How do we write about the results of the most recent US election without repeating what has already been said about how Kamala Harris and her campaign got it wrong, how Joe Biden ought not to have run for a second term, and whether this loss can be laid at the door of the Democratic Party elites who are so out of touch with what animates most Americans?
There is plenty of analysis to go around in varying attempts to make sense of “what happened”. What we know is that 2024 was a bad year for incumbents around the world, and Harris was, for all intents and purposes, an incumbent.
It is also very tempting to fall into an easy comparative analysis of “if it happened there it can happen here” (wherever “here” is).
It is, therefore, hard to write with clarity at such a moment. But perhaps two thoughts for a heady moment:
Reaching back to Professor Mary Beard’s lecture (delivered in Cape Town this year at the Classical Association of South Africa conference), titled Order and Chaos: The Dystopian World of the Roman Emperor, was helpful. The world has seen it all before, only in a different guise. Beard provides fascinating insights, taking the audience into the world of 218AD and the strange excesses that marked the period of the empire under the 14-year-old emperor Heliogabalus.
He was known to serve fake food at dinners, (or so writers of the time tell us) and to display all manner of inappropriate behaviour, including smothering his guests with rose petals. “Capricious craziness” (sound familiar?) was often a trademark of this dystopian world where the natural order of things was perverted – sleeping during the day and working at night, or Caligula wanting to make his horse a consul. (We can think of a Trumpian or Zumarite equivalent, surely? Trump is assembling his cabinet of hardliners and sycophants with speed.) So, Zuma’s appointment of Des van Rooyen as finance minister – or Matt Gaetz as Attorney-General of the US?
Pretence becomes reality and in this dystopian world, it is hard to see the truth, unless one wants to search for it and see it. Meaning is completely disrupted. On the surface, it appears as farce, but the absurdity of it also causes us to pause. How do we work out how to read these stories of excess (and, as the New York Times put it, tedium) in a world turned upside down? How do these exaggerations indicate not only the sclerosis of imperial politics, but also help us think about power and, importantly, how to subject power to scrutiny?”
These are important questions in the analysis of empire and autocracy, and all the more interesting for their current relevance – whether in Trump’s America or indeed in a world inhabited by Jacob Zuma and his uMkhonto Wesizwe party, or South African courtrooms more and more inhabited by those who turn legal mores upside down. And a South Africa in which Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni feels comfortable with random cruelty, saying, half-mockingly, “You want us to send help to criminals? You want us to send help to criminals, honestly?” when asked about illegal miners trapped in a Stilfontein mine. Not content to stop there, she continued: “We are not sending help to criminals. We are going to smoke them out. They will come out. We are not sending help to criminals. Criminals are not to be helped, criminals are to be persecuted. We didn’t send them there, and they didn’t go down there with good intentions for the republic, so we can’t help them. Those who want to help them, they must go and take the food down there. They will come out, we’ll arrest them.”
Doris Lessing was right when she said: “This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that – a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to check. But I think that while it is true there is a general worsening, it is precisely because things are so frightening we become hypnotised, and do not notice – or if we notice, belittle – equally strong forces on the other side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization.”
For the dystopian nature of the world today reveals aspects of cataclysmic decline, surveillance, environmental disaster and technological advances, which create disparate outcomes – advantages for some, leaving others behind – further cementing inequality. In the dystopian world, excess becomes normalised. And are we not living in a somewhat Orwellian “1984 society”, where the behaviour of those in power provides a larger-than-life lens into the nature of power and those who wield it? The powerful understand that to remain in power, cunning distortions are needed. Sometimes they appear as farce (dangerous farce) or as lampoons of pet-eating Haitians. The distortion is so effective that even those who are “othered” believe it.
Shauna Shames and Amy Achison, in Survive and Resist: The Definitive Guide to Dystopian Politics, describe the inverted politics thus: “Dystopia is not a real place; it is a warning, usually about something bad the government is doing or something good it is failing to do. Actual dystopias are fictional, but real-life governments can be ‘dystopian’ – as in, looking a lot like the fiction.”
They go on to say: “Defining dystopia starts with establishing the characteristics of good governance. A good government protects its citizens in a non-coercive way. Good governments use what’s called ‘legitimate coercion’, legal force to which citizens agree to keep order and provide services like roads, schools and national security…”
So, perhaps the lesson for us all at this moment is to seek to define what a decent and humane society looks like, whether in the US or here.
Disconnect between ‘establishment politics’ and the poor
A second and related point is, however, that to understand what a more just society looks like (or the ANC’s “better life for all” strapline), we must connect the dots between our attempts to build a better world and those most directly affected by poverty and inequality.
Last week Prince William arrived in Cape Town for the Earthshot Awards, an innovative sustainability initiative he has championed. Many gathered in Cape Town for a series of sustainability events. It was a chance to showcase Cape Town too and also some really excellent projects – and there were many.
But somehow, despite all these good intentions, this event too felt a lot like fiction, when one looked from the outside in.
Video clips showed those in attendance being welcomed by the ubiquitous African girl-child dancers, reed skirts and all. It was so jarringly stereotypical, conjuring up just a tinge of empire. There was much glitter and gloss. Heidi Klum was in attendance; Cape Town shone with other “celebrities” and bit-players. It wouldn’t have been out of place had Anna Wintour suddenly popped up from behind an indigenous bush, in sustainable fashion, of course.
Read more in Daily Maverick: Prince William brings Earthshot to Africa
One couldn’t help but think that herein lies the world’s challenge: while the issue of climate change affects the poor the most (and is arguably the most pressing issue of our time, given that it is a further driver of inequality) the many gathered at the Earthshot Awards could be mistaken for a “selfie-brigade” very far removed from those the initiative seeks to assist. So, it all felt very much like patronising “establishment politics” even while dealing with sustainability and even as the room was also filled with serious-minded researchers, climate policy activists and some very innovative ideas. It’s the “celebrity” that clouds the intention. (cf The Harris campaign had Beyonce, Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen).
What was the collective carbon footprint of those gathered, one wondered? Perhaps an unfair criticism of a well-intentioned event, but it stood as a stark reminder that the poor are mostly absent from discussions about their own lives. And is that not what some of the dystopia we are witnessing in the US is about – the Grand Disconnect which makes voters throw every caution to the wind?
For this moment, The People’s Bus, written by Vernon February in Surinam in 1975: resonates:
Nobody who is an expert
Has ever taken a ride
On a people’s bus
Lines 2 ,7 or 9.
Nobody who is an expert
Of the third world
Has ever had to arch his back
And find his way to half a seat
Nobody who is an expert
Has ever had his ears pierced
By the loud and soulful blare
Of the latest hit.
Nobody who comes with plans
In a briefcase for a better world
From his safe and opulent confines
Of his materialistic world
Has ever seen the dark and muted faces
Of the Creole and the Hindu in a bus.
Lord! Let them take a ride one day!
Nobody who comes in a plane with a briefcase
full of plans for a better world
has ever seen the peoples’ world,
from their air-conditioned rooms
over-looking palm-fronded swimming pools.
Nobody who is an expert on the poor
Has ever seen… DM
Is this what democracy looks like - Dark, dystopian, fear-filled and enraged?
In a world turned upside down, how do we make sense of ‘what happened’ and analyse it meaningfully — to help us think about power and, importantly, how to subject power to scrutiny?
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