Post-Liberation Politics
A few days backed I linked to a short take from Sasha Polakow-Suransky about the failures of opposition politics in South Africa. He has a longer take in The National that, I think, puts this in an enlightening perspective:
COPE, despite the hopes it inspired, fell flat – taking just under eight per cent of the vote, while the DA took almost 17 per cent and won control of the Western Cape. The fact remains that South Africa has not yet emerged from the era of national liberation politics. The Congress Party, which led the anti-colonial struggle in India, was not seriously challenged nationally for the first 20 years of independence and it did not lose control of the parliament until 1977. It was in the same year, three decades after the establishment of Israel, that voters there shocked the nation’s founding elite by electing the Likud opposition for the first time.
South Africa has not yet reached the stage where, as Johnny Copelyn puts it, “the previous order is so far in the background that it is no longer a compelling explanation for the problems people have”.
That said, there are also a bunch of countries that never emerged from the phase of initial domination by the liberation political party. Thus far, though, despite much hand-wringing related to Jacob Zuma I haven’t seen any real indication that democratic institutions don’t continue to exist in South Africa. The ANC just continues to have an extremely strong grip on the public imagination.
23 Responses to “Post-Liberation Politics”
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May 5th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Re: The Congress Party, which led the anti-colonial struggle in India, was not seriously challenged nationally for the first 20 years of independence and it did not lose control of the parliament until 1977.
And later this month, when Narendra Modi gets elected Prime Minister and starts slaughtering Muslims, perhaps Mr. Yglesias and his cosmopolite crew will come to realize the benefits of one-party revolutionary politics. Perhaps they might realize that India would be better off if the Congress had maintained unchallenged power and the BJP had been crushed like a viper in its cradle. Or, perhaps not. After all, liberal cosmopolites are not known for their perceptiveness.
May 5th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Sailer-bait!
May 5th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Yglesias and his cosmopolite-modernist crew have this touching faith that liberal democracy is always the answer. Touching, but also absurd.
May 5th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
“…perhaps Mr. Yglesias and his cosmopolite crew will come to realize the benefits of one-party revolutionary politics.”
If it’s good enough for Stalinist Russia, it’s good enough for me!
May 5th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
Before Hector hijacks the thread, I just wanted to say that Matt makes a very good point. Also, even in established democracies one party often dominates the goverment in most years for a very long time, ie the Liberals in Canada, the Tories in the UK, the Christian Democrats in Germany and Italy.
May 5th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
Hector’s view of the BJP is way overboard. They are hardly saints and many perpetrators of the 2002 riots in Gujarat need to be prosecuted, but the BJP is actually more democratic in their internal politics than the calcified Congress party which seems to only care about power when there is a relative of the Nehru clan in power. That being said, I would note that in the late 1960’s Congress in India ruled as a minority government (lacked a parliamentary majority).
May 5th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Oh, please, Hector. Even the ridiculous demonization of the BJP in the Western media can’t lead you to the conclusion that they are going to “start slaughtering Muslims” if such and such a person wins such and such an election.
May 5th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Why would Narendra Modi become prime minister? L.K. Advani is the BJP’s prime minister candidate, no?
May 5th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
Matt:
You’re being obtuse. Most of the handwringing over the election of Jacob Zuma is _not over the fact that a new opposition party didn’t defeat the ANC, it’s over the trend _within_ the ANC: from Mandela to Mbeki to Zuma, which is like going from George Washington to Marion Barry. It’s not an encouraging trend.
May 5th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
Another anecdote is the LDP’s grip on power in post-war Japan, which mirror’s Congress’ grip on India in the post-colonial era. Perhaps we will someday view the transition in Russia as one that has a historical precedent, and not a trenchant regression to Russian autocracy.
May 5th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
You know America didn’t have a stable two party system until after the Civil War. I think that is worth keeping in mind.
May 5th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Matt writes:
“Thus far, though, despite much hand-wringing related to Jacob Zuma I haven’t seen any real indication that democratic institutions don’t continue to exist in South Africa.”
What the hand-wringing over the rise of Jacob Zuma is about is not South Africa becoming less democratic, but South Africa becoming _more_ democratic, as epitomized by the shift in ANC leadership from the elitist Mandela and Mbeki to the populist Zuma.
In a population with vast inequalities of wealth (gini of 65 versus 45 in America and 30 in Finland), 21% unemployment, and 18.7% of the population having AIDS, populism can be concerning.
May 5th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
Most of America still only has a single party. In the American South, it’s the direct descendants of the revolutionaries, fighting for the same heinous bullshit.
May 5th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Re: Oh, please, Hector. Even the ridiculous demonization of the BJP in the Western media can’t lead you to the conclusion that they are going to “start slaughtering Muslims” if such and such a person wins such and such an election.
