Everyone seems to have an opinion about the growth prospects of South Africa’s liberal party, the Democratic Alliance (DA). While interesting, I do not think this is where partisan liberals’ attention should be focused. Politics is about more than elections and growth.
It is important for liberals to understand that there are electoral limitations for liberalism. The notion of endless growth in support is impossible for liberals who seek to remain liberals. Socialism and populism have higher limitations because they lend themselves to rent-seeking and flipflopping.
Some people understand this but draw incorrect conclusions from it. I have had many discussions with people who say the DA cannot afford to be a good liberal party because that means it will hamstring itself. The DA must, therefore, in the name of growth, be ‘pragmatic’ with its principles.
Liberalism’s unelectability
It will probably never be the case that the majority of any society’s population will comprise classical liberals. When liberalism was ascendant, many people who were not liberals voted liberal for what I surmise to be two reasons.
First, the scope of government was significantly more limited back then. Some things, like ‘green politics’, were not yet on the reservation of political contestation, and socialism was in its infancy. The second reason, which flows from the first, is that non-liberals regarded the liberal option as the most sensible amongst the small range of other options.
Since then, the scope of government has expanded dramatically. Whereas 200 years ago a voter could rent-seek indirectly by supporting a protectionist candidate – free trad versus protectionism was a key political issue – today they can rent-seek far more directly by voting for the party that promises to simply hand them the most goodies. Voting for basic income grants, for example, would have been unthinkable then, but is normalised now.
Liberalism cannot engage in the contestation around rent-seeking, although many liberals have tried. Rentseeking is simply outside of the liberal vocabulary and liberal common sense.
When more liberally inclined politicians in the United Party tried to act like strict racialists and defenders of white dominance, most conservative voters could see right through it. When the DA tried to act as if it supported racial policy, most supporters of racial policy could also see through it.
Liberals getting on the rent-seeking bandwagon just does not track. It is insincere and incoherent.
Within this paradigm, it is astounding – in the best possible way – that the DA has managed over many years to keep around 20% of electoral support, especially after it re-committed itself to classical liberalism in 2019. In a developing African state, a sincere liberal party with such a share of the vote is a story for the history books.
This is no small feat, and the DA’s seeming discontent with this share of the electorate is worrisome. There are many liberal politicians around the world – in societies more conducive to liberalism than South Africa – who would be simply ecstatic to say that 20% of the electorate stands behind them.
The allure of populism as a means to grow support
Liberals are only human, and that means that we have the same desire to ‘see’ that other people are also liberals – even if it is not true. This desire has often led liberals down the path of modifying their values and principles to the point of them being indistinguishable from those of authoritarians.
The DA has itself been guilty of this at various times. When it seemed that race policy was popular, the DA – no doubt encouraged by expensive publicists and marketing professionals – threw itself behind a ‘sensible version’ of the ANC’s racial priorities.
While the party should represent a given ideological constituency, it often ends up identifying the constituency it would like to have and changing itself to accommodate that constituency. This has the whole system of political representation facing backwards.
Liberals do not want to be left out, and because we are usually left out, many – including the DA – often think, just this once, because the masses seem to be in favour of something, we want to both feel, and be seen to be, on the side of the masses. We saw this with racial policy, and we are seeing it with the culture war issue of immigration.
The real power of classical liberalism
In South Africa, classical liberals do not need to win any election outright because our future is firmly based in coalition politics. Liberal parties, if any, will always be a junior partner, hopefully to a centrist, big-tent senior partner (no such luck this term!).
These smaller parties will always wield influence, however, because liberals are in touch with reality in ways populists on the left or right can never be, or can never afford to show it if they are. Whereas the leftist populist can easily say ‘whatever the cost, we need national health insurance!’ and the rightist populist can easily say ‘whatever the cost, we have to deport all immigrants!’, only liberals can and do say ‘the cost matters – and we cannot afford it.’
Classical liberals are also ‘kingmakers,’ in a sense, on specific issues where they tend to side with either the progressives or the conservatives.
Liberals, for example, support the decriminalisation of sex work and significantly easier freedom of movement across borders, alongside mostly progressive leftists, even though to the leftists, classical liberals are conservative right-wingers.
In turn, liberals also oppose expansive government dependency among the population and loose monetary policy alongside mostly conservative rightists, even though to those on the right, classical liberals are progressive left-wingers.
To the two ‘wings’ of the political divide, this makes liberals seem like flipfloppers, but ultimately it is liberalism being consistently pro-liberty, and the progressives and conservatives being opportunistically pro-liberty.
This allows liberals to forge alliances on specific issues as they arise.
Liberals also wield influence through effective lobbying. This is less clear in South Africa because we have hitherto had a notably unresponsive government that only listens when the wheels of reform are greased with bribe money, or when the balance of forces has turned against it.
Out there, in the real world, however, when a government is considering adopting a particularly unaffordable welfare programme, for example, and the liberals inevitably point out the error of its ways, concessions tend to be made.
Leveraging support
As a 20% party, the DA is a force to be reckoned with and one that could supercharge the influence that liberalism wields in our society. Those who view policy and politics only through the lens of parliamentary majorities will want to say ‘no – 20% is not 50%,’ which is on its face true, but misses the point.
With the support of 20% of the voting population, the DA has immense potential leverage in the national political discourse.
Despite this, its effect on the discourse is either nil or negative. Compare, for example, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), which hovers with around 10% support, and how it basically dictated the national discourse between 2018 and 2021 with its agenda of ‘expropriation without compensation.’
The EFF also sincerely popularised the meme of Jacob Zuma having to ‘pay back the money’, despite that party and that man being close allies today. Without even attempting to seem sincere, the small EFF is capable of changing the conversation.
Rather than uncritically seeking growth, the DA should focus on leveraging the support it does have. If it does this, it will have more sway than the red berets.
And, whilst doing so, the party should focus on ‘activating’ those South Africans who are favourably disposed toward the party but who cannot bring themselves to vote for it. These are the people who are put off the DA when, in the weeks and days before an election, they are told that (for example) