Raymond Aron, French intellectual and the author of Opium of the Intellectuals, believed politics rather than revolution was the way to change society for the betterment of all. He criticised ideological fanaticism, Communists and their fellow travellers for being outmoded and incapable of producing what was needed for a successful modern state.
Editor Roger Kimball, writing in The New Criterion in 2001, described the subject of Aron’s 1955 masterpiece as ‘the bewitchment, the moral and intellectual disordering, that comes with adherence to certain ideologies’.
‘In politics the choice is never between good and evil but between the preferable and the detestable,’ Aron said.
Detestable. It’s a powerful word denoting the action of repudiation. And although Aron is currently, apparently, ‘out of fashion’, whatever that means, he seems particularly apt as I scroll through my diverse and inclusive news sources preparatory to writing.
New immoral acts and policies and the future of the country were planned in a frenzy of African National Congress conference activity by those who would continue to rule over us ‘until Jesus comes’.
A permanent cabinet fixture of the ruling party, Lindiwe Sisulu, who seldom advances the reputation of women as leaders, proposed that school registration be conditional on a 50:50 white-black ratio of pupils.
Elsewhere another useless cabinet luminary, the Minister of Sports, Arts and Culture, Nathi Mthethwa, was reported to have risen zombie-like from knockout ridicule to renew his bid for cabinet approval of an absurd R22m monumental flag park project to attract tourists.
The detestable stupidity of those in government continues to amaze.
But we can offset the default South African position of wall-to-wall doom and gloom a smidgeon, with welcome news that the de facto ‘pilot project’ for a future national coalition government may be about to add yet another city site to the grand experiment made possible by the ANC’s waning fortunes in the November municipal elections.
The local politicians of Nelson Mandela Bay municipality, Gqeberha, Port Elizabeth or what you will, have been coaxed into agreeing on a new seven-party opposition coalition to rescue the drought-hit city from the clutches of the ANC Mayor Eugene Johnson, who took that seat from the DA’s Nqaba Bhanqa with a one-vote margin.
It’s a motley assemblage of opposition parties: The Democratic Alliance, the Freedom Front Plus, the African Christian Democratic Party, the African Independent Congress, the Abantu Integrity Movement, the Pan Africanist Congress and the United Democratic Movement.
The Economic Freedom Fighters did not join the coalition.
One by one the representatives of each coalition partner gave assurances of their resolve to work together despite their ideological or philosophical differences for the good of “the people” and the city.
We’ll have to wait to see if it’s successful and how the needs of the people and the city stay paramount in this latest coalition.
But nothing ventured nothing gained, as the old saying goes, and there is now the possibility of this new opposition configuration being tried and tested in local government, and if all goes well, or at least better than before, the opportunity to win more voters over to the still foreign prospect of an effective national multiparty coalition democratic government.
Up in KwaDukuza in KwaZulu-Natal, ActionSA fell out with the Democratic Alliance over ousting an ANC mayor (not an unusual occurrence as we are learning almost daily). So maybe there’ll be another opposition coalition in the great alternative governance project.
Speaking at the NMB coalition agreement announcement, DA leader John Steenhuisen said coalitions needed trustworthy partners with integrity.
They also need to have the trust of their constituencies.
Trust, however, for obvious reasons, is in short supply in South Africa currently.
A recent Business Day editorial posited the possibility that the ANC policy conference could see it pull appealing policy rabbits out of its numerous Borsalino hats, get voters to trust it again and ride into a new cosmetically transformed dawn. (All right, it didn’t actually say exactly that precisely, but you know where I’m coming from.)
ANC spokesperson Pule Mabe told reporters, while assuring them that the ANC was not a cash-in-transit heist organisation, that the party’s fortunes would improve ‘once the people renew their love and their trust and their confidence in the ANC and start to invest their resources’ to sustain the organisation. He did not indicate when this would happen.
Will sufficient voters still entrust with government an organisation that repeatedly puts into high office leaders who make patently ludicrous proposals and has a president at risk of losing both that job and the top job in government because he didn’t know where to stash his cash? Plus a former president and convicted criminal waiting in the wings to be a puppet master?
Surely they can no longer think of it simply as corruption when cadre crookedness or official negligence or ineptitude leads to the deaths of people, the malnutrition of children? It is time we stop calling it maladministration when government departments are regularly unable to pay very poor people on time, when government cannot provide health care because its cadres are playing fast and loose with the health budget, when it fails to give the police force direction or resources to protect citizens and prevent killings, thefts and rape.
We should also stop calling it a lack of skills or mismanagement that is causing the disintegration of municipalities and the collapse of service delivery. Let’s not call it affirmative action and empowerment when you create a new set of race-based laws to replace ones you said were crimes against humanity.
These are immoral acts that demand punishment, consequences, meted out by voters at the polls. Politics rather than revolution or violence.
The detestable alternative offered by the African National Congress can be ousted through ‘creeping coalitionism’, and the politically wise, moral choice of trustworthy parties for a stable multiparty alternative at the polls in 2024.
According to Kimball, the leitmotif of Raymond Aron’s career was responsibility: the exercise of the virtue of prudence. Aron, he said, understood that political wisdom rests in the ability to choose the better course of action even when the best course is unavailable.
Here’s another bite of prosaic Aron wisdom that the members of the new multiparty coalitions ‘for the people’ should bear in mind and take to heart as they slowly, painfully, build trust with one another: ‘The last word is never said and one must not judge one’s adversaries as if one’s own cause were identified with absolute truth.’
The views of the writer are not necessarily those of the Daily Friend or the IRR.