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.” “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.”
