In the same way that rubber-necking men and women are drawn to a car crash, however macabre, there is something undeniably fascinating about the sight of a politician in distress. That was why I went to the Democratic Alliance’s press conference last Thursday, the day after “the man from Absa” had begun what I sense will be the inexorable process of at least
partial corroboration of Jurgen Harksen’s allegations of dodgy donations to the DA.
Humour is an exquisite weathervane. Like a mirror, it offers an honest message: equilibrium or disequilibrium. Tony Leon can be witty, and sometimes very funny. But last Thursday the humour radar was seriously off course. The jokes were contrived, as Leon tried to disguise the undisguisable: he was and is rattled, seriously rattled.
When Hennie Bester resigned the previous afternoon, gatvol with the sleaze that slurped around the bed of his beloved Democratic Party’s initially lustful marriage to the New National Party, Leon recognised that he had to try and offer some decisive leadership to stop the rot.
He announced an external forensic audit of DA accounts. Too little, too late for his party. Yes it will begin a process to arrest the decline towards rock-bottom, and through this its fortunes will begin to recover. But this cannot disguise the fact that the DA’s current predicament is an inevitable outcome of its fundamental failure of strategy since 1994.
The thinking then was as follows. The DP is a 2% party. We need to get bigger, and if we are serious about winning power we have to win black votes. But we can’t go into the townships and be taken seriously with 2%. In politics, at least, size does matter.
Thus, a fatally flawed strategic seed was sown: we will first collect votes from wherever we can most easily acquire them, said the DP high command. And, in the short term, that meant from minorities — especially from white voters disaffected with the National Party.
It succeeded in this — the DP became the second-biggest party and the official opposition. With a smile as big as the proverbial Cheshire cat, Leon took his parliamentary seat opposite President Thabo Mbeki and life looked rosy. But it was an illusion. Within just three years the three main planks of the DA long-term plan lie in ruins.
First, the attempt to build a broad anti-African National Congress coalition has fallen apart. The relationship with the NNP was not only untenable because of the clash of political cultures; it meant that the DA/DP was now closely associated with a brand of politics that was essentially alien: the pork-barrel crudeness of the likes of Peter Marais, Gerald Morkel and Leon Markovitz. Consuming the rotting carcass of the National Party was not, in fact, a very clever idea.
Since the 1994 election the second main strand of DP/DA strategy has been to relentlessly attack the ANC over corruption from a position of clean government and integrity. Now that lies in tatters as well. Within 18 months Leon has had to force from office not one, but two DA mayors. To lose one mayor might be considered misfortune, but to lose two looks like carelessness.
Which brings me to the third and final ruined strategic plank. Opposition parties have to show that they are capable of government. The Western Cape — both the province and the Cape Town unicity — was the obvious place to do it. Power was duly won in both spheres of government.
But now power has been lost in the province, with the installation of an NNP-ANC coalition government and, once the “crossing-the-floor” legislation is passed by Parliament in the next week or two, the DA may relinquish power in the Cape Town city council as well.
Put simply, the DA can no longer put itself forward as the party of clean, alternative government.
What does this mean for opposition politics in South Africa and, more importantly, for ideology? Thabo Mbeki’s “third way” has moved the ANC to the centre-ground of politics. This is where social democracy, a la Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder, feels most comfortable. But it creates a serious challenge for liberalism. Where does it go? Does it hold its ground and fight for supremacy or, like capital, does it go in search of greener pastures, and if so, at what cost?
The response of European liberal parties, such as the United Kingdom’s Liberal Democratic Party, has been largely to move to the left. Leon took another road. His brand of neo-liberalism could not stomach the European option, so he took his party right. Some true, traditional liberals, such as Helen Zille and Colin Eglin, came along, however reluctantly. Some, such as Dene Smuts, even gave the impression that they were enjoying the ride — enthusiastically adopting the style of their leader in body, if not in mind.
But the strategic direction has forced such liberals to sit with some pretty uncongenial people. And I am not thinking here of the Markovitzs and Morkels of this strange Western Cape world, but of the likes of Graham McIntosh, who recently wrote a long letter to the Cape Argus in essence complaining about the reproductive rights of women and their right to choose abortion.
The right to abortion has, in the past half century, been a defining issue for liberalism. Supporting the pro-choice lobby was the first test. Which is why so many real liberals could not stomach the Leon journey or the “fight back” intolerance of his 1999 election campaign.
They are left behind, marooned without a party. But this is not their only difficulty. More significant must be the realisation for liberals that their time has come and gone. Liberal thought can no longer cope with the imperative of contemporary politics and of the harsh global environment of massive inequality. Individual rights and freedoms, useful though they are in overturning dictatorships, are blunt instruments in the quest for meaningful socio-economic justice.
That is why people like John Kane-Berman and Patrick Lawrence, die-hard liberals of the old order, struggle to interpret and understand modern developments in human rights thinking. In a recent article, they could not disguise their dislike of the socio-economic rights in South Africa’s final Constitution and, in particular, the argument put forward by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa and the Community Law Centre in the recent nevirapine Constitutional Court case that such rights should contain a “minimum core”. Such liberalism would prefer to defend the rights of “big” government to determine its own priorities.
What an odd position for a liberal, one might think. But it is easily explainable: in the end, liberals are uneasy with collective rights that seriously confront power relations and threaten the supremacy of market capitalism. Which, in turn, is why, despite the desire of traditional liberals to sustain their voice and values, liberalism has become a euphemism for conservatism and is properly treated as such by the progressive left.
This is the real crisis of liberalism. The plight of the DA is just an entertaining side show.
Archive: Previous columns by Richard Calland