Refuse Trump’s return to open racism – The Mail & Guardian

(John McCann/M&G)

Donald Trump’s chainsaw massacre of the rules and pieties that shaped the post–Cold War order marks a new moment in both American and global history. But, like the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe — when colonial ideas and practices were brought home — this moment is nested in longer historical continuities.

The United States replaced the great European powers as the dominant global power after World War  II, emerging with overwhelming economic, military, cultural and institutional power. During the Cold War, it shared global dominance with the Soviet Union but remained preeminent in the capitalist world. Its dominance was fully consolidated after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Trump’s aggressive nationalism is an attempt to defend the waning global power of the US against new contenders, most notably China. It is also a response to broader shifts in global power, including initiatives by Brics to establish a bank and a unified payment system that facilitates transactions in local currencies — reducing dependence on the US dollar and the SWIFT financial messaging network — and the proposal for a common Brics currency.

During and after the Cold War the US used a mixture of hard power — invasions, coups, assassinations, sanctions — and soft power — its media, universities, think-tanks, state and allied private donors and its power over the international financial institutions — to sustain its domination. 

Force was mixed with the seduction of persuasion and incorporation. Vietnam and Iraq experienced devastating violence and Chile and Haiti suffered coups while post-apartheid South Africa got funding for media, think-tanks, universities, NGOs spun as “civil society”, scholarships and regular invitations for selected editors, academics and others to the embassy.

Trump has not turned away from all forms of soft power — X and Facebook are being even more effectively weaponised than before — but he has radically scaled back much of the use of soft power in favour of crude intimidation and bullying. Bullying is always a sign of weakness and this is not the politics of a man or a country enjoying the unflustered assurance of unrivalled power.

Holding an old line

Trump’s turn to open and crude threats in domains where the US recently sought to win consent through persuasion and incorporation is not only about defending the US as the global hegemon. It is also about defending the imbrication of the US in older forms of domination.

Europe and its settler colonies have ruled the world since 1492 when Columbus arrived in the Caribbean. That domination was originally legitimated and organised through a claim to the superiority of Christianity. Since the latter part of the 17th century the dominance of religion has given way to race as the central ideology. After World War II claims to the superiority of the West began to displace open claims of racial superiority in polite company. But the West always largely meant Europe and its settler colonies and this was a refinement rather than a rejection of racial ideology.

Both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were recorded making grossly racist statements in private during their time in office but after the moral victory of the civil rights movement in the late 1960s no US president made openly racist public statements. Dog whistles, particularly in reference to crime, were preferred. George H Bush infamously used the Willie Horton television advert in 1988 to stoke white fears about black criminality. 

Trump has reasserted the open expression of brazen racism. One of the most astonishing expressions of this has been the contrast between his vicious hostility to Mexican and Haitian migrants and his bizarre claim that Afrikaners are an oppressed minority in South Africa.

With the support of South African emigres like Elon Musk, the most followed person on X, and Joel Pollak, an editor at the far right Breitbart News, this has placed claims about white South Africans at the centre of the open racial revanchism in the US.

Challenges to racial order

Just as Trump’s turn to bellicose grandstanding on the international stage is motivated by the declining power of the US, his turn to open racism is motivated by a set of challenges to white domination in the US. These include demographic change, a growing consensus on the need for diversity in elite spaces and the huge protests following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. These protests, which brought millions of people onto the streets, perhaps as many as 26 million people, were a direct challenge to the racial order, an order that has always been grounded in white impunity.

That order was also challenged by the growing popular refusal to accept impunity for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people and its murderous destruction of Gaza. The protests on US campuses were a direct challenge, as was South Africa’s brave decision, understood as unacceptable temerity by the US political class, to take Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Trump’s personal connections with right-wing white South Africans predate his recent embrace of Elon Musk, and his support for conspiracy theories about white oppression in South Africa predate the ICJ case. He has a long-standing personal relationship with Gary Player who, in 1966, declared that “I must say now, and clearly, that I am of the South Africa of Verwoerd and apartheid.” These days Player speaks the standard part paranoid and part hyper-masculinist language of the dangers of wokeness and the benefits of ice baths typical of the red-pilled online right. It was back in 2018 that Trump tweeted about “the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers”.

For any racist the idea of white people living as a minority among a black majority, let alone under largely black rule, is going to be deeply unsettling. But this is not the full explanation for the intense and escalating hostility to South Africa by Trump and others in the US. They are also exploiting racism and racist conspiracy theories to legitimate their attack on South Africa for the temerity of taking Israel to the ICJ.

It is essential that we understand that it is not only the Afrikaner right, organised most effectively in AfriForum, that have actively sought to build a transnational project to openly affirm white claims to special standing. There is a strong current in English-speaking white liberalism, often evident, for instance, on BizNews, that does the same, albeit in a different register.

Reject racial paranoia

South Africa confronts many serious problems, including a stagnant economy, massive unemployment, systemic impoverishment, rising prices, frightening rates of violence, decaying cities and municipal services, and rapacious and sometimes dangerous political mafias. Although there are, of course, whites who have been murdered or who suffer unemployment, and many white people struggle with surging food prices and municipal bills, white people are, on average, vastly better off than other South Africans and much better placed to deal with these difficulties. White people enjoy all the rights and freedoms affirmed in law after apartheid and participate in all aspects of society.

The idea that white South Africans are an oppressed minority is risible. White South Africans who are concerned about real problems, such as pervasive violence, should be working with all other South Africans to address these issues rather than succumbing to delusional racial paranoia or making deliberate attempts to assert the sanctity of whiteness — a sanctity always sustained by the reduction in the value accorded to others.

The problem here is not solely a matter of the hallucinations of racial paranoia being taken seriously by Trump and Musk, two of the most powerful people on the planet. It is also that it is being used to threaten and pressure South Africa and curtail its sovereignty.

White South Africans must make it clear that claims of white oppression in South Africa are absurd. We must oppose racism at home — whether from Afrikaner nationalists or English-speaking liberals — and reject any attempt by the US to punish South Africa for its principled stance at the ICJ. We must insist that the serious problems South Africa faces are addressed through democratic disputation by the South African people, not appeals to the power of the Big White Father in Washington.

Richard Pithouse is distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies, an international research scholar at the University of Connecticut and professor at large at the University of the Western Cape.