 0:12:17 - Kaufmann's cancellation story: four internal investigations in four years
• 0:16:52 - Zooming out: living in the aftermath of the 1960s
• 0:18:27 - Why woke massified in the 2010s: social media and clickbait
• 0:19:31 - The big bang: the anti-racism taboo of the mid-1960s
• 0:23:55 - Back to the beginning: affirmative action in 1965, disparate impact in 1971
• 0:25:58 - How equal treatment quietly became enforced equal outcomes
• 0:27:15 - Word games, Orwell, and the redefinition of racism
• 0:30:02 - The feminization of culture: demographics or ideas?
• 0:33:58 - Who is actually woke: the survey data by age and sex
• 0:35:51 - Free speech versus emotional safety, public versus private life
• 0:38:54 - Who sets the taboos, and the problem of selective empathy
• 0:42:34 - Trans as the cultural left's first defeat in sixty years
• 0:44:22 - The right side of history and a belief system that cannot give ground
• 0:45:30 - Post-progressivism and the end of the progressive era
• 0:47:47 - Why young Britons moved left and young Canadians moved right
• 0:50:43 - Immigration, identity, and the discomfort around white culture
• 0:54:52 - Attachment to your own group is not the same as hatred of others
• 0:56:48 - What white culture actually means
• 1:02:12 - Timothy pushes back: culture, not colour
• 1:06:39 - White guilt and the ambient public morality
• 1:08:02 - Is defining people by race already outdated?
• 1:09:53 - Culture as outward expression, identity as inward attachment
• 1:13:23 - The Black Carol story and a child who never noticed skin colour
• 1:16:22 - The coming demographic shift and why Kaufmann thinks it will matter
• 1:17:39 - A legitimate democratic preference stigmatised as racism
• 1:20:09 - Does acknowledging race create a new divide?
• 1:23:08 - The next few decades: interregnum, polarisation, and who must back down
• 1:29:51 - Culture versus identity, and is Rishi Sunak English?
• 1:32:02 - Islam, Rupert Lowe, and halal slaughter at the village pub
• 1:34:19 - Competing versions of Britishness
• 1:37:58 - A free market of ears: the podcast's 95% male audience
• 1:41:12 - Membership versus system level: caring without being a racist
• 1:43:23 - Owen Jones, Ezra Klein, and who on the left will actually engage

Guest: Eric Kaufmann - University of Buckingham | X | sneps.net

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