Liberalism’s last stand — the GNU represents a last chance. Let’s see if SA liberals grasp it

style="font-weight: 400;">Leningrad Cowboys Go America, directed by the Finnish master of deadpan comedy Aki Kaurismäki, that perfectly predicts the chaos that would eventually follow the Cold War. 

The film details a Soviet balalaika band dragged to the United States by their autocratic manager, Vladimir, after he is told that Americans will “buy any shit”. As the band traverses the country on their way to play a wedding in New Mexico, Vladimir behaves like a communist party boss, which is to say, like an American capitalist. 

He slurps Budweiser, chows steak, feeds his band raw onions and exploits their labour for his personal comfort. When the “Revolution” finally comes, it is absurd rather than violent — Vladimir is bear-hugged, tied up and stuffed in the rear seat of a Cadillac. Sadly, his overthrow is only temporary. Following a title card that reads “Democracy Returns”, Vladimir is once again in charge, Bud in hand, his charges grim and hungry. 

Leningrad was released in 1989, two years and change before the final fall of the Soviet Union. But Kaurismäki understood very clearly that “democracy” was a mutable term and that liberalism would perhaps prove as inhumane and unforgiving as its ideological adversary. In the years since, perhaps even Kaurismäki could not have anticipated how liberalism’s failures would produce, first, a return of hardcore authoritarianism in Russia, and second, the rise of far-right illiberalism throughout the West. 

In the early 90s, blissfully unaware of Finnish cult cinema, South Africans from all camps — former white racist nationalists, former black communist nationalists, socialists, intellectuals, academics, celebrity chefs, retired assassins, retired retirees, sex workers, yogis and, of course, genteel liberals themselves — decided to gather around liberalism’s warming fire. 

The resulting Constitution, drafted under a government of national unity that included ex-fascists and ex-freedom fighters in a weird if expedient mélange, produced a document that is often described as progressive, but is more accurately considered liberal in both its broad strokes and its details. The Constitution was not created in a vacuum — South Africans were encouraged by the “international community” to come up with something that mimicked what a US Democrat thinks the United States is. And after all, following the fall of communism, liberalism was the only meal on the menu. 

While tantalisingly plated, it proved over time to be deficient in taste and calories. 

Let’s take, for instance, the US experiment, which is now reduced to two walking corpses jacked on beta blockers and statins. The first represents a liberal faction constrained by law but grindingly exclusionary — a class of nobles that US republicanism was meant to banish in favour of an inclusive meritocracy. The second represents a disruptive cabal of anti-constitutionalists, dismissive of the rule of law, determined to banish democratic fripperies in favour of ethnonationalist authoritarianism. 

Sound familiar? 

It should, because South Africa’s latest GNU is similarly divided. On one side, there is the Ramaphosa faction, aligned in the main with the Democratic Alliance, ostensibly committed to upholding the tenets of a liberal Constitution. On the other, a series of linked and overlapping factions committed to “parliamentarianism” and African nationalism. 

For now, the liberal faction holds the balance of power. To call this tentative is a laughable understatement, largely because liberalism’s dividends have proved so elusive for most of the people in this country. It comes down, in the end, to economic inclusion — and not by communism or socialism’s standards, but by the central liberal tenets of openness, access, opportunity and meritocracy.

Things have grown so bad that the defining economic text of our age, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, actually kicks off in South Africa. Its first chapter details the Marikana massacre, and reminds us of the failure of the Mandela/Mbeki/Zuma governments to produce fair outcomes, and how even modest redistribution schemes entrenched a small elite which rules to this day. Famously, Mbeki-ism proposed social democracy — the “welfare state” that, since World War 2, most liberal regimes considered their default setting. (His detractors have described him as neoliberal, but it’s unseemly to argue about such matters in public.) It didn’t work, because it couldn’t work — plug-and-play politics isn’t a thing in a country devastated by centuries of feral racial exploitation, deranged classism and hyper-capitalism. 

And so, something must change if liberalism is to survive in the new GNU. The question is: does anyone in power want it to? 

* * *

Liberalism, of course, has as many definitions as it does academics studying its attributes. The kindergarten explanation can genuinely be agreed upon: As the Italian political scientist Domenico Losurdo writes, “Liberalism is the tradition of thought whose central concern is the liberty of the individual.”  

By extension, liberalism concerns the individual’s rights — freedom of movement, freedom of speech and freedom of thought; freedom to own property; freedom to participate in a free market. 

From this hub, the spokes go in many directions: there is freedom from, and freedom to. More thornily, there is also the question of what constitutes property. Quite shittily, when liberalism was taking shape as a dominant political concept, it was generally understood that human beings — which is to say, slaves — were objects to be owned, traded, and protected by law as property. 

Thankfully, liberalism, like most ideas, has refused to remain constant. One hopes that most liberals today would disavow slavery. But the truth is that the ownership of money that cannot be touched and grows in darkness — in other words, capital — now produces similar imbalances between plantation baas and no-wage worker. The thrust of Losurdo’s arguments, and he is not alone, is that liberalism was built on an absurd contradiction — freedom for all, but only for some. 

