He has “reposted” or approvingly quoted posts claiming that South Africa is our future; that the United States is at risk of turning into a “Global Favela”; that the Left is “import[ing] a new voting block from the Third World”; that “all other [racial] groups show extreme in-group preference and particular hatred for white people”; and that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani seeks to “eradicate white people”. 

The agents of collapse are unassimilated immigrants, aggrieved black Americans, and progressive elites who have inflamed resentment through years of identity-based moralizing. The implied endpoint is civil conflict, for which he wants whites to prepare themselves.

These claims would be alarming coming from anyone. From a man of Musk’s unparalleled resources and influence, they warrant loud and unambiguous rejection. The hundreds of thousands of likes and millions of impressions garnered by Musk’s posts suggest that his views are shared by more than a few others. Despite flashpoints over immigration and high crime in a handful of American cities, the conditions in the country are generally peaceful. The streets are generally safe. The crime spike we endured in 2020 has fallen off. So why has “the race war is coming” proven to be such an attractive rallying cry?

I thought I had an answer. In my inaugural essay for UnHerd, I offered a short genealogy of our present political moment. I argued that President Trump’s rise had been abetted by a backlash against progressive overreach, especially on matters of race, and I expressed concern that the reactionary energy unleashed in 2016 — and again more intensely in 2024 — would culminate in a repudiation not only of racial politics, but of blackness itself. 

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But the “backlash” frame, while not inaccurate, isn’t what is most important about the present moment. It captures the direction of political motion but misstates its mechanism.

Backlash suggests something like a political analogue to Newton’s third law of motion: progressive excess produces an equal and opposite reaction; grievance is answered by grievance; and if the reaction takes on a racial coloration, that is only because the initial action was racially tinged. In this view, Trump’s return appears as a kind of inevitability — an elastic band released after being stretched too far. But this way of thinking drains politics of agency. Human beings are not rubber bands. They choose, within limits, how to respond to strain. Those limits are shaped by politicians, institutions, and the culture at large. These organize raw dissatisfaction into strains of discourse, thought, and belief, with varying degrees of coherence. 

The Right’s response to progressive identity politics has not chiefly taken the form of repudiation. It has taken the form of adoption. A focus on racial identity remains the coin of the political realm. What we are witnessing is not merely a backlash. It’s a convergence.

For years, identity politics was treated — rightly — as a pathology of the Left. It displaced the individual as the bearer of moral and political claims, and instead proposed group membership, defined by race, gender, and sexuality, o as the proper grounds for justice. Classical liberals warned that once politics was organized around groups rather than persons, the state would become an arena of zero-sum contestation among identities, with predictable consequences for social cohesion. During the “racial reckoning” of the late 2010s and early 2020s, we saw enough of that dynamic to last a lifetime.

Yet in the months since Trump’s return to office, it has become clear that identity politics has not been defeated. It has just been rebranded. An insurgent movement on the Right has concluded,  quietly but unmistakably, that identity politics is not a moral error so much as it is a powerful political technology. As a democratic ideal, it is corrosive. As a tool of mobilization, it is extraordinarily effective. What I had previously described as backlash (against overly aggressive anti-racism) now looks more like a realization: the right has decided it can no longer afford to leave the weapon of race-identitarian politics unused. 

Enter Elon Musk. 

Before dismissing the Tesla and SpaceX boss’s vision of open racial conflict outright, it is worth steel-manning it — internet parlance for presenting the strongest version of an argument before proceeding to contest it. Musk’s framing resonates because it speaks to genuine disorder that many associate with race. Crime has risen in some cities. Immigration has strained administrative capacity. Progressive elites have often appeared more interested in moral signaling than in competent governance. Many citizens reasonably feel that institutions no longer enforce rules impartially or tell the truth about trade-offs. Against such a backdrop, warnings about social fragmentation do not sound like hysteria. They sound like realism.

