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

There’s a scene in the cult film 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. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUDQQDqT8w8

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? 

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[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.