Much has changed in South African civic discourse since the beginning of 2025, to the point of being jarring to many of us. What could explain the about-face, especially among those who used to portray themselves as the moderate middle?
Dr James Myburgh’s masterful forensic demolition of Max du Preez’s latest book has exposed how fragile the new narrative against AfriForum and Solidarity really is. In the space of a few hundred words, Dr Myburgh knocked Du Preez’s entire thesis clean out of the water.
My own column last week on the FW de Klerk Foundation asked what on earth had happened to an organisation once anchored in FW de Klerk’s own federalist and non-racial convictions.
Both pieces should be seen in the context of the dramatic, almost overnight shift in the posture of many South African classical liberals, “quasi-liberals”, and self-described moderates over recent years. Du Preez, judging by Dr Myburgh’s analysis, is evidently one of these, having abandoned his own (recent) prior views seemingly on a dime.
The question is: what gives?
The shift
The shift was not subtle.
Before January and February of 2025, there was broad agreement in these circles that expropriation without compensation (EWC) represented one of the gravest threats to property rights, investment, and long-term prosperity.
The South African Institute of Race Relations’ Index of Race Law, which I compiled and which was published without fanfare in December 2022, was rightly regarded as a straightforward public database of racial statutes. Few in the media or commentariat paid it much attention.
AfriForum and Solidarity, while always controversial in some quarters, were not routinely accused of “high treason” for doing what they had been doing for years already: meeting with governments in Washington DC, London, Brussels, and elsewhere to raise concerns about farm murders, racial discrimination, and minority rights.
Then Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term as President of the United States in January 2025.
Within weeks – specifically in early February – the tone changed completely.
On 2 February 2025, Trump posted on Truth Social: “South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY.”
This checks out. This is precisely what broad swathes of civil society in South Africa had been saying for years, for no other reason than that it is true.
Trump announced that the United States would cut off all future aid funding until a full investigation was completed. Days later, on 7 February, he signed an executive order titled “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa”. It explicitly cited the Expropriation Act, stating that the law enabled the government “to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation”. The order froze aid and framed South Africa’s policies as human rights violations.
The American president later pressed Cyril Ramaphosa directly on these issues, including violence against farmers.
At long last, a global hegemon was calling the African National Congress (ANC) to order. After decades of letting the ANC misbehave as it pleases, the Western power which in many ways cleared the way for the ANC to come to power in 1994, had had enough. What a boon for reform in South Africa, I remember thinking on the morning of 3 February.
Almost immediately, however, many in my own tribe – classical liberals and those broadly on the preservation of liberal democracy – reflexively took the ANC’s side in the resulting geopolitical tension.
People who had agreed, 1:1, that EWC was a catastrophic idea, suddenly declared Trump’s concerns to be either completely fabricated, or at best exaggerated.
The Index of Race Law, more or less uncontentious for three years, became a media obsession – not because journalists suddenly found it odd that there are still some 145 racial statutes on the books, but because it was now apparently necessary to portray it as “propaganda” feeding the Trump administration’s “disinformation”.
I sat through hours of press interviews where the real subject was never the substance of the Index, but whether it was “a tool to undermine South African sovereignty”.
AfriForum and Solidarity, which had lobbied Democratic and Republican administrations alike for years with the same consistent message, were suddenly branded as engaged in an international “propaganda war” and even treason.
What changed?
Nothing material had changed in “AfriSol’s” advocacy or the substance of the Index of Race Law.
What had changed was the identity and personality of an American president who had now taken a (welcome, long-overdue) interest in South Africa.
This is the crux.
The national-conservative currents Trump rode did not begin with him. Activism for Brexit, European right-wing movements, and earlier American critiques of South Africa’s trajectory long predated 2025. There was never this level of hysteria.
The distinguishing factor is Trump’s particular and peculiar personality: his vibes, his aura, his grating, unpolished and unrefined charisma.
To many liberals, especially those with an overly romantic attachment to the idea of how “a statesman” should behave, Trump is viscerally offensive. He does not sound or behave like Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Ardern, or even press and elite darling Cyril Ramaphosa.
These heads of government ruled with significant authoritarian streaks – centralising power, and sometimes even suppressing dissent – yet they projected impeccable vibes. Their demeanour aligned with what (incorrectly) passes for the “liberal” ideal of how a modern democratic leader should feel.
