The demand that South Africans who oppose race law, expropriation without compensation, and the toleration of farm attacks “stay at home” and “win by persuasion” and votes treats the battle of ideas as a majoritarian device. That is a category error.
Truth and rights are not settled by a headcount, and the failure of domestic persuasion should not, and does not, oblige a minority to cohabit with the consequences.
The Free Market Foundation (FMF) recently took the question of South Africa’s race laws and the threat to private property to an American audience. Part of this trip was undertaken alongside Lex Libertas, and focused on farm murders, which sits inside an intensely racialised public discourse in which farmers – the prototypical white boere in particular – are routinely treated as the embodiment of a pure evil.
An ordinary response to any mention of farm attacks online is not engagement with the facts of rural violence, but a retort that farmers feed black women to pigs or live on “stolen land”, as if the existence of crime by members of a class excuses or diminishes brutality against that class.
No other category of victim – except perhaps immigrants – is answered in this way. Murders of women are not met with catalogues of women who have killed or “provoked” their slaying, and political assassinations are not excused by the observation that politicians are often unpleasant.
The farming community is treated as a special case in this regard. The political elite regards having to deal with farm violence as embarrassing, even as it jumps at the opportunity to show how (ostensibly!) “serious” it is about other categories of crime.
Battle of ideas
The outreach by the FMF and Lex Libertas has clarified a conception of the battle of ideas that has been latent for some time.
On this view, an idea is to be taken to the relevant constituency, the constituency responds, and the idea is then declared to have won or lost according to, essentially, a tally.
The Expropriation Act can serve as an example.
The Department of Public Works had an idea, and then published this idea as a bill. The public made written and oral submissions with their own ideas, contesting or supporting the department’s idea. A parliamentary committee considered the ideas at play around the bill, and Parliament even invited further public comment and engagement in this battle of ideas. The ideas of supporters and opponents of the Expropriation Bill were aired.
Parliament and the President, however, were not persuaded that the bill was a bad idea – in fact, they were persuaded in this battle that it was a rather good idea. The bill then became law.
From this, naïve liberal institutionalists (as opposed to good, muscular-liberal realists) conclude that the democratic process was followed, the battle of ideas was had, and one of the ideas ultimately won out. Fair game!
Rights violation
The obvious difficulty is that this account uses the battle of ideas to paper over a rights violation, which showcases a longstanding dispute within liberalism: substance over process, or process over substance?
To the process-liberals, what matters is that the correctness of the idea has been made to depend on the capacity of its opponents to persuade a body that was already disposed to agree with itself. The non-persuasive are then told that they have legitimately lost, and that the loss binds them.
My colleague Ayanda Zulu has written a thorough deconstruction of naïve institutionalism, its historical record, and its dangers, which I can highly recommend.
This is majoritarianism – which is by nature authoritarian – in liberal garb. Dressing it as a completed institutional dialogue (a battle of ideas) does not change that essential character.
Something can be both true and unpopular, or false and popular, at the same time.
That human beings require brains is not rendered doubtful by the number of people who find the fact uncomfortable, or by the size of any vote against it. The fact, simply, stands.
Many political questions are less certain than that, of course. But the point of departure must always be that there is a reality against which claims can and must be tested, and that the battle of ideas must be primarily about the identification of what is true, right, and factual. It is not a popularity pageant in which the sweetest and prettiest argument that attracts the most affirmative clicks is declared the victor. To treat it as such is to smuggle majoritarianism through the back door while retaining the language of liberalism.
Ethics of argument
The battle of ideas must also presuppose that the participants have rights that the discourse itself may not vote away.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s argumentation ethics – whatever else one makes of his other contentious ideas – speaks directly to this point.
To enter an argument is already to treat the other party as a person whose control over his own body and the means of discourse must be respected. One cannot coherently argue a person into accepting that his rights are contingent on a headcount, because the very act of arguing has already conceded the opposite.
A process that concludes by authorising the deprivation of property (in the Expropriation Act example), or the toleration of a racialised double standard in the response to farm violence, has not completed a battle of ideas, but abandoned the precondition that made the battle possible in the first place.
When John and Paul approach Karl to engage in a “battle of ideas” about whether the former two may kill the latter, they are presupposing that by allowing Karl to state his case, he has a right to life (he must be alive to participate in the battle), liberty (he must be able to articulate his views fully), and property (the means and priors, whether a computer, a megaphone, a pen, or the clothes he wears, are an inseparable part of the articulation).
Forum of the battle
The forum in which ideas may be pressed is not, moreover, confined by any objective logic to the domestic state. The notion that one may engage only inside one’s own country, and only through the formal institutions of that country, is a new, arbitrary rule that has never been observed by those who now insist upon it.
As Zulu writes, “institutions alone cannot serve as the lens through which political outcomes are understood, nor can they be assumed to be the primary determinants of those outcomes”.
Transnational argument and “lobbying” is the ordinary condition of contemporary politics. Governments and civil society organisations lobby foreign capitals on public health, the regulation of artificial intelligence, the conduct of armed conflict, and on a range of other matters, without being told that they have ostensibly deserted the proper arena.
The condemnation that has met our recent American engagements is therefore obviously and brazenly selective and opportunistic.
The further demand that those concerned should simply have remained in South Africa and “followed the process” is equally difficult to sustain, because that is precisely what has been done for decades.
Petitions have been submitted, Parliament and government departments have received written and oral representations, and public campaigns have been undertaken, continuously and at scale, at least since the early 2000s.
These attracted little no serious consideration from the state on their merits.
But now, once the next point of pressure is a foreign capital, suddenly and in volume, interest appears!
The people who were absent from the domestic table for decades, now wish to police the terms on which those who waited patiently for their arrival may move on to the next thing.
That is clearly not a defence of the battle of ideas through persuasion but an underhanded attempt to monopolise the legitimate means by which a permanent minority may refuse to be assimilated into a condition it has consistently rejected.
Everything to everyone
The battle of ideas need not, in any event, include everyone under all circumstances.
When classical liberals meet among themselves to decide how to respond to a threat, that meeting is already an instance of the battle of ideas, even if the conclusion is defensive rather than evangelical. Fortifying a position, building parallel institutions, or seeking external attention after domestic persuasion has failed, can be the rational outcome of a completed battle of ideas.
Liberals should, of course, wish to persuade, but persuading the whole public – again, defined arbitrarily as the domestic public living in a state-defined region – is not the only legitimate expression of politics, and the insistence that it must be is itself a rejection of the battle of ideas properly understood. It converts an aspiration into a duty to cohabit with error.
The ballot can never conclude an argument about rights.
Obviously, it also does not entitle those who lose the ballot (the minority) to rule those who win it, by some other route. The rights of the majority – properly understood – must be equally respected.
Ideas, not arbitrary power
The battle of ideas is the attempt to establish what is true and what justice requires, conducted on the prior recognition that those engaged in it possess rights the discourse may not itself extinguish. Once that recognition is withdrawn, and the outcome of any given process is treated as conclusive of both truth and obligation, the enterprise has changed its nature – no longer testing claims against reality, but merely recording the distribution of power.
What follows for those who reject this substitution is not a new right to rule as a dominant minority, but the ordinary liberty to decline assimilation into error or evil, to fortify the institutions and communities that recognise their liberty, and to continue pressing the claim wherever an audience prepared to hear it on its merits can be found.
If liberalism treats this liberty as “disloyalty”, it has already accepted that rights are whatever the political elite can be brought to tolerate. That is not losing the battle of ideas, but abandoning it.
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The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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