Since the debacle of the DA's support and then opposition to the Equity Employment Amendment Bill and the accompanying and equally crazy new BEE Bill, the party has come to its senses enough to launch a large damage limitation exercise. Helen Zille, Wilmot James, Lindiwe Mazibuko and others have all been frantically busy in the media.
Lindiwe Mazibuko's response struck me as the most honest in that she admitted (Sunday Times, 17.Nov. 2013) that the DA has changed its stance on affirmative action since Tony Leon vociferously opposed the original Equity Employment Act of 1998 - a change which has never been explained to voters or even party members. And she also admits that it is a problem that Helen Zille is trying to perform her DA leadership role only as a day job while putting in the main hours at another job altogether.
The DA leadership has pressed the panic button really hard over this so that we have also had articles by its Director of Communications, Gavin Davis, which, astonishingly, attacks Tony Leon and the "Fight Back" campaign and the DP's decision to ally itself (briefly) with the NNP plus a similar attack by Wilmot James. All these articles inspired by the DA leadership strongly attack the critics who expressed alarm at the DA's original stance on the EEAB.
All of which prompts three large questions.
First, who authorized the attacks on Tony Leon? This is bizarre, not only because no previous Prog or DP leader has ever been publicly attacked by their own party before - and those attacking him all owe their careers to him. Colin Eglin was clearly irked by Jan Steytler, his predecessor as Prog leader, but he kept that to himself. When Van Zyl Slabbert suddenly resigned as the Prog leader many were shocked and hurt, but Eglin refrained from any public criticism of Slabbert. In the same way, Tony Leon sometimes had problems with former party leaders but he refrained from all public criticism of them. Yet it is difficult to believe that the attacks on Leon could have taken place without Helen Zille's authorization. This is a remarkable and unhappy "first" for a party claiming to lie within South Africa's liberal tradition.
For consider. Tony Leon's DP vigorously opposed the Mandela administration because it was deeply illiberal on many points. The party was utterly united about this: who could support the arms deal, ignoring Aids, the Equity Employment Act or the appalling Mafikeng speech? Then in 1999 the party adopted the slogan "Fight Back". There was nothing especially remarkable about that: the ANC government was utterly hegemonic and Leon had led a doughty resistance to that - in terms of liberal principle. The campaign was massively successful and it established the DP as the official Opposition, an achievement which has been the base for all that has since followed.
It was only because that campaign more than quintupled the party's vote from 1.7% to 9.6% that many budding liberals were able to launch their careers. The last marginal person in the Western Cape to be lifted over the edge by the "Fight Back" campaign was Helen Zille. Similarly Gavin Davis attacks Leon over the pact with the Nats which launched the DA. He might have mentioned that Helen Zille was appointed to help negotiate that pact and to certify that it was liberal. Which she did. The truth is that one cannot attack Leon without attacking today's DA as well. The "Fight Back" campaign is why Gavin Davis has a job, why Helen Zille is able to lead and Wilmot James to chair the official Opposition. And it was a slogan, a tactic: it involved no deviation from liberal principle.
Second, it is still mysterious how the DA could have supported two Bills which were utter anathema to their electoral base. The answer to this lies, almost certainly, to the adoption of an ANC-like democratic centralism under Zille. The choice of candidates had hitherto been carried out by democratic means but now the electoral colleges have been robbed of their power, candidates are selected in a process in which management consultants play the dominant role, and the central leadership is able to impose candidates of its choice, very much to the disadvantage of the party's traditional constituency.
At the same time there has been a huge diminution in the power and vitality of the DA parliamentary caucus, illustrated by the fact that the party leader can not only choose not to be in Parliament but can still insist on primacy over that caucus. This is a weird and historically unparalleled situation. It is easy to see how diminished that caucus is. Under any previous dispensation the opposition to such a betrayal of the party's central principles would have been led by voices within the caucus. This time it was led exclusively by the liberal intelligentsia outside parliament and the caucus was tamely silent.
