Those resisting Trump’s MAGA mania have seen how freedom can be taken for granted

The thing about freedom is that those born to it take it for granted. 

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson sang in Me and Bobby McGee, a song about liberation from constraints and limitations.

Those once unfree, like the vast population of South Africans who grew up before 1994, know what it feels like to be free. Anyone who has survived an authoritarian government understands the feeling.

To be able to speak your mind, love who you love, think for yourself, make a meaningful life, call out the corrupt while living in peace with others is the aim of a constitutional democracy.

The freedom of religion, the freedom not to believe, the freedom to start a political party, the freedom to talk back to the president.

Hobbled freedom

In South Africa, we are all free but we are not all equal. Technically, our Constitution offers all the tools needed to address and redress centuries of imbalance and inequality.

However, these are freedoms that are hobbled for those who have been excluded and deprived of some of those fundamental rights, including personal dignity, affordable or public housing, public education and public health.

South Africa is not a poor country. It is an unequal one.

The Gupta brothers, with their bestie Jacob Zuma and his acolytes in the ANC, siphoned off R57-billion in public funds between 2016 and 2017.

Steinhoff’s Markus Jooste pumped R100-million out of the coffers of investors and into his horses, his mansions, his trinkets and toys.

If you would like to imagine what R1-billion might look like, imagine spending R10,000 every day for the next 250 years and you would not have gone through the pile.

It will take South Africa’s new coalition government years to repair the massive damage done to some institutions. Other institutions, although they were under attack, have survived. The judiciary, the National Prosecuting Authority, the Special Investigating Unit, the Asset Forfeiture Unit. 

Young South Africans all around us are ready to take up the challenge.

Authoritarian creep

Should you have stopped a US resident 15 years ago to ask if they thought their country was “free”, in fact the “land of the free”, they would have unequivocally replied in the affirmative.

The national anthem told them so:

“And the rockets’ red glare

The bombs bursting in air

Gave proof through the night

That our flag was still there

O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave”.

Yet within a short time the US finds itself governed by a party and a man who is the epitome of Western sado-capitalism – transactional to the bone – Donald Trump and the Republican MAGA cult.

Guided into the moral morass by technology and algorithms, with the freedom of choice and speech obliterated by fake news and lies, Americans who support Trump are political lemmings.

And the tech bros who supported Trump laughed up their sleeves, while Russian President Vladimir Putin laughed out in the open.

In retrospect, many people will deny supporting such a malevolent leader, who came to power seeking retribution and violence.

The technological brainwashing on Trump’s Truth Social and Elon Musk’s X works on the same atavistic circuits that Nazi propaganda genius Joseph Goebbels tapped into. 

Americans believed their democracy to be secure, old and intact, a shining example to be exported, sometimes by force and chicanery, to the rest of the world. And yet, from afar, we watch masked, uniformed and unnamed ICE goons dragging people from churches, shopping malls, schools and shopping centres to be deported.

History will have all the receipts. The US has finally made itself the fool many believed it to have always been. The poser. Its primary mass export is its hamburger culture, which birthed a hamburger president. 

Those who know their freedoms are being removed in the US are fighting back. There are protests all over, citizens filming ICE arrests and various other extra­judicial acts of lawfare.

Those resisting MAGA have seen how freedom can be taken for granted and that within just a few months, if it is not stopped, violence will be the law of the land.

South Africans are, for once, not at the political knife edge where we have had to live for hundreds of years. We are free. We should cherish this. 

The young South Africans I encounter as I move through South Africa know and understand this. We have nothing left to lose… DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.