I have always been deeply uncomfortable with the nexus between the classical liberal movement and ethnic identitarianism.
Martin van Staden believes that my concern about what black working-class voters would make of the Free Market Foundation hanging out with AfriForum in the United States is “quite a new populist streak” on my part.
I wrote: “I would argue that by so closely associating with AfriForum, the FMF has done more to bolster the misperception of classical liberalism as a policy to preserve white privilege than all its opponents have done in 30 years. I think it was a disastrous decision.”
“Ordinary black South Africans can see the good (and it’s virtually all good) that AfriForum does, on a broad basis,” he replied. “Vibes analysis is largely the purview of political, media, and academic elites, and the anonybots on X. … The FMF doesn’t worry about supposed academic perceptions when it sides with hawkers or immigrants either. It won’t make an arbitrary exception for Afrikaners.”
Van Staden likes to studiously miss the point. There is no history of sectarian conflict or a negotiated constitutional settlement involving street traders or immigrants in South Africa. They are not previously advantaged groups with a history of denying the civil rights of the majority of the population.
Political reality
The argument I made in my article earlier this week wasn’t about whether or not AfriForum does good work. It does, and I acknowledge it, despite my misgivings about the resurgent old-school Afrikaner nationalism that is associated with it.
It is also not about whether the FMF is making an argument that is in principle correct. It is, and I agree with (almost) every word of the speech Van Staden plans to (or just did) deliver in Washington.
The argument is about whether organisations that claim to promote free markets – like the FMF, and also like the Institute of Race Relations, of which Van Staden and I are both members – ought to get in bed with organisations that can at best be described as ethnic nationalists.
Leave aside the philosophical objection that individual liberty is the very foundation of classical liberal thought, while group rights based on inborn characteristics like ethnicity or nationality are intrinsically collectivist, and therefore in conflict with the classical liberalism Van Staden claims to espouse.
Groups like AfriForum, Solidarity and Lex Libertas, in whose support Van Staden is addressing the Americans, are viewed by many – and perhaps most – South Africans as the inheritors of white right-wing politics, and defenders of white privilege earned from decades of oppression. They count among their members outright racists, unrepentant defenders of apartheid’s good intentions, and vocal ethnic separatists.
You may argue that these perceptions are wrong. You may even be right. But that does not change the political reality in which we operate.
Negotiated settlement
South Africa is a country where races were long pitted against one another, and where a peaceful negotiated settlement that demanded compromise on all sides was hard-won and paid for with blood.
My concern is that in this context, it is fatal to associate a small-government free-market ideology, promoted as an alternative to today’s crony-capitalism and socialism, with the interests of white Afrikaners.
Or, in the words of the FMF’s Ayanda Zulu, who ironically intended them as a defence of his organisation’s mission to support AfriForum in the US: “Liberalism in South Africa has a historical association with the protection of white privilege, and the fact that the liberal movement’s racial composition is predominantly white only reinforces the perception that it serves minority rights. Your advocacy can speak to everyone, but you cannot simply work your way around this.”
That is exactly my point. If the classical liberal movement is ever to be taken seriously by a majority of South Africans, the last thing it can afford is overt association with white minority interests.
I’m not one of those woke left-wingers who thinks that all white people must feel guilty about their privilege or must apologise for the sins of their ancestors. Unlike critical race theorists, who demand anti-racism, I don’t believe promoting non-racialism is itself racist because it denies present-day disadvantage due to historical discrimination and ongoing systemic racism. Just because I’m not right wing does not mean I’m left wing. Far from it.
But I do believe that the mission of advocates for classical liberal ideals is to convince a majority of policymakers in South Africa (or even better, a majority of voters) that non-racialism, liberty and free markets will benefit the poor in particular. We need to explain how these ideas will benefit the disadvantaged majority, not how it will benefit white Afrikaners.
We need to sell the idea not that economic empowerment for the disadvantaged is morally superior to black economic empowerment (though it is), but that abolishing race laws will practically benefit everyone, including the black majority, the poor, and the unemployed who are the intended beneficiaries of black empowerment.
That is the art of practical politics. All else is populist theatre.