Things become even more complicated when we consider liberalism’s various offshoots and breakaway sects. There’s “classical” liberalism (slightly racist small “c” conservatism); neoliberalism (capitalism inoculated from democracy); neoconservatism (neoliberals who like to bomb stuff); ordoliberalism (neoliberalism while being German); “woke” liberalism (liberals who paint Pride flags on zebra crossings); and libertarians (fundamentalist liberals who believe in magic). 

As the economist Branko Milanović writes, in almost all cases, but especially on the left, liberal parties have become the preserve “of the educated credential elites, while the working and middle classes have lost their influence and even representation”.

Rightly or wrongly, South African liberalism has always been associated more with elite business interests than with individual rights or humanism. Afrikaner nationalists enjoyed pointing this out before and during apartheid; African nationalists enjoy pointing it out today. Mining magnate Harry Oppenheimer, the ur-liberal business/statesman, proved in Parliament time and time again that liberals were committed to growing the economy while being slightly nicer to black people than their fascist counterparts. 

The nationalists didn’t care about the economy functioning as a marketplace, but in segregation as an ideology — by its very nature, indentured black labour allowed the economy to flourish. 

Then, as now, liberals were called on their bluff, and they often ignored their principles to nurture their economic interests. The incrementalism practised by those liberals during the bad old days and their failure to stand by their convictions wasn’t missed by radicals, socialists and communists. Let’s just say it didn’t make a positive impression. 

To be sure, there were committed liberals during apartheid and they did help make a difference in the end. But the hangover from too many compromises over too many years has persisted. The Rainbowist construction of the Mandela/Mbeki era is now a national punchline, along with many other tenets of post-apartheid South African liberal thought. 

But for the past week or so, as the shape of the new GNU starts to solidify for however long or short a time, liberalism is back. And it’s badder, if not worser, than ever. 

* * *

At this present moment, the South African elite, along with the “markets”, has rallied around an alliance between centrists in the ANC and the DA, along with a smattering of other liberals and the odd neo-fascist or two. There are some truly godawful people in this GNU, but there are also pragmatists who understand the stakes all too well: this is South African liberalism’s last stand. 

Who knows, perhaps it’s global liberalism’s last stand. South Africa has never been a leader when it comes to political thought, only a follower. Everything we have was begged, borrowed or stolen from elsewhere: from warmed-over Sankarist sloganeering to anti-woke Americanisms to ecstatic Russophilia. But we now arrive at an opportunity to reinvent liberalism — or at least get it largely right, which is to say, left — for the next three-quarters of the century. 

There will be challenges, though. 

South Africa is, according to several measures, the most unequal society on Earth. Make no mistake: this will destroy the country, just as it has destroyed so many places over the centuries. 

According to a new study by the complexity scientist Peter Turchin, which may end up rivalling Piketty’s Capital in terms of lasting importance, vast disparities in capital distribution presage societal collapse. His latest book, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, details how dozens of countries and systems over the centuries have died as factional battles for dwindling spoils result in violent revolution. 

This is not a book based on vibes. Turchin’s methodology is sound, his data are terrifying, and the new field he and his colleagues have innovated — called cliodynamics — shows clearly how societies tend to unwind due to warring poles of concentrated wealth and oceanic poverty. As he writes of the United States: 

[T]he extra wealth flowing to the elites (to the proverbial “1 percent,” but even more so to the top 0.01 percent) eventually created trouble for the wealth holders (and power holders) themselves. The social pyramid has grown top-heavy. We now have too many “elite aspirants” competing for a fixed number of positions in the upper echelons of politics and business. In our model, such conditions have a name: elite overproduction. Together with popular immiseration, elite overproduction, and the intra-elite conflicts that it has engendered, has gradually undermined our civic cohesiveness, the sense of national cooperation without which states quickly rot from within. Growing social fragility has manifested itself in collapsing levels of trust in state institutions and unraveling social norms governing public discourse — and the functioning of democratic institutions.

If that feels like looking in the mirror, it should: the same is broadly true of South Africa, along with many other Western-style liberal democracies. 

Can this be reversed? Turchin insists it can be, although he is agnostic about liberalism’s chances to course-correct. Similarly, it is hardly my job to advocate for liberalism over all other -isms. It is my job, along with every journalist in this place, to hold South Africa’s current governing elite to their word. 

They say that it’s their intention to rule benevolently according to the Constitution. Luckily, there are copies freely available online for their perusal. Perhaps providentially, many — but certainly not all — of South Africa’s problems can be rectified if our legislators and policy engineers adhere to the law of the land and take seriously the need to reduce our wild economic disparities. So, will the libtards finally nail it? We shall see. But if the market, corporate special interests and the imperatives of free-floating capital end up governing by proxy, then we are fucked. 

The data are there to foretell our fall. 

As with Leningrad Cowboys Go America, democracy can seem exactly like authoritarianism if the outcomes aren’t fair and labour isn’t adequately compensated. Happily, it turned out okay for the Cowboys. In the years since the release of the film they’ve dropped classic LPs such as We Cum From Brooklyn, Buena Vodka Social Club, and even a Christmas album. The US is much like South Africa: they buy any shit there. I’ll take such guilelessness as a good thing. DM