Western media be damned, Haukur. I’m of Indian extraction and I know very well, from Indians, who and what Narendra Modi is. Mind you, I am about the farthest thing from an Islamophile around, and I have to say the least, little fondness for the Muslim religion. However, whatever my views about Islam, Modi and his crew are little better than murderers. I make no such allegation about all the BJP rank and file, but no excuse can be made for Modi. He has blood up to his elbows.
May 5th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
The success of Modi and his crew, of course, is merely a proof of the ancient and age old argument against liberal democracy, as true now as it was then: “The mob will always choose Barabbas.”
May 5th, 2009 at 10:48 pm
Well, I’m always one to defend Hector when he’s right, and attack him when he’s wrong. So I must do both.
“perhaps Mr. Yglesias and his cosmopolite crew will come to realize the benefits of one-party revolutionary politics.”
I understand very well the benefits of one party politics when you need to win a war. But it really doesn’t work so well when you want to build a society. But one party politics never works anyway. If there is only one party, there will be factions within it. So there will always be many parties, we’ll just call them ‘factions’. Except that they kill each other to gain power, rather than asking people for their support. And I know that Hector doesn’t mean this. But I don’t know that. I just want to believe it.
May 5th, 2009 at 11:31 pm
What the hand-wringing over the rise of Jacob Zuma is about is not South Africa becoming less democratic, but South Africa becoming _more_ democratic, as epitomized by the shift in ANC leadership from the elitist Mandela and Mbeki to the populist Zuma.
In a population with vast inequalities of wealth (gini of 65 versus 45 in America and 30 in Finland), 21% unemployment, and 18.7% of the population having AIDS, populism can be concerning.
I don’t hold any particular brief for Zuma, but I think Sailer’s fears are overblown (although he presents them in a much more reasonable form here than the Zimbabwe scenario he touted previously). So Zuma doesn’t measure up to Mandela. But neither would any other politician in SA, or most other countries. Madiba was an extraordinary statesman, the Washington of his country.
As for the contrast between the “elitist” Mbeki and the “populist” Zuma, I suspect there is less here than meets the eye. Mbeki might have cultivated more of an air of polish and refinement, but where are the substantive differences in the ANC program in the Mbeki era and today? As an unwieldy and not particularly ideologically coherent Big Tent party, the ANC is trying to keep a lot of constituencies happy against the backdrop of fading memory of national unity during the Struggle: some constituents get populist gestures, some get their preferred public policies, others patronage or pork. There is no escape from that balancing act.
If anything, the more stylistically populist Zuma, with his revolutionary resume, his credibility in the townships, and his kinship with the Zulus (the largest ethnolinguistic group), may enjoy more leeway than Mbeki to follow the neoliberal course charted by the ANC since 1994, to the delight of capital-owners and the disappointment of many allies on the Left.
Finally, not all populist policies are as dangerous to the commonweal as Sailer implies. The expenditure of public funds to upgrade living conditions in the townships, for example, was a relatively inexpensive intervention that made a massive, tangible difference to the quality of life of millions. A bit more money thrown at health services, public transportation and primary and secondary education could do the same (though the policy issues and political barriers there are considerably more complex). If you ask how it is that the ANC remains so popular in the townships even though unemployment is up and per capita income has stagnated, you’ll find the answer in improved public services for the poorest (which is precisely the opposite of the perception of the middle classes; many of them have experienced a decline in quality as the provision has become more equitable).
Finally, I would counsel those who get exercised about Zuma’s unabashedly populist/revolutionary rhetoric and symbolism to take campaign stylings a little less literally. Yes, overheated rhetoric can have real world consequences, and I’d just as soon that politicians didn’t resort to it. But to get exercised because Zuma–a real, live, honest-to-goodness revolutionary at the head of a successful revolutionary movement–indulges in a little revolutionary nostalgia is to set a standard of propriety that our own founding fathers would not have met in the early years of the American Republic, what with all their talk of watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants and all that.
May 5th, 2009 at 11:44 pm
For the record, I am no ANC partisan, and look forward to the day that it fractures, or at least spawns some successful offshoots that help sort out the party system along coherent ideological lines. A healthy democracy needs alternating parties in power and a real opposition. (And, in the context of SA, it would be healthier if the government and opposition were not so visibly divided by epidermal melanin content.) It’s not surprising that the ANC as a political party inherited a lot of the loyalty it enjoyed as a broad-based national liberation movement. Add to that all the opportunists who jumped on board after liberation, and you get a ruling party that encompasses more ideological diversity and attracts a larger share of the electorate than is really healthy for democracy.
In practice, I’m not convinced that the COPE splinter group is a very promising start to a new party system, since the diferences between the Lekota faction and the Zuma faction seem to be more a conflict of rival personalities and patronage organizations than actual ideological competition. But who knows, it could be the seedbed of a more serious opposition, which development I would heartily welcome.
May 5th, 2009 at 11:51 pm
Why would Narendra Modi become prime minister?
