American Conservatism's Home Grown Defenses of Apartheid

Apartheid and its legacies have suddenly come to haunt us. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and others have formative ties stretching back to apartheid South Africa, prompting a slew of writing on the effect this had on their politics. These pieces are interesting but inaccurate. Ascribing the blood-and-soil turn of the GOP to the Paypal Mafia misses the mark. While they may or may not have been motivated by formative experiences in South Africa, the reality is that conservatives in the United States did not need to be goaded into supporting apartheid. They did so at the time, and not in a kneejerk way—their support for the apartheid order was carefully thought-through.

In 1977, William Rusher, one of the leading columnists at the National Review forwarded a piece he had written to an American lobbyist named John Chettle. Describing the piece, he noted that “Its last paragraphs point directly toward the formation of some sort of organization of Americans (and perhaps, as we discussed, Englishman as well) designed to open the minds of our Western intelligentsia to the proposition that separate development is not, necessarily and always, such an evil idea.”[1] “Separate development” was the euphemism that South Africa’s apologists used to describe apartheid. Chettle was working for the South Africa Foundation, a lobbying arm of the South African government that was waging a furious campaign to silence apartheid’s critics.

Rusher was not a lone voice in the wilderness working to defend apartheid. The National Review frequently ran sympathetic or even admiring coverage of the apartheid government. In 1963, William F. Buckley wrote that when it came to Hendrik Verwoerd, “there has never been any reason to doubt Verwoerd's own sincerity. He means to help the blacks.” At that time, Verwoerd was trying to inaugurate the so-called Homelands that would strip all black South Africans of their citizenship and confine them to “tribal homelands” that were overcrowded, impoverished, and designed to function as pools of cheap labor for white South Africans. Russell Kirk claimed that “the destruction of order in South Africa would be a catastrophe for the free world comparable to a communist conquest of Latin America.”

Why did South Africa attract such vociferous support? U.S. trade with South Africa grew through the 20^th century but was ultimately a very small portion of exports. Rare mineral imports were significant in certain sectors, but most libertarian ideologues and members of the Moral Majority weren’t emotionally attached to South African platinum. For many of them, South Africa seemed to sum up so many of their concerns about “civilization” at a time when the European-run world order was on the retreat everywhere else.

For cultural conservatives, South Africa’s government offered a lot of what they wanted from their own. Jerry Falwell claimed that apartheid was more of a “social reality than a government policy” and embarked on a media blitz defending South Africa in the mid-1980s. Falwell’s sympathy for South Africa makes sense: the government was deeply socially conservative, criminalizing abortion, banning pornography, and arresting LGBTQ individuals. The government waited until 1976 to even allow TV into the country out of a fear that it would promote race mixing and undermine traditional morals.

Conservatives of course celebrated South Africa as a bulwark against communism, and indeed the South African government was very committed to opposing it. But much like the United States, South Africans used communism as a convenient boogeyman to decry a whole host of things. The Suppression of Communism Act of 1950 defined as a communist anybody who might try and bring about “political, industrial, social, or economic change by the promotion of disturbance or disorder,” a definition so broad it could encompass anything. As the 1970s wore on, conservatives in the United States might agree that reform was necessary in South Africa, but it had to be carefully structured and paced, or it would doubtless result in a Marxist government led by Nelson Mandela, whom they insisted was a terrorist.

“Communism” in both countries and the fear of it was a fear of redistribution and of dismantling a racial settler-colonial empire. Writing a month after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, Buckley claimed that the shooting had been a “barbaric response,” but a barbaric response “firing in the defense of the homeland.” In an understated interview, Jeffrey Hart claimed that “I am sympathetic, to some degree, to the position of the former Dutch settlers, the Boers, who were there before the Blacks were there. There were only a few bushmen there when they arrived in the seventeenth century.” It was theirs, as far as they were concerned, and the principle of the thing extended across the Atlantic.

Even more fundamentally, apartheid in many ways seemed to be a way to talk about race and the idea of civilization in a socially acceptable way. Instead of focusing on inherent inferiority or framing it in terms of biology, people like Buckley could talk about “preparedness” or “fitness” to participate in government. Wilhelm Ropke argued as such in 1964, saying that blacks in South Africa were of a “utterly different type and level of civilization.” Little changed over the decades. In a 1986 column, Buckley maintained that thread and said that “it is preposterous at one and the same time to remark the widespread illiteracy in South Africa and to demand the universal franchise.”

