Much has changed in South African civic discourse since the beginning of 2025, to the point of being jarring to many of us. What could explain the about-face, especially among those who used to portray themselves as the moderate middle?
Dr James Myburgh’s masterful forensic demolition of Max du Preez’s latest book has exposed how fragile the new narrative against AfriForum and Solidarity really is. In the space of a few hundred words, Dr Myburgh knocked Du Preez’s entire thesis clean out of the water.
My own column last week on the FW de Klerk Foundation asked what on earth had happened to an organisation once anchored in FW de Klerk’s own federalist and non-racial convictions.
Both pieces should be seen in the context of the dramatic, almost overnight shift in the posture of many South African classical liberals, “quasi-liberals”, and self-described moderates over recent years. Du Preez, judging by Dr Myburgh’s analysis, is evidently one of these, having abandoned his own (recent) prior views seemingly on a dime.
The question is: what gives?
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