Last Sunday, I cautioned against the temptation to underestimate the uncertainty in millions of voters’ minds about choosing a different future for want of sufficient conviction in the existence of a better alternative.
So long as they remain unpersuaded, I suggested, ‘it does seem that voters will go along with things that might well be bad for them, and for long enough for the harm to become perilous’.
‘The burden of responsibility, the onus to make a better case for a different way of doing things, rests on those of us who are convinced that South Africa can succeed in being simultaneously fairer and more prosperous.
‘To think it’s not worth the effort would only be to surrender to cynicism: the challenge is defined less by the obduracy and self-serving impulses of the ruling elite than by the lingering, perhaps habitual, uncertainty of ordinary people. It would be wrong, the lesson seems to be, to think they are foolish for being insufficiently convinced.’
It brings me no joy, a week later, to point to what I think is a vivid emblem of that lesson; the ill-judged Democratic Alliance (DA) poster campaign in Phoenix.
Hard to judge
I might be wrong; after all, the effects are hard to judge. And there is an argument about that – I would recommend my colleague Gabriel Crouse’s considered appraisal in this video:
(The argument itself highlights another implicit lesson, which is the risk – mine, in this case – of imagining that voters are incapable of making complex judgements, and so must rely on being told how it is that they make sense of their world.)
But I remain convinced that the imprecision of the message, and the inescapable reliance on voters forming in their own minds an essentially racial distinction between ‘racists’ (by the ANC’s purported definition) and ‘heroes’ (in the DA’s eyes), made for a cynically tantalising choice in a troubled suburb where, one imagines, grief, anger and resentment remain fresh.
Whether or not the posters deliberately sought to exploit minority interests, they so readily lent themselves to it that critics were relieved of having to exert any strain in concluding it was intended.
Even where it might seem tactically fruitful, exploiting minority interests only curtails the scope for making a South African argument, which is the only kind of argument that has any chance of actually turning the country around. IRR polling over many years, now, shows that this is what most people hanker for. Against that promising potential, efforts to mine minority-interest seams in the social bedrock only compromise the greater enterprise of acknowledging and building on a stable foundation of shared interests.
Redemptive feature
Which, in turn, is why I believe that the redemptive feature of this week’s controversy was the DA’s courage in acknowledging its mistake, and correcting it.
Under such circumstances, there is always the danger, as economist and intellectual J K Galbraith once pointed out, that ‘(faced) with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.’
Having the courage to fix an error, and be honest about it, is not common in our politics. Voters will doubtless take note of that, too.
It stands in very great contrast, after all, to a dissembling President Cyril Ramaphosa sanctimoniously telling us this week: ‘We appeal and work to achieve the unity of our people and we promote the diversity of our people. We will never as a political organisation try to divide the people of South Africa along racial lines.’
[Image: Peter Roe from Pixabay]
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