Trump is decidedly not that.
The result is a form of mass hysteria that overrides sense and principle.
The Trump fan club
I say this as someone who has never been in the sometimes equally grating Donald Trump fan club.
I disagree with Trump sharply on international trade, immigration policy, and much of his economic and social agenda.
It is perfectly appropriate to question and criticise the policies of the Trump administration and the premises of Trump’s governing philosophy, which is why I steer clear of accusing others (or accepting the accusation from others) of having “Trump derangement syndrome”.
But despite these deep disagreements with him and with his Democratic opponents, I count myself lucky for never having fallen into the trap of believing that Trump is the next incarnation of Adolf Hitler, which is a preposterous notion sincerely believed by otherwise sensible people.
Understanding how such evil as the Third Reich could come about, be maintained, and be rationalised, has been one of my primary interests over many years.
Donald Trump is not a Nazi or a “fascist” in the contemporary sense people understand it. He is not Adolf Hitler, nor Benito Mussolini or Francisco Franco either. We know what actual totalitarianism looks like. Donald Trump is not that.
Normal policy, abnormal vibes
He is a former New York Democrat who became a Republican, surrounded himself with a mixed cast of advisors, and has governed in the mould of a relatively authoritarian but still democratic president – much like many others across the Western world, including Cyril Ramaphosa, whose underlying philosophy is considerably more authoritarian and, in fact, totalitarian in ambition.
Authoritarianism is, regrettably, normal in modern democratic governance.
Keir Starmer has not faced removal for using state authority to undermine the democratic and civic protests of his opponents – something he should be held criminally liable for. Nor was Justin Trudeau held similarly accountable for using state power against peaceful protesters against his lockdown policies. In South Africa, a tiny Afrikaans interest group, PRAAG, gets its accounts seized by the Reserve Bank with negligible engagement with the owner, while senior politicians in the Economic Freedom Fighters, and of course Jacob Zuma, have free access to their bank accounts despite being implicated in corruption over decades.
This is normal in the modern West. It is accepted as routine.
What is not normal to the liberal sensibility, is Trump’s personal style.
And that personal distaste has colonised political discourse in South Africa.
Suddenly, downplaying EWC, softening on race law, or attacking civil groups that highlight minority vulnerabilities, becomes a way to signal opposition to Donald Trump’s vibes.
The FW de Klerk Foundation’s apparent retreat from robust federalism and non-racialism, Max du Preez’s book that contradicts the essence of his own earlier writings on Afrikaner disillusionment with the ANC’s misgovernance – these shifts cannot be explained by new evidence or new ANC behaviour.
They can only be explained by the arrival of a figure whose very existence offends the aesthetic and emotional priors of a certain class of South African opinion-former.
Myburgh’s article shows how Du Preez’s thesis – that AfriSol has somehow manufactured a false sense of victimhood – ignores his own past acknowledgements of real policy failures, farm murders, and the alienating effects of so-called Black Economic Empowerment policies.
Distaste for Trump’s aura is being projected onto South African realities. Organisations doing the same work that they did during the tenure of Obama or Biden are now cast as existential threats to sovereignty, simply because an American president the elites despise has noticed (and noted) many of the same problems.
2025 is the year
The year 2025 is the clear dividing line.
Go back and read the columns, statements, and social media posts of prominent South African “liberals” and moderates before February 2025, and compare them to what came after. The only variable that explains the sudden silence on EWC, the sudden chill towards the Index of Race Law, and the sudden eagerness to smear civic watchdogs, is the personality of Donald J Trump.
This is unfortunate and self-defeating.
Allowing visceral dislike of one man’s demeanour to distort our analysis of South Africa’s actual (and existential) policy failures – on property rights, race law, centralisation, and minority persecution – does nothing to advance freedom or prosperity. It merely imports American culture-war hysteria into our own discourse, at the expense of principle.
South Africa’s challenges existed long before Trump noticed them. They will remain long after he leaves office.
The question for those of us who still prioritise principle and tangible prosperity is whether we will let another country’s personality-driven political psychodrama dictate what we are willing to say about our own. Principles, not vibes, should guide the advocacy for a free and prosperous South Africa.
[Image: Gabriel Douglas from Pixabay]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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