Who benefits?
The message that these policies would benefit white Afrikaners, even if true, and even if that benefit is perfectly justified (because racial discrimination is ipso facto unjustified), will be fatal to the classical liberal project in South Africa.
Tell voters why they would benefit (and policymakers how their constituents would benefit) from non-racial, merit-based, pro-disadvantaged policies, not how we, white people in general, or Afrikaners in particular, will benefit.
Raising the point of principle that race shouldn’t matter, and that minority groups are entitled to lobby in their own interests and entitled not to be discriminated against, does not change the fact that in South Africa race does matter.
Acting as it if does not simply because it should not might feel transgressive and morally superior, but it is naïve and politically immature.
Or, as a friend of mine put it in a private message: “He [Van Staden] is really determined to help the ANC and EFF, isn’t he? This is so dumb. People don’t like foreign interference in their countries, and they don’t like people who collaborate with foreigners who interfere in their countries. Even when it’s a foreign influence as despised as the Trump admin.”
Nothing new
Contrary to Van Staden’s claim (and quite dishonestly, in light of his presence in meetings at which I have raised exactly this concern), this disquiet about how the libertarian or classical liberal movement is perceived among the electoral majority, and my wariness about associating it with the white right, is not a “new populist streak” on my part.
Fourteen years ago, I wrote about proposed libertarian enclaves in wealthy areas: “The perception that libertarians speak for the rich only, and cannot truly represent the poor, is an age-old conundrum. … However, given that this perception is widespread, it would be counter-productive to propose, as a first attempt at creating an enclave of freedom, an area that is already rich and largely white. Sure, libertarians pride themselves on not being politically correct, but this isn’t so much a case of being politically wrong as being politically stupid.”
And further: “If you’re convinced a libertarian enclave is the only way to demonstrate the transformative socio-economic power of free markets and free people, you’re entitled to your view. But when even your serious proposals are likely to encounter political resistance, it doesn’t do to give critics soft targets like entrenched privilege and prejudice to shoot at.”
A year later, in 2013, in a column about the launch of the stillborn Libertarian Party of South Africa, I quoted the sole black person who was involved (a Nigerian) but who was ultimately not elected as an office-bearer: “I helped start this, and wrote most of the founding documents, but now I am afraid the party is dead in the water. I am surprised that they do not realise that a party leadership of six white men may be perceived as racist.”
I wrote: “Leon Louw, who did not join the new party, welcomed its formation in principle, but also struck a skeptical note. He argued that the ANC and DA are not as authoritarian as libertarians often represent them. He added that libertarians, instead of merely stating opposition to government force, should say what they will deliver: healthcare for all, jobs for all, houses for all. ‘The parties that don’t deliver it always promise it,’ he told the meeting. ‘Libertarians need to argue why their policies will deliver it.’”
In a column about secessionist movements, written in 2019, I wrote:
“There’s also the more thorny issue of racism among those seeking secession. The motto of the [United Liberty Alliance] is Ex Unitate Vires, which was the motto of the former National Party government. Whether such a clear appeal to the apartheid past will ever attract the required two-odd million votes in a referendum is hard to imagine.
“Someone wearing a CapeXit shirt went on about how his people (meaning Afrikaners) came into a largely unpopulated South Africa and created one of the richest countries in the world, before ‘the world’s most stupid people took over and f****d it all up’. That is also not exactly a non-racial sentiment that would appeal to classical liberals.
“Pragmatically, of course, those who secede don’t have to like those from whom they secede, provided they don’t infringe on their basic human rights. There is a precedent for secession based on common ethnic background (and ethnic hatred, for that matter) alone. But again, whether such sentiments will appeal to more than a small minority of disenchanted white people is highly doubtful.”
Rejecting rainbowism
Of course the resurgence of Afrikaner nationalism, ethnic isolationism and even separatism, is wholly reactionary.
South Africa was once united across lines of colour, creed and class. Every country needs its founding myths, and racial harmony was ours.
The blame for creating the space for this resurgence must lie squarely with the ANC. It rode the tiger, in Terence Corrigan’s words, of African nationalism “as a means of consolidating its own position and rejecting criticism from without”.