But realism requires discrimination and discernment. Musk’s diagnosis leaps from institutional failure to demographic destiny, from policy breakdown to fighting in the streets. That leap is not evidence-based; it is interpretive. And it is here that thoughtful analysis must reassert itself.

As I see it, the imagery Musk deploys draws on two sources: conspiratorial narratives about demographic “replacement”, and his own reading of civilizational failures in post-apartheid South Africa. In one widely circulated episode, Musk endorsed a post claiming that if white men were to become a demographic minority, they would face slaughter, and that only white solidarity could ensure survival. The meaning was unmistakable. This was not a critique of identity politics; it was a remarkably disquieting embrace of it.

Not long ago, open calls for white solidarity from a figure of Musk’s stature would have been politically radioactive. Today, they are met with a mix of alarm, rationalization, and — in some quarters — approval. That shift itself is the real story. Musk did not invent white identity politics. But he legitimizes them. His importance lies less in the sincerity of his beliefs than in his role as a permission-granting figure. When ideas migrate from fringe spaces into elite discourse, they change character. Errors that might remain contained at the margins become dangerous when voiced by powerful actors. Such is the case here.

Musk’s central error is conceptual. He is importing a post-colonial model of race politics into Western multicultural societies where it does not apply. Post-apartheid South Africa was not renegotiating the status of racial groups within a stable constitutional order; it was adjudicating the inheritance of the state itself. Questions of sovereignty, land ownership, elite replacement, and historical authority were all in play at once, in a context of racial domination and dispossession and a setting in which institutions were weak and legitimacy was racially compromised. Under those conditions, identity became destiny — because in the end, there was no other dimension along which to mediate political conflict.

Today’s pluralistic Western societies are not in that position. However bitter, their race-related conflicts take place within settled, universalist constitutional frameworks with entrenched property regimes and comparatively high-capacity institutions. Their arguments are about distribution, recognition, and status, not the wholesale transfer of political power. To read these conflicts as incipient post-colonial struggles is simply a grave category mistake.

What makes this mistake so consequential is that it is structurally enabled by a political culture already organized around identity. Once politics is understood — on Left and Right alike — as a contest among morally freighted groups, the temptation to treat race as a civilizational variable becomes overwhelming. In that context, Musk’s rhetoric is weirdly logical. It mirrors the structure of progressive racialism while reversing its moral valence. History still marks groups, in this view. Power still reproduces itself through institutions. Racially disparate outcomes still function as moral evidence. Only the identities of the winners and the losers, the offenders and the victims, have changed.

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Whether Musk genuinely believes in white cultural superiority is beside the point. What matters is the effect on the discourse. Once race is treated as destiny, society reorganizes itself accordingly. Institutions, insofar as they operate according to the disavowed pluralist precepts, fade into irrelevance. Demography becomes fate. Politics become a struggle for survival among groups. Race war seems to be imminent.

Institutional realism provides the best alternative to this logic. A serious response to rising crime asks whether policing, prosecution, and punishment are functioning coherently. A serious response to immigration asks whether borders are enforced, asylum systems administered, and newcomers integrated through work and civic obligation. A serious response to inequality asks how education, housing, and labor markets actually operate, rather than how they are symbolically narrated. These are institutional questions. They admit of failure, reform, and learning. They do not require racial metaphysics or “civilization-or-barbarism” histrionics.

This is also, in part, a story about the evolution of the American Right. Identitarian, white racial paranoia on the Right has filled the vacuum created by an earlier ideological unraveling. After World War II, the so-called fusionism associated with William F. Buckley and his National Review magazine attempted to unite three distinct, occasionally contradictory strands of American conservatism into a single governing philosophy: economic libertarianism, a hawkish foreign-policy , and moral traditionalism. The viability of that alliance depended on general conditions of peace and prosperity in the United States, and a kind of gentleman’s agreement that adherents of each strand would mostly overlook their disputes with the others. They were stronger together than apart. And it helped that they were together in the trenches against a common foe: Soviet Communism and those who sought to expand its influence in the West.