Because of this huge centralization of power the party's old democratic structures are greatly enfeebled - and, of course, as a result party leaders do not listen to their grass roots in the way they used to. Nowadays, if they want to communicate with the grass roots they write an article for Business Day. If Wilmot James had had to sell the notion of demographic representivity in employment - which would mean four out of every five Coloureds losing their jobs - he would have not got to first base in Mitchells Plain or Bellville, irrespective of whether he was quoting John Rawls or Donald Duck.
The third great question is why on earth these attacks on the critics who expressed horror at this betrayal of liberal principle? Given that the party has now accepted that it made a mistake and publicly apologized for it, this meant that its critics had been right. So why attack the critics? To do so only suggests that the party's apology was not really sincere. This is almost certainly the case. There is a great deal of circumstantial evidence to suggest that the party was hoping to snick this one through the slips without anyone really noticing.
Indeed, some party leaders, like Wilmot James, were and still are strongly in favour of these two disastrous Bills. James wrote a large article for Rapport along exactly those lines but had to snatch it back once Ms Zille reversed herself. The continuing anger against the critics of these two Bills can only stem from the fact that the party leadership had not realised how important the party's grass roots and the liberal intelligentsia still are. Awkwardly, they shone a stark light on the party's manoeuvres, forcing a humiliating retreat. So, despite its apology, the DA leadership remains furious.
The problem of not reading
The key point about these various media interventions by DA leaders and activists is, however, their sheer intellectual confusion. They make all manner of confident assertions about the nature of liberalism though it is not clear how much of the liberal classics - James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Gladstone, Asquith and so on - they have actually read. Does anyone in the DA leadership get time for serious reading?
Most interesting in this regard is Michael Cardo's article. Cardo works for the Western Cape government and is thus another apparatchik pushed into the fray. Cardo criticizes Jill Wentzel for her notion of the "liberal slideaway", but it is not clear why. Wentzel saw erstwhile good liberals justifying violence - even necklacings - if they were committed by the UDF/ANC and accepting all manner of political intolerance as reasonable. This was an early example of liberals beginning to pander to African nationalism. Cardo's attack on Wentzel merely suggests that such pandering is still going on. For how can anyone criticize Wentzel for speaking out in favour of the liberal virtues of tolerance, free speech, freedom of association and non-violence?
Cardo also attacks me and various others for "ivory tower" thinking. He calls for "an honest recognition of the injustices of the past". And he accuses me and others as standing for "nothing else but free market policies and a reduced role for the state". This is a sort of identikit scarecrow, uncaring of black interests, a "rank conservative" and so on.
This merely trumpets his complete ignorance. A little reading might have helped. I was so upset by "the injustices of the past" that I am one of the few white people alive to have attended a meeting addressed by Mandela before he was arrested. Later I spent many years embedded among the French Communist Party in the Parisian red belt, which enabled me to write my book, The Long March of the French Left. I was an adviser to the British Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, and I have never been a free marketeer. Indeed, I would instance both the French railways and the Norwegian Statoil company - both nationalised industries - as among the world's finest companies. After all, most European liberals are perfectly content with the mixed economy model. Such a career can hardly qualify for the term "rank conservative". As for being uncaring of black interests, that would be hard for me given that five members of my immediate family are black.
Cardo is on stronger ground when he says that liberals have never been "pure", that they have been as capable of error as anyone else. Of course they have. It was a British Liberal government which granted independence to the Union of South Africa in 1910 under white-only rule, a huge blunder for which they felt justifiably guilty. Once could instance many other such mistakes. Liberals are thoroughly human.
The problem of parochialism
The most notable feature of the various articles by the DA leadership plus their acolytes is their entirely parochial understanding of liberalism. South African liberalism is, after all, merely an offshoot of a far stronger and older British tradition. How familiar is the DA leadership with John Locke, John Hampden or Charles James Fox? And "liberal" has come to have very different meanings according to context. In the US "liberal" means pretty much as the same as "social democrat" in Europe; in Britain people in all three of the major parties would be happy to describe themselves as liberals; while the Australian Liberal and Country party is a conservative party. In France a liberal is a sort of conservative, a follower of Giscard d'Estaing who has made common cause with the Gaullists. How familiar are DA leaders with all these tangled strands of liberalism?