It isn’t hard to understand the rise of the white nationalist right, whether in South Africa or around the world. Yet that does not make it right.
Answering Afrikaner nationalism with African nationalism was wrong, and answering African nationalism with Afrikaner nationalism is equally wrong. Both movements are illiberal, and ought to be rejected by anyone who purports to represent classical liberal ideology or free markets.
As I wrote in Bring back the Rainbow Nation, at the start of the new national coalition government in 2024: “An open, expansionary, growth-oriented and liberal economic policy stance that is friendly to business, trade and investment, together with a renewed sense of non-racial unity among the people of South Africa, may be just the tonic that the country’s moribund economy needs to begin growing again.”
Against enclaves
Saying that liberal economic policy is exactly what AfriSol is calling for is not helpful. They’re not exactly ideologically committed to it – they’re nationalists, after all, and would as soon embrace protectionism and communitarian welfare. But to the extent that they advocate for free markets, they are right.
The thing is, they do not have the political capital to do so.
Saying that if they cannot get that, they have every right to go it alone is also not a sound strategy. As I wrote all those years ago, demonstrating that a bunch of largely privileged white people, who collectively are the wealthiest demographic in the country, can make non-racialism and classical liberalism work for them is not an achievement.
I refuse to accept that the best way, or even the only way, to promote classical liberal ideals is to accept that free societies can only exist within isolated enclaves or ethnic communities, or that classical liberalism is a feature of Western civilisation for which non-Western societies are simply not cultured enough.
Classical liberalism and its Enlightenment forerunners, dragged Western civilisation out of the bonds of feudalism and into the modern age, and there is no reason to believe it cannot do so for other societies.
We’ve been trying for a century to convince people that individual liberty and free markets are good not only for rich elites, but especially for the poor and the unemployed. If rich elites withdraw into “free” enclaves and leave the poor to their lot, we must accept that classical liberalism has failed as an appropriate ideology for a unitary South Africa.
There is a powerful faction within libertarian and classical liberal circles that wants to accept exactly that. They use terms like “decentralisation”, “federalism” and “subsidiarity” to argue that economic and political freedom are simply not possible in a large and diverse country like South Africa.
You’ll hear them say that uniting the four provinces in 1910 was a mistake, and that the idea of ethnic homelands was perhaps not such a bad one (albeit badly implemented).
That is how you bring back apartheid via the backdoor, and I will have nothing to do with it.
The art of the deal
Yes, Afrikaner interest groups are right to say their members have a right not to be discriminated against. In any negotiation, however, how you will benefit has no place in your sales pitch. You need to sell your counterpart on how the deal will benefit them.
Instead of demanding your rights you need to convince people to give you your rights.
Regardless of whether AfriSol’s demands are technically correct, for free market campaigners to associate their ideological advocacy with the interests of AfriSol is not how you achieve that objective in practice, for all South Africans.
On the contrary: it will set the cause of liberty in South Africa back by decades, if it hasn’t already done so. AfriSol probably doesn’t care, but Van Staden should.
War or peace
I say that, assuming that Van Staden cares about promoting classical liberalism as the key to peace and prosperity for all South Africans, and isn’t only concerned with the interests of the ethnic minority with which he identifies.
Perhaps he does not. Perhaps he has given up. Perhaps he thinks a South Africa in which we “recognise the injustices of our past … and believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity” is no longer an achievable ambition, and is no longer worth fighting for.
Perhaps he thinks that today’s discrimination is morally indistinguishable from apartheid, that today’s government has no more legitimacy than the apartheid government did, that the ANC are basically Nazis (as his invocation of WWII metaphors suggests), and that today’s race laws merit the same strategy of resistance that the ANC deployed against the government of apartheid South Africa.
I do not believe so, but if he does, it would explain circling the wagons, withdrawing into an ethnic laager, and preparing for war without caring what the enemy thinks. If so, rest in peace, free markets.
[Image: Bronzed replica ox-wagons drawn into a laager at the Battle of Blood River Monument in Kwazulu-Natal. Renier Maritz, 2005, used under the GNU Free Documentation Licence]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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