But then Communism collapsed; the shared enemy went away. The forever wars and financial crises of the millennium’s early decades broke the accord, with neoconservatism discredited abroad, libertarianism discredited at home, and religious traditionalists left to pursue their own ends. The rise of Trumpian populism marked the definitive end of the fusionist project. But Trump’s distaste for consistency created an ideological vacuum, and a need for a coherent program to organize the resentments he brought to the surface. 

It would now appear that identity politics rushed in to occupy the space, because it is emotionally energizing and cognitively cheap. It offers a mirage of moral clarity without institutional analysis, and solidarity without responsibility. Racial fatalism on the Right thus functions as a substitute for a serious account of institutional decay.

The deeper tragedy is not that identity politics has migrated from Left to Right, but that it has become the shared grammar of political conflict itself. We now argue loudly about which identities deserve protection or priority, but we no longer argue about whether identity is the proper battlefield. That tacit agreement is more troubling than any particular tweet. For once that terrain is fixed, escalation becomes inevitable.

Liberalism’s achievement was never the denial of any group’s level of historical suffering, but discipline in managing the present. It sought to thin out identity enough that a sense of shared citizenship could survive our grievances and differences. That achievement is fragile, and it is now under open assault — from a Left that moralizes identity and a Right that weaponizes it.

If the most influential figures in our public life continue to teach citizens to read pluralistic democracies through the lens of post-colonial struggle, the consequences will not be confined to rhetoric. Today’s permission structures become tomorrow’s political programs. Ideas that begin as tweets harden into expectations. Right-wing advocates of identity politics promise a restoration of order. What they will more likely produce is the acceleration of distrust and a descent into chaos.

The White House was responding, most obviously, to the passage through South Africa’s parliament of the Expropriation Act, a bill allowing the state to confiscate land for reasons of public interest. This includes the pursuit of racial equity, and in some circumstances it will now be legal to seize land without compensation. Though my cousin’s comment was ironic, it also conveyed a hint of nervousness. As her husband put it, somewhere at the back of their minds there does lurk the possibility that one day the state will simply confiscate their land. Prominent politicians have been threatening to do so for years — and not just firebrands such as Julius Malema of the Economic Freedom Fighters party. In 2017, to give one example, then-President Jacob Zuma promised to strip white landowners of their property.

Understandably, then, many Afrikaners will feel relieved to have Trump’s support. And yet, by singling them out as victims, the American President is effectively claiming them as members of a Western civilization that he is now the guardian of. This doesn’t do justice to the subtleties of the Afrikaans identity, and nor is it likely to win them many friends in the country where they reside.

Indeed, in South Africa as elsewhere, Trump’s comments were immediately mocked. The rebuttal was obvious: the country’s white minority, which includes English-speakers as well as Afrikaners, still enjoy a vastly higher standard of living than their black and colored compatriots. It has been widely reported that white South Africans, despite making up just 7% of the population, own over 70% of the country’s private land, though the import of these figures is not primarily about economic justice; in England, for comparison, half the land belongs to less than 1% of the population.

The issue, rather, is historical and cultural. Apartheid, the system of white minority rule that ended three decades ago, is still regularly invoked in political discourse. Though often dressed up in Marxist jargon, land redistribution is both promised and demanded as restitution for historical dispossession. At the same time, land carries a special significance for many Afrikaners as well, since farming is a profession and way of life with which they identify to a unique extent. “Boer” — the colloquial term for Afrikaner — literally means farmer.

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More importantly, I’m not sure that people in the West citing ownership statistics genuinely understand the situation of South Africa’s white farmers. Take my cousin again. In some ways, she and her family enjoy a very high quality of life. But 15 years ago, her first husband was murdered during a robbery at their farm, and she was dumped in the wilderness with her six week-old infant. Then she married a man whose first wife had also been murdered, on the same farm where they live now. The actual business of agriculture entails a constant struggle against a corrupt, disintegrating and ideologically hostile state. A few years ago, an illegal settlement sprang up in their area, consisting of improvised housing and such basic services as the inhabitants can provide for themselves. It now numbers thousands of people and will, they fear, soon spread onto their land.

