nd the sense of superiority that her sanity gives her over her husband fills her with ‘self-loathin
walls as metaphors,  represents rationality in its most unpleasant form.
 the husband speaks of a metaphorical wall betdown the boulevard Saint-Michel in a state of extraordinary exultationween himself and his wife. The narrator describes the man’s face as ‘walled up’, muré. We begin to wonder whether all the stories – there are three more – will have something to do with walls and wheth  luck version of existential freedom, some of the ways in which things go wrong because they just do 
Chance is a better mathematician than he is.
s in himself a special talent: he is an even better hater than any of his friends
he must be thinking of Hitler, master of, among many other things, the theory of hatred as a prime source of self-esteem.

down the boulevard Saint-Michel in a state of extraordinary exultation

offered a character and a destiny, a way of escaping from the never-ending chattering of his consciousness

 The story ends with the unwitting betrayer’s laughter: ‘I was laughing so hard that tears came to my eyes.’ Perhaps this is the only way that self-admiring heroes know how to weep

According to Kaufmann’s projections, the UK is likely to have a majority of mixed and non-white people by 2100.

Kaufmann believes these trends will eventually result in a situation he calls ‘whiteshift’, whereby white-majority populations will ‘absorb an admixture of different peoples through intermarriage, but remain oriented around existing myths of descent, symbols and traditions

n theory of  This part of the argument relies more heavily on anecdote, and skips between countries: es it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman,’ andhe repeats Orwell’s well-worn remark that ‘in left-wing circl cites culture wars on US university campuses as if they were an index of international trends.

Eatwell and Goodwin seek to dispel a series of myths, such as the idea that people who voted for Trump, or Brexit, or Marine Le Pen, are stupid or irrational; or that they are mostly angry old white men; or that these votes were protests that will recede as quickly as they appeared to emerge. Then they go further, arguing that we shouldn’t see national populism as anti-democratic, even though some of the parties and movements involved have their roots in 21st-century fascism. Indeed, ‘most national-populist voters want more democracy – more referendums and more empathetic and listening politicians that give more power to the people and less power to established economic and political elites.’ This ‘direct’ democracy may be different from the system of checks and balances associated with liberal democracy – but, they say, it should not be seen as threatening.

oral bearings from the Oxford philosopher David Miller, ‘who has defended the right of states to control their borders and exclude immigrants on the basis of community goals and preferences’. It is impossible, they write, ‘for reasonable people not to be deeply saddened by events such as drownings in the Mediterranean’, but ‘the basic responsibility of government is to maximise the welfare of its citizens.’ At what cost

 They smooth over the differences in culture, history, class and political outlook that exist among people who might be categorised as white, and they are even less careful in discussing everyone else. They do not consider the ways in which the social uncertainty caused by globalisation is a worldwide phenomenon, and do not see that to retreat behind closed doors is the path to disaster. Worst of all, they close off any possibility that the prevailing order might be challenged by people coming together in their difference to work towards common goals. Unless we can move beyond arguments like theirs, sooner or later we will come to realise that the walls we build to defend ourselves are the walls of a prison.

stuart hall has argues that re, he continued, globalisation was radically disrupting the way people related to these forms of belonging

‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.’

ell and Goodwin give a narrow account in support of their argument that the move away from welfare state economies has undermined people’s sense of self-worth. They argue that ‘relative deprivation’ – even people who aren’t especially poor see the rich getting richer while their incomes stagnate – makes people feel that others (bankers, immigrants, ‘benefits scroungers’) are gaining an unfair advantage. Ye

They also want us to understand that national-populist voters have ‘legitimate concerns’ – that phrase again; they use it a lot – ‘about immigrants who cannot speak the language, minorities who do not respect women’s rights, the practice of female genital mutilation and other cultural traditions that appear to undermine or challenge the established community, or ethnic and religious groups which do not seem to integrate into wider society’

National-populist voters simply want to ‘reassert the primacy of the nation’ and ‘cherished and rooted national identities’. The centre left in particular needs to accept this, otherwise it will drive voters away.

It’s easy to single out the excesses of campus politics

, too, are interested in the spread of nationalist and far-right politics in ‘the West’ (although their West appears to include countries such as Hungary and Poland), a trend they call ‘national populism’. In their view, the trend has four main causes: a widespread and growing distrust of elites; fears that national identity is being undermined by immigration and ‘hyper ethnic change’ (the authors’ term); resentment about the effects of several decades of neoliberal economic policies; and a longer-term decline of traditional political allegiances, particularly between working-class voters and social democratic parties.

If we want to want to avert the danger of ‘ethnic unmixing’ – where people retreat into their own ethnic communities and division and hostility abound – governing elites, Kaufmann argues, will need to reorient themselves around an ‘ethno-traditionalist’ concept of the nation. They should, he thinks, base immigration policy not on economic or humanitarian concerns, but on what will fit with ‘the cultural comfort zone of the median voter’: lower rates of immigration that would ‘permit enough immigrants to voluntarily assimilate into the ethnic majority, maintaining the white ethno-tradition’. Such things as speaking the national language and ‘being in an inter-ethnic marriage or of secular or moderate religiosity’ would count as evidence of assimilation. But this perfectly reasonable course of action, in Kaufmann’s view, is being prevented by the ‘anti-white ideology of the cultural left’, which tells people to celebrate their own decline