The Afrikaanerization of the Republican Party

Trump's biggest financial backers just happen to be white former South Africans. Coincidence?

Elon Musk literally jumping for joy at a weekend Trump rally in Pennsylvania: an image that has been labeled “dork maga” by some of Musk’s detractors online

Originally published October 7, 2024 …

Something I read recently in the Financial Times triggered a memory.

In my second book: The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story, I interviewed a white South African professor named Andries du Toit, who described to me the panic that set in among the Boer class as the end of apartheid loomed.

As professor du Toit explained to me, more than 300,000 whites fled South Africa after apartheid fell and Nelson Mandela — newly freed after 27 long years in Robin Island prison — and his African National Congress took over. Another quarter million would soon follow. Many went to Europe, or to New Zealand or Australia, to return to the comfort of a white-ruled nation; and many came to the United States.

The white South African expats feared many things — violent revenge by Black South Africans who had endured centuries of slavery, subjugation and state violence at the hands of white colonizers, what they were certain would be the incompetence of Black rule, and the frightening potential for what life would be like under the authority of their former house servants, field hands and mine workers. In short: the prospect of Black majority rule terrified them.

Many White South Africans whose families quit South Africa are living well in America. They found prosperity and opportunity in places like Silicon Valley, California. Yet they are terrified again. From the Financial Times:

Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sacks, the venture capitalist who has become a fundraiser for Donald Trump and a troll of Ukraine, left aged five, and grew up in a South African diaspora family in Tennessee. Peter Thiel spent years of childhood in South Africa and Namibia, where his father was involved in uranium mining as part of the apartheid regime’s clandestine drive to acquire nuclear weapons. And Paul Furber, an obscure South African software developer and tech journalist living near Johannesburg, has been identified by two teams of forensic linguists as the originator of the QAnon conspiracy, which helped shape Trump’s Maga movement. (Furber denies being “Q”.) 

In short, four of Maga’s most influential voices are fiftysomething white men with formative experiences in apartheid South Africa. This probably isn’t a coincidence. I say that as a fiftysomething white man whose formative experiences include childhood visits to my extended family in apartheid South Africa. (My parents left Johannesburg before I was born.) We’d swim in my grandparents’ pool while the maid and her grandchildren lived in the garage. These experiences were so shocking, so different from anything I experienced growing up in Europe, that they are my sharpest childhood memories.

[Emphases mine]

So why does this matter?

As that college professor explained to me, in the waning days of white rule in South Africa, Afrikaaner leaders implored their counterparts in the U.S. Republican Party to beware of facing a similar fate. The rise of Black American civil rights, then sports, then business and political leaders, along with declining birth rates among whites relative to nonwhites meant that soon, America could be the new South Africa, and whites here could lose power the same way whites there did.

Hence the abject fear of Barack Obama, the mild mannered Black intellectual and Illinois State Senator-turned U.S. Senator who despite having no militant wing to his center-left Democratic Party movement, was likened to Mandela — the man considered a terrorist by U.S. Republicans even after he became South Africa’s first Black president (he didn’t get off the U.S. terrorism watchlist until 2008, the same year Barack Obama was elected President of the United States.

From my book:

In Britain, Katie Hopkins, an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim columnist (who, incidentally, appeared in 2007 as a contestant on Britain’s version of “The Apprentice” with U.K. billionaire Alan Sugar in the Trump role) promoted the claim that white South Africans were being “slaughtered” and their property seized.

Afrikaner identity movements have latched onto the anxieties of white South Africans who are unsure of their place in the new, black-run country, and have sought to amplify those fears. In their dark lore, the minority white population – who are about 9 percent of the country though they own approximately 80 percent of the agricultural land as well as the bulk of the nation’s mineral and economic wealth – are oppressed and under threat of cultural and even physical extinction.  Seeking international support from other far right and white nationalist groups, these Afrikaaner alarmists issued dark warnings that when white Americans become the minority in the United States and are subjected to governance by formerly oppressed non-whites, they will suffer the same fate.