Indeed. Perhaps if Hector had to put his money where his mouth is, he wouldn’t be so free with his fantasies.
May 6th, 2009 at 5:27 am
A case to consider is Pakistan, where Jinnah’s Muslim League lasted really only till the mid-50s. Another to consider is Bangladesh, where the Awami League rather rapidly lost power. But you would not call these countries models of political maturity, would you?
May 6th, 2009 at 5:41 am
Well, this is a rather informed response. Most people (over there) don’t seem to know that the African continent exists, let alone that we have a functioning democracy down here.
However, the problem with Mr. Zuma is that he faced charges that his personal financial adviser, multi-millionaire Schabir Shaik, solicited bribes for Zuma from foreign arms companies and bribed Zuma to get contracts. Shaik went to jail for these crimes (later released on questionable grounds). We are talking somewhat more serious charges than the ones which Nixon faced via Watergate.
Zuma was able to use his control of the South African intelligence services (he used to be head of ANC intelligence, and Shaik’s brother Mo coordinated the formation of new South African intelligence services) to bamboozle and bully the national prosecutor into dropping the charges. Then he went on to win the election.
I find that rather scary. I don’t think Zuma is a fit President. Nor do I think that he is of the stock of Marion Barry — I’m afraid he’s a bit more like a Mafiosi than that.
May 6th, 2009 at 5:44 am
Fostert,
Er, my point was more that if you have a ruling party that’s reasonably upstanding and responsible (like Congress) sometimes it’s better to have that party continue to exercise unchallenged power rather than open the political arena up to free-market Capitalists, radical Maoists, Hindu-Fascists, Sikh Separatists, and other assorted yahoos who will do their best to dismantle the system that Nehru worked so hard to establish. On the contrary, now we’re about to see (with Modi) how the yahoos act when they’re in power. The answer is, not well.
May 6th, 2009 at 6:09 am
Zuma is a Big Man in the African tradition. One should have some sympathy for Big Men. The multitudinous demands upon them are not obvious to Westerners:
The outstanding feature of African politics is the Big Man, of whom Kenyatta remains the archetype. In The Coup, John Updike burlesques the species in the voice of Col. Ellelloû, the puritanical Muslim Marxist who can’t abide his Kenyatta-like neighbor “Wamphumel Komomo, President-for-Life of Zanj: height six foot six, weight three hundred seventy pounds.”
Ellelloû gleefully snipes at The Coup’s stand-in for Kenyatta:
“Not a tuck in his patriarchal robes ungarnished by private gain, which he extracted from the toubab [European] corporations as blithely as his forebears the cannibal chiefs extracted hongo from the Arab slavers …”
Theodore Dalrymple, who practiced medicine in Africa in the 1970s, offers a more sympathetic appraisal of the burdens of being a Big Man:
“The young black doctors who earned the same salary as we whites could not achieve the same standard of living for a very simple reason: they had an immense number of social obligations to fulfill. They were expected to provide for an ever expanding circle of family … and people from their village, tribe, and province. ”
Similarly, when Updike’s dictator Ellelloû visits the French colonial villa that his first and most traditional wife, the equivalent of Obama Sr.‘s Kezia, had seized and which was now populated by an entire village of his extended family from the Salu tribe, Updike explains (in a couple of sentences more convoluted than even Obama can produce):
“Nephews, daughters-in-law, totem brothers, sisters by second wives of half-uncles greeted Ellelloû, and all in that ironical jubilant voice implying what a fine rich joke, he, a Salu, had imposed upon the alien tribes in becoming the chief of this nation imagined by the white men, and thereby potentially appropriating all its spoils to their family use. For there lay no doubt, in the faces of these his relatives … that nothing the world could offer Ellelloû to drink, no nectar nor elixir, would compare with the love he had siphoned from their pool of common blood.”
Dalrymple points out that the ever-increasing number of relatives a Big Man is supposed to support explains:
“… the paradox that strikes so many visitors to Africa: the evident decency, kindness, and dignity of the ordinary people, and the fathomless iniquity, dishonesty, and ruthlessness of the politicians and administrators.”
Paul Johnson notes in Modern Times that Kenyatta publically made fun of a leftist rival, Bildad Kaggia, for not being corrupt, for being a Little Man. Kenyatta boasted:
“We were together with Paul Ngei in gaol. If you go to Ngei’s home, he has planted a lot of coffee and other crops. What have you done for yourself? If you go to Kubai’s home, he has a big house and has a nice shamba. Kaggia, what have you done for yourself?”
Barack Obama Sr. loved to play the Big Man. His son Sayid recounted:
“You know, your father was very popular in these parts. Also in Alego. Whenever he came home, he would buy everyone drinks and stay out very late. The people here appreciated this. They would tell him, ‘You are a big man, but you have not forgotten us.’” [pp. 389-390 of Dreams from My Father’