The Changing World Order and Rise of Transcontinental Racial Politics
by Yusuf Bangura.
I recently listened to an insightful 25-minute interview of The Guardian journalist, Chris McGreal, on Democracy Now!’s YouTube channel (Democracy Now! 2025), which discussed the apartheid roots of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who has carved out for himself a big job in Trump’s government to reorganise the US’s federal bureaucracy. In that interview, I was struck that a group of white South Africans who were raised in the apartheid system had penetrated not only the high-tech industry in the US but also joined forces with Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, inserted themselves into the Trump administration, and were part of Trump’s grand strategy to overturn the liberal order in the US and globally. The insights I gained from the interview led me to read more about the background and activities of the group. I also refreshed my understanding of hard-right or white supremacist groups in the US, Europe and South Africa, to gain insights into what looks like a convergence of interests and the transnationalisation of the group’s activities.
After listening to the interview, I hypothesised that the breakdown of the global liberal order is not only empowering authoritarian regimes across the world and ushering in old-fashioned big-power politics, as realist scholars in international relations predict; it is also connecting three types of racial politics globally. These are the politics of the anti-immigrant and pro-white MAGA movement in the US; the politics of the nativist or anti-immigrant far-right parties in Europe; and the politics of ‘white victimhood’ in South Africa, which seeks to hold back or overturn progressive social change in South Africa and elsewhere. Read more …