It is this which makes me a little doubtful of Cardo's statement that the DA has been "fortunate to be led by thinkers with a deep understanding of the intellectual history of liberalism". Have the present DA leadership really all read John Stuart Mill? How familiar are they with the credos of American and Australian liberalism? What do they know of European liberalism? How familiar are they with even South African liberalism's history - with Stockenstroom, Philip, the Colensoes, Fairbairn, Adam Tas, the Schreiners, Ballinger and Hoernle? If they are, why on earth have they not instructed the DA caucus to be proudly conscious of that history and tradition? If that had been done the caucus would not now be at sixes and sevens.
In fact the speeches and writings of the DA leadership suggest is that their liberalism is something they make up as they go along. Typically, they make a sort of genuflection to Helen Suzman and then vote for things which would have made her scream.
In a word, today's DA is deeply parochial. This is a very South African problem. Apartheid was a parochial ideology that lingered on here long after such notions had been discarded by the rest of the world. The same is true of Communists here today: visitors to our shores marvel at these political dinosaurs. And of course, the same is true of the re-insertion of a racial classification system via BEE and affirmative action. It is extremely odd that this should been seen as a left-wing or progressive cause: there is nothing progressive about trying to further empower the tiny upper stratum of blacks who qualify for BEE or affirmative action. Helen Zille has written an extremely good piece about the open embrace of Verwoerdian notions that this has occasioned among black elites.
Why Liberals Say No
The core of liberal belief is its concern for individual rights. It is, indeed, a form of humanism for it puts the individual at the centre of things: what matters is his/her rights to freedom of expression, of association, of movement, of religion, and so forth. Perhaps the seminal figure was Luther. When he nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1519 he knew he was risking his life but he stated his beliefs and said "Here I stand...I can do no other". This was the first great assertion of individualism and it is no accident that Protestantism has played a crucial role in the development of liberal thought.
In many cases liberalism means protecting individuals from the controlling attempts of the state, which is why many liberals have an instinctive anxiety about any further extension of state power into the lives of its citizens. This concern for individual (and not group) rights was indeed, the foundation for today's concern for human rights, and it also meant that individuals had to be assessed on the basis of their own merit alone. Which was why liberals have always been so hostile to attempts to judge people by their race, their religion, their sexual preferences or their gender. Indeed, John Stuart Mill spoke out for women's rights - including female suffrage - some fifty years before the first suffragettes appeared. Thus the slogan "merit, not colour" is inevitably at the core of liberal belief and has a timeless role in the liberal tradition. Helen Zille's suggestion that "merit not colour" was "almost racist" merely demonstrates that she is unfamiliar with liberal thought.
This insistence that neither race, religion, gender or any other general category should stand in the way of assessing an individual fairly, also means both that liberals have to be tolerant of all such differences and are also much concerned with fairness. For in principle all individuals are equal, should have equal rights and must be equal before the law. There is a sense in which these concerns for equality, fairness, tolerance and human rights mean that liberalism is always a radical ideology, for there are very few societies in which the expression of the full-blown liberal creed does not involve an attack on privilege, discrimination, unfairness, inequality or intolerance.
One can, even from this brief outline, see why liberals said no so decisively to apartheid, a doctrine which ignored individual rights, which denied equality before the law, which discriminated unfairly, and which offered spurious "group rights" instead. But one can also see why liberals reacted so strongly against the DA's acceptance of BEE and affirmative action laws which denied individual rights in favour of group rights, and which denied the perennial liberal doctrine of "merit not colour".