Fast forward to 2012, and the re-election of America’s Mandela…

In the days after Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012, Dan Roodt, founder of the Pro-Afrikaans Action Group, wrote in the white supremacist magazine American Renaissance, “What lessons can white Americans draw from our tragic demise, as they ponder the outcome of a Presidential election in which the evidence of a demographic turn for the worse is clear for all to see?”[1] Roodt saw a Republican Party locked in a “demographic death spiral as youth, single women, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians overwhelmingly vote Democrat.” He warned that the Democratic Party “could become an American version of [the] African National Congress, as immigration and high non-white birth rates ensure a steady stream of Democratic voters eager for “change” and channeled American white supremacist Jared Taylor in calling for the Republican Party to become the explicit champion of white interests.

In an August 2018 tweet, Donald Trump invoked South Africa, seemingly out of the blue, saying he had asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers,” adding: “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.” The tweet echoed a sentiment voiced not long before by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and caused white supremacists, including David Duke and Richard Spencer, to cheer.[2]

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[1] “Will the US Follow South Africa Down the Path of White Decline?” By Dan Roodt, American Renaissance, November 9, 2012.

[2] “Trump tweet cheers White Supremacists,” By Matt Pearce, The Los Angeles Times, August 24, 2018.

More from the FT:

So what connects these men’s southern African backgrounds with Maga today?

Southern Africa under apartheid offered an extreme version of some of the main themes of American life today. First, there was tremendous inequality. The mine where Thiel’s father worked was “known for conditions not far removed from indentured servitude”, writes Thiel’s biographer Max Chafkin. “White managers, like the Thiels, had access to a brand-new medical and dental centre in Swakopmund and membership in the company country club.” The mine’s Black migrant workers lived in work camps.

To whites of a certain mindset, this inequality wasn’t due to apartheid. They thought it was inscribed in nature. Certain people were equipped to succeed in capitalism, while others weren’t. That was simply the way it was, and it was pointless to try to mess with nature. Two of Thiel’s contemporaries at Stanford in the 1980s recall him telling them that apartheid “works” and was “economically sound”. His spokesman has denied that he ever supported apartheid.

The white South African nightmare in the 1980s, hanging over everything, was that one day Black people would rise up and massacre whites. Like the US, South Africa was a violent society and becoming more violent in the 80s. Musk’s teenage recollections of seeing murders on trains may not be entirely factual, but do evoke the atmosphere of the era. He warned in 2023 about potential “genocide of white people in South Africa”.

Trump’s recent claim about “American girls being raped and sodomised and murdered by savage criminal aliens” preyed on similar white fears. The final commonality between many white South Africans who experienced the end of apartheid and today’s American right: a contempt for government.

And it’s not just a fear of violence. It’s a fear of “replacement.” Note that it’s not just JD Vance who obsesses over single women not having children, it’s also Musk, who has twelve children by at least three different ex-wives and girlfriends. (Donald Trump of course has five adult children from three marriages.)

These men, and their favorite media carnival barkers like Tucker Carlson and a cadre of fascist and nazi-curious podcasters in the “manosphere” spend a creepy amount of time hand wringing over Americans not having enough children, low marriage and birthrates among American women and low testosterone rates among American men, and fears that brown and Black people are out-producing them. And of course: over the racist, anti-semitic parlor game known as “white replacement theory,” an insane conspiracy theory that “The Jews” are conspiring to import millions of nonwhite immigrants to replace mostly white but also nonwhite working class American workers and especially voters that’s now common parlance inside the Republican Party.

This explains why white conservatives (and increasingly some of their Black and Latino followers) obsess over illegal (nonwhite) immigration and make wild claims that immigrants from Black and Brown countries are a hoard of extravagantly violent criminals, rapists and pet eating savages. (Notably, Elon Musk and his brother openly admitted to having been illegal immigrants themselves, but that’s apparently ok since they are white and thus inoffensive to the right.)

It also explains Republicans’ obsession with ending affirmative action, Critical Race Theory and DEI — policies and intellectual ideas that lead to Black and women’s advancement and equality. Not to mention their zeal at trying to knock off progressive and especially Black leadership at leading universities and ending things like grants programs to Black women owned businesses.

In short, Republican conservatism has been thoroughly Boerized. It is increasingly funded by and steeped in the ideological firmament of the white men (and their now adult children) who lost control of South Africa to Black Africans, and now fear losing control of the U.S. to Black and Brown folks too.

It’s why halting the advance of multicultural democracy is such an imperative that Musk claimed over the weekend that if Trump isn’t elected THAT will be the end of democracy. What he means is the end of unimpeded white rule.

This post has been updated