Apartheid could even be constructed as a positive defense of diversity. One argument that got trotted out again and again was that South Africa was home to too many different kinds of people to ever function without control over its minorities: in a 1985 letter to Pat Buchanan, Davenport maintained that “it [South Africa] will need segregation of the races and tribes as well as minority rule.”[2] Davenport expressed again and again a disbelief that multiracial societies could ever truly be held together; in yet another letter, he explained that his opposition to one man, one vote in South Africa grew out of the fact that it “has not worked in the rest of Africa.”[3]

Because multi-tribal or multiracial societies could not function in their mind, apartheid was a system that actually promised a solution: by keeping everybody apart, it kept the peace. One of Reagan’s confidantes, Peter Hannaford, believe that a heavily devolved federal system was the best way forward for South Africa on the basis that “thoughtful South Africans of all races and ethnic groups do recognize these differences and are looking for a way to protect ethnic and minority rights and culture…”[4] Reason magazine among others ran with this line of logic; an interview with South African libertarian Leon Louw promoted the division of South Africa into a hundred cantons with extremely devolved government.

In this federal system, one gets a sense of what they wanted to promote: unrestricted capitalism. John Blundell, a British free-market supporter enthusiastically wrote about one of the homelands, Ciskei, and their attempts to aggressively deregulate, cutting taxes, and opening itself to foreign investment. The Bantustans had been designed to be pools of cheap labor, but whereas white South Africans initially imagined them as pools of labor for themselves, Blundell and others saw global sources of cheap labor.

But there were political dimensions to this as well. The English-South African economist W.H. Hutt laid this out in a letter to South African Prime Minister P.W. Botha in 1980, where he claimed that weighting people’s votes based on their income tax payments, saying “the reform that I am suggesting will, indeed, bring out the truth that the protection of property is the main function of government under ‘classic liberalism,’ as distinct from its function under certain so-called ‘democracies’ of transferring income from the politically strong to the politically weak.”[5] Hutt was an economist at the Hoover Institute.

Hutt wasn’t alone in this belief: John Davenport, an editor at Fortune and Barron’s expressed the same ideas. So too did Milton Friedman, who unsurprisingly received a very warm welcome during a speak tour of the country in 1976. He criticized the whole idea of political democracy as ineffective and contended that one man, one vote was a sham of an idea: the only real democracy that was possible was in a free market. Asked about unequal educational opportunities for black South Africans, Friedman’s response was that “surely the right way to go about it in the present circumstances is to impose identically the same fees on the Whites as you impose on the Blacks.” Within weeks, the country was aflame after South African police opened fire on protesting schoolchildren in Soweto; at no point thereafter did Friedman’s views change.

Apartheid, with a few tweaks and changes, was the perfect straitjacket to throttle democracy and all of the uncomfortable demands that came with it for the redistribution of property. It was also the perfect way to cement power, and even be able to claim that it was in the best interests of everybody. Now we’re relitigating this issue. It spells a depressing reality for many of us: the end of apartheid wasn’t the last battle against global white supremacy, but one of the first battles against a new, transnational form of it. It didn’t take Elon Musk or Peter Thiel to bring it back to the United States; editors at Reason and the National Review or visiting fellows at Hoover had been hoping for it for some time.

[1] “Letter to Chettle,” December 2, 1977, Library of Congress, William Rusher Papers, Box 83, Folder 10.

[2] “Letter to Pat Buchanan,” August 23, 1985, Hoover Institute, John Davenport Papers, Box 1, Folder 1-7.

[3] “Letter to Senator Garn,” March 28, 1987, Hoover Institute, John Davenport Papers, Box 1, Folder 1-7.

[4] “Letter from Peter Hannaford,” University of Nevada Reno, Paul Laxalt Papers, Box 20, Folder 22.

[5] “Letter to P.W. Botha,” March 17, 1980, Hoover Institute, W.H. Hutt Papers, Box 7.

Featured image is Children behind fence that separates them from the white community near Johannesburg in 1973.