"Redress"
What to do, however, in a society where a large section of the population has been unfairly oppressed for a long time, and where that inheritance still continues to hold individuals back? Liberals are much concerned with fairness and would have no argument in principle with attempts to give special assistance to those who have been thus unfairly held back. At the same time, liberals would be wary of pretending to achieve some impossible "redress" of wrongs long past. The real point is to take action which will help black youngsters empower themselves in a way that will enable them to become capable individuals within the wider society.
Such remedial action should be very careful to avoid racial quotas or the creation of a new privileged victim class, which will, of course, never want to give up its victimhood and the advantages that thereby accrue to it. One merely has to read President Mahathir on the disastrous consequences of affirmative action policies in Malaysia to realise that this is a political and social cul-de-sac. Whatever parochial arrangements may be made now, the outside world will break in in the end and will expose this nonsense for what it is.
Thus the DA's stress should be on creating black individuals who can compete on equal terms with whites and others, and who do not need these spurious "group" or "victim" rights. It would be perfectly logical, for example, for the DA to offer a scholarship scheme for Africans and Coloureds only in which the top students were guaranteed free places at our top universities, the aim being then to release fully empowered individuals into South African society every year.
Indeed, the DA could usefully take a leaf out of Tony Blair's book. He had promised to reduce hospital waiting times, come what may. No one really believed him until Labour legislated that if any NHS patient had not been treated within a given period, the government would pay for them to have the operation done abroad. Given that South Africa has a sharply diminishing number of good universities, the same promise could be made here. It would be highly cost-effective.
Such a scheme may use race as a criterion but only up to the point where the individual is launched into the wider society. It is a thousand times better than operating an affirmative action system which uses colour, not merit; which denies individual achievement; which pretends that serious deficiencies don't exist; and which creates a permanent victim class. As for BEE, that is simply beyond salvation. The DA slogan that it only wants the sort of BEE that creates jobs is meaningless. There is no such thing.
A longer game
In a word, the DA needs to play a longer game. It must not get involved in parochial South African nonsense of a Verwoerdian sort. I travel a lot in Africa and can say without fear of contradiction that most Africans in Nigeria or Ghana or Tanzania think that black South Africans are very peculiar.
"They just sit around saying everything is the effect of apartheid or the fault of the whites. Which clearly it isn't. They take no responsibility for themselves. They think they are permanent victims and that other people are always to blame. Even a casual visitor can see that the whites bequeathed them a lovely country with a great infrastructure. This failure of responsibility for oneself has dire consequences. Often, people don't really try. Fathers desert their families and don't even pay maintenance for their own children. And so on."
Thus a visiting Nigerian friend. Similarly, Zimbabweans and Malawians often express amazement at the poor work ethic in South Africa - which is, in the end, the only way that our millions of black immigrants can find jobs. Which they absolutely have to do because they do not qualify for welfare grants. No political party has had the guts to be honest about this.
What is clear is that neither ANC-style BEE nor affirmative action would be adopted anywhere else in Africa or, indeed, anywhere else in the world. It seems bizarre for the DA to tie itself in such knots over policies which are so parochial. During the apartheid period liberals knew that however unpopular they were here, they were backed by a rising tide of international opinion and that that alone would probably guarantee that their cause won in the end. If the DA had any sense it would again align itself to international, and not parochial, trends.
Life is not easy for the DA. Absurdly, they have talked far too much of a good game - the DA at 30%, winning Gauteng, the Northern Cape and so on. This is plain silly, as is the talk that the next DA leader has to be black. One should not mortgage the future in this way. At the last general election the DA got under 17%. Anything over 20% would be quite good now, even if that means they keep only the Western Cape. Similarly, the party simply has to elect its best possible leader in a completely colour-blind way. Their colour actually doesn't matter much.
The whole of the DA's advance since 1994 has taken place under white leaders and the party has gained at every election. That process should continue, irrespective of the leader's colour. Similarly, there is no point in chasing after the black middle class if that means discarding liberal principles. You simply end up with a party that doesn't know what it believes in, like the old United Party. Any leader who reduces the party to such a state will go down as its Neville Chamberlain, not its Churchill. That is far too high a price to pay.
RW Johnson
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