Liberalism is not really the subject of Richard Calland’s latest exhibition of shameless schadenfreude (”The crisis of liberalism”, June7).
The piece is of the same order as his notorious confession of ”joy in pain” at the World Trade Centre massacre. ”The instinct that now leads us to quietly celebrate the news of an Israeli casualty” is the same blood-sniffing instinct that took him ”to see a politician in distress … in the same way that rubbernecking men and women are drawn to a car crash, however macabre …”
His is a bad case of Paradigm Lost. The vicarious victim syndrome that he and the rest of the left appear to use as a substitute for an actual belief system now that theirs has crashed seems to me to boil down to little more than a desperate identification with anyone (including entirely miscast candidates like the warlike Palestinians) who will fit the description of the downtrodden.
Elsewhere the lost left are rich kids wreaking havoc in the name of fighting the unfair effects of globalisation. Here, like Calland, they are bent on giving the socio-economic rights a collectivist construction neither the Constitution nor the Constitutional Court gives them. (Nor does the Democratic Alliance: I am happy to see that our approach during constitutional negotiations has to date won through, being that of a rationality review to ensure an uncaring government is held at least to the essentials for survival.)
Does the left speak for the wretched of the Earth? Of course not — nobody asked them. They are speaking for and about themselves, and so their commentaries boil down to an inventory of who they like and who not.
Do we care? No. But I must insist that he should get the roles and characters right in his gleeful misreading of the DA, at which point he will see that his script falls apart. He has made an arbitrary leap from the strategic alliance with the late New National Party to the larger question of ideology.
On strategy, Hennie Bester was a prime mover, why, the very bridegroom who first leapt into the ”lustful marriage” to the NNP. I think it is unforgivably self-serving that he sloped off the scene without taking formal political responsibility for the self-same sleaze Calland sees ”slurping around the bed” (my word, but Calland wallows).
As for Graham MacIntosh being uncongenial to liberals like me when it comes to ideology: quite the contrary. I did not vote for the abortion law, which I consider an appalling piece of work. I particularly enjoy having MacIntosh back in Parliament for his loud insistence on the freedom of conscience, which should be extended as of right to doctors and nurses who are not prepared to abort babies over a certain age of gestation, or at all. It is not abortion that is ”the defining issue for liberalism”, but freedom of conscience.
I have absolutely no idea what Calland means when he says that I give the impression of enjoying the ”ride” of the purported move to the ”right”, whatever that means in the Calland lexicon of liberalism.
Believe me, enjoyment is not the word. Despair frequently is, in defending fundamental human and economic rights. These are not just ”useful in overturning dictatorships”, they are in constant need of protection under this government to prevent us sliding in any such direction.
There are two political visions in South Africa: the tripartite alliance’s historicist National Democratic Revolution, and the DA’s liberalism.
Some members of the ruling party strive to keep the issues of colonialism and racism alive in order to reach only the first of the two stages in the ”two-stage theory”: they are African nationalists cast in the mould of the old Afrikaner nationalists. (And some, accused of being Xhosa Nostra, are tribal nationalists, fitting the old mould even more neatly.)
Other sections of the ruling party believe the first stage will lead in relentless scientific fashion to the second stage, socialism. Even the first group believe, in Lord Acton’s immortal description of nationalism, in ”a kind of fate, not freedom”.
By contrast, liberalism is synonymous with freedom. It was the only belief system left standing at the end of the past century against these self-same ideologies. It is based on the natural fundamental human rights and freedoms of individuals, whose democratic consent to be governed gives the system its legitimacy in the first place, and who must be protected through checks and balances, and by constant vigilance.
The crisis liberalism and freedom face in South Africa is the assault on those values as they stand enshrined in the Constitution. The concept of equality before the law and equal treatment is being eroded to build a black oligarchy.
Calland thinks President Thabo Mbeki is pursuing the ”third way” but the signs of statism are everywhere: the most spectacular and most recent example, given the fact that the Internet is the one arena where the nation state has disappeared, must be the government’s attempt to nationalise our domain name and turn it into dot.coza.nostra.
Fighting is what it takes to counter these tendencies, not the condescending underdoggery that I suspect Calland associates with ”true liberalism”, and with which he would naturally identify as a self-styled vicarious victim. There is arguably a crisis, but it is the crisis of the country, not of the DA. And there is only the DA to combat it.
Dene Smuts is a Democratic Alliance MP