These experiences are far from unusual: South Africa regularly sees the murder of 50 farmers each year. Over the past decade, such crimes have invited wider interest in the Afrikaner question. In particular, Western conservatives who suspect mainstream institutions of anti-white bias claim that the attacks are being ignored or downplayed. Elon Musk — himself born and raised in South Africa — has referred to the farm murders as genocide. The issue is inherently muddy due to the inconsistent nature of the crimes, and the very high levels of violence in South Africa more generally. But there are certainly many Afrikaners who resent their own government’s failure to even recognize the problem. “White farmers are regularly characterised as ‘criminals,’ ‘land thieves,’ ‘rapists,’ ‘oppressors,’ by high-ranking politicians,” Ernst van Zyl, spokesperson for the Afrikaner interest group Afriforum, tells me. “Farm murders are often characterised by incredibly brutal levels of torture. In many cases nothing is stolen.”

Arguably, though, Trump’s concern with Afrikaners has less to do with their daily lives than their status as symbols. According to the framework of post-Seventies liberal thought, Afrikaners were the archetypal villains: white invaders who subjugated the indigenous people of a foreign land. It is on this basis that it became unthinkable to express sympathy for them as a group. Trumpism is all about attacking such taboos, and overturning the moral hierarchies they imply. In this case, he is turning the logic of progressive liberalism against itself: are Afrikaners not also an ethnic minority, with all the protections that is said to entail? Can they not also suffer discrimination, and be granted the sacred status of refugees?

This tendency of outsiders to view the Afrikaners in terms of political symbolism, though reductive, is nonetheless made possible by their peculiar history and identity as a group. For centuries, they have inhabited a position of existential ambiguity, understanding themselves by turns or even simultaneously as an endangered minority and divinely sanctioned masters; as humble land-dwellers and custodians of a higher civilization; as fundamentally both African and European. This is one of the paradoxes of the Afrikaners: their situation is singular and unclear, yet they have become a common point of reference for the expansive and passionate convictions of others.

As the historian Hermann Giliomee has written, South Africa was “unique in the world of European colonization”. White settlers didn’t form their own self-sufficient society (as in North America or Australia), nor did they remain a small administrative and commercial elite (as in India). Rather, they dominated only in certain places, often only precariously, and even there were dependent on African labor. This last point cannot be stressed enough. The relations between Afrikaners and the peoples they encountered in Africa, whether the Khoisan inhabitants of the Western Cape region or the Bantu-speaking tribes inland, were extremely varied. Yet they were usually defined, at least in part, by the contradictory dynamic of trying to remain socially distinct while also needing these groups to serve as workers and fighting auxiliaries. This meant that Afrikaners frequently engineered situations — including, arguably, Apartheid itself — in which they exploited other populations while seeing themselves as an endangered minority.

No less important, the Afrikaners were not the only people of European descent in southern Africa. From the early 19th century, when the region began to be incorporated into the British Empire, they endured an uneasy coexistence with British settlers, numerically fewer but in most other respects much more powerful. Supremely confident in the superiority of their customs, manners and laws, the Victorians in southern Africa often looked down on the Afrikaners as primitive and backward, and sometimes even as an inferior race. The English South African writer Olive Schreiner remarked that, as a child in the 1860s, it would have been unthinkable for her to eat food or sleep in a bed that an Afrikaner had previously touched. As late as 1946, the average Afrikaner’s income was less than half that of an English-speaking South African’s.

