This article offers a critical analysis of several basic themes in the ideology of the new white right, as it has developed in the 25 years since the democratization of South Africa. The article describes expressions of anxiety regarding “genocide of the whites,” frustration and resentment of the rule of the so-called black ethnocracy. In addition to describing the point of view of the new white right, the article lays out the necessary context for understanding the biases, blind spots, and racist assumptions that establish and construct that point of view. The article describes in particular the racial angst that the ideology of the new white right in South Africa demonstrates, nurtures, and disseminates. This is an angst that is rooted in the experience of loss—loss of privilege, loss of symbolic capital, and loss of Afrikaner nationality and homeland, as imagined before the walls of apartheid were removed.

The importance of the new white right in South Africa reaches beyond the country’s territorial borders. It exports to new right-wing movements and activists in North America, Europe, and Australia a narrative according to which the South African miracle—peaceful democratization under pressure from the international community of conscience—has failed. It provides the new white movements throughout the world with an apocalyptic image of the white humankind as a persecuted minority facing extinction, even in countries where whites are actually the hegemonic majority.