I love democracy. I love the excitement and energy of election day, the lines at the polling station, the feel of the pen in my hand as I mark the ballot, the counting of the ballots. The fun doesn’t end there; I love the sleepless nights as I impatiently wait for the results to come in, I love the maps, and the gradual filling in of the blank spaces with all the colours of the different parties.
No matter how accurate the polling beforehand there are always surprises and fascinating little details. And once all the results are in, I will stare for hours at the maps over months to come. An election is a rare moment of shared civic purpose when all voters are connected in a shared experience and power is wielded not by anyone person or little group but by millions of people at once.
So, it gives me no pleasure at all to speak of the spectre haunting the free world’s democracies; the insidious ideology of cakeism. This is the belief that you can both have your cake and eat it too. Believers in cakeism do not believe in trade-offs. They believe that all good things can happen without any real sacrifice. If there is a sacrifice to be made then the only people who have to make it are people you don’t like, who are not very numerous anyway. Some ascribe different names to this ideology, such as slopulism or Peronism.
Cakeism is most corrosive and common in highly competitive democracies and once it sets in among the public, the political incentives are for politicians to pander relentlessly to this tendency to win elections. The result is growing frustration at the ineffectiveness of politics, dissatisfaction with democracy, a failure to solve crisis and growing division.
Let’s look at some examples.
The growing debt burden of the United States has been of growing concern to economists and serious political thinkers for some time. In 1980 the US had a debt-to-GDP ratio of 31.7%. By 2000, it had reached 54.9%. After a financial crisis, Covid and lots of reckless spending in 2025, that number stood at 130.6% and has no prospect of falling any time soon. How to solve this problem? It’s simple if not easy. Grow so massively you outpace your debt (difficult to do and difficult to sustain), raise taxes or cut spending.
So, which of these do Americans support?
None of them.
In theory, growing the economy is popular, but this is difficult to do in practice as it needs lots of things to go right and lots of popular policies to be abandoned. It is also difficult to sustain the very high level of growth needed over a long enough period of time to actually make a difference. And there is no guarantee that politicians won’t simply take the opportunity of an improving money situation to spend even more: “Don’t worry about it … look, we’re growing!”
In practice there are only two ways for a big, developed economy like the US to solve its debt problem. Raise taxes or cut spending. Both are extremely unpopular.
One of the largest line items in America’s budget is that of social security. This is essentially their national pension system. It is calculated to become insolvent by 2032. When polled about how to fix this, voters reject every option.
80% of voters reject raising taxes to pay for these benefits. 90% reject cutting these benefits to match tax revenues, 76% oppose raising the retirement age. And to top it all off, 76% demand the national debt must not be increased to pay for it.
Many voters believe that simply eliminating fraud will make the program solvent again, something for which there is precious little evidence.
Is it any surprise, then, that politicians in both the Republican and Democratic parties have abandoned any and all serious efforts to solve America’s debt crisis? There exist no majorities for cutting social spending or defence to solve the debt crisis.
Instead, politicians increasingly turn towards ever greater handouts or culture-war issues, promising ever more vague and utopian visions of the future under their leadership.
The US is not alone in suffering from this problem. France has a very generous pension system whereby retirees earn more than the median worker, and French pensioners get twice as much back from the pension system as they put into it. This has driven France into a perilous financial situation.
Here, too, France is stuck in much the same problem, refusing to raise taxes to the levels needed or to cut spending. French President Macron spent much of his political capital trying to solve this problem and ultimately failed.
The UK is also afflicted with its own unique brand of cakeism. In the UK it takes many forms but perhaps the most toxic is the so called “triple lock”. This policy of David Cameron’s government ensures that pensions always grow by inflation or more every single year.
With an ageing population and a stagnant economy this is a recipe for financial crisis. Eventually on a long enough time scale pensions will balloon to become completely unaffordable. However, the voters of almost every single party in the UK, from left to right, Labour, Reform, Greens, Conservative and so on, strongly support the triple lock and will oppose any government that seeks to abolish it.
Every political major party in the UK has committed to defending it. Restore Britain, the only significant party to oppose it, may be shut out of an alliance with Reform because of its opposition to the triple lock.
This issue is not confined to pensions.
As we can see, cakeism once entrenched is nearly impossible to quickly remove and makes solving problems impossible. For me, however, one of the most malevolent consequences of cakeist politics is how it plays into conspiracy theories or divisive toxic politics.
When cakeist policies inevitably fail, unscrupulous politicians and activists will pin the blame on some disfavoured group and claim the only reason cakeism has failed is because this small, evil group is deliberately sabotaging it. The disfavoured group in question can be anyone depending on the ideology, “the 1%” the “billionaires” the “immigrants” the “Jews” “the left” the “whites”, “the WEF” and so on. This grift can last for many years and the membership of the disfavoured group can be adjusted to suit the vibes of the era.
Unfortunately, South African politics has its fair share of cakeism – and to be fair, all countries need a bit, that’s just how politics works – but our political class, particularly in the EFF, MK and ANC, seems very enamoured of it.
However, I don’t believe ordinary South Africans have bought into cakeism quite as our political class has. We do have a party on the ballot which completely and entirely embraces cakeism in the EFF. While they of course remain a force in our politics, they are stuck firmly around the 10%-ish mark and don’t seem set to grow rapidly anytime soon.
When asked in IRR polling if “All this talk of racism and colonialism is by politicians who are trying to find excuses for their own failures”, 70% of respondents said yes. When our polling has contrasted pro-merit, non-racial solutions to issues and compared them to racial ones, time and time again South Africans pick the less emotionally satisfying non-racial option. All of these give me hope that as our politics becomes more competitive, we will be able to resist the call of cakeist politics.
Resisting cakeism requires an engaged and informed population, a civil society that mobilises on real issues and not symbolic or vague causes, and a media that interrogates specifics and not just the morality of issues or the vague outlines of a problem. It requires a public debate that is focused on what is wrong and how to fix it rather than more abstract questions of identity, tone, moralising or emotional appeal.
Only then will we succeed in resisting the sweet allure of delicious cakeism.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/governmentza/28147670223]
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