The British had their own bitter conflicts with African peoples, and much of their involvement in southern Africa was driven by land speculation and the mining of gold and diamonds. Yet the British at this time were also a liberal superpower. Inspired by Evangelical Christianity, they were radically committed to the welfare and basic rights, as they saw them, of non-Europeans in their empire. A major source of friction with the Afrikaners was the British insistence on protecting their workers, who included Khoisan peons and, until 1838, slaves of South Asian and African origin. In a foreshadowing of more recent events, some Afrikaners felt they were unfairly discriminated against. One of their leading figures, Piet Retief, complained in the 1830s of the “prejudice” stirred against them by “dishonest persons, under the cloak of religion, whose testimony is believed in England, to the exclusion of all evidence in our favor”.

The struggle for independence from Britain would provide crucial moments in the Afrikaner nationalist mythology. One of these was the Great Trek, when groups of Afrikaner pioneers fled the Cape Colony in their wagons through the 1830s. Some of these were wiped out by disease and battle, but others managed to establish a pair of Boer Republics beyond British grasp. Another milestone was the Boer War, fought 1898-1902, in which these states fought unsuccessfully to maintain their sovereignty from the British Empire. The people who would later become the world’s most famous oppressors were, ironically, also the first anti-imperialist freedom fighters of the 20th century.

Yet Afrikaner identity was late in finding a definite shape, and its eventual contours were far from inevitable. Even in the late 19th century, the word “Afrikaner” was used loosely and inconsistently. Few regarded Afrikaans — essentially a simplified and creolized version of Dutch — as a distinct language. In the Cape, many Afrikaans elites were loyal subjects of the British crown. As one leader put it: “I am, I hope, a patriotic Dutch-Afrikaner, but if anyone dares to touch the English flag I shall shoot him point blank.” An influential proponent of the Afrikaans language, S. J. du Toit (no relation), ended up supporting the British in the Boer War. Today, Afrikaners are not even the largest group of Afrikaans speakers. That would be the coloreds, whose mixed ancestry includes the Khoisan people of the Cape and Asian slaves from the early colonial period.

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Likewise, Afrikaners are far from homogenous today. Besides the gruff farmers of popular imagination, there are cohorts of Johannesburg hipsters, artists in the Karoo Desert and suburban white-collar professionals. The South African diaspora in places like the UK and Australia numbers in the hundreds of thousands, of which a significant proportion are Afrikaners like myself. The members of this far-flung tribe certainly do not think alike, as I discovered when I canvassed opinions on Trump’s intervention. Some regard the American president almost as divine, others as Mussolini with a toupee.

Still, I get the sense that the challenges of adapting to South Africa’s crumbling state are bringing parts of the Afrikaans community closer together. At AfriForum, for instance, van Zyl talks about the twin principles of staatsbestand and selfdoen: “state-proof” and “autonomous”. These are clear in the efforts of neighborhoods and community groups to plug gaps in basic services and infrastructure, from police patrols to road repairs. Such cooperation, together with Afrikaans schools, historical commemorations, religious belief, sports fixtures, and the all-important ritual of the braai or barbecue, have produced a kind of thick identity I’m not sure I’ve encountered in Britain.

I’ve spoken to numerous Afrikaners who have tried Europe or the United States and found life under the care of a more structured “first world” state to be suffocating and infantilizing. I remember asking one such man if South Africa’s violence didn’t bother him, to which he shrugged and said that everyone dies eventually. Others, of course, are less glib. My cousin’s husband told me that he’s still excited about the country, that there is so much to enjoy — but for his children’s and grandchildren’s sake, he worries about the volatility of South African politics and the ongoing deterioration of the country’s institutions.

The backing of Trump and his supporters may also turn out to be a mixed blessing. To an important degree, his gesture relies on an image of the Afrikaners as an embattled outpost of Western civilization, about to be swallowed by the chaos of the African continent — a metaphor for the perceived threat to traditional ideals within the West itself. Insofar as this implies that somehow, after 350 years, Afrikaners still do not fully belong in Africa, it risks deepening the longstanding ambiguity of their situation, and playing into the hands of those who really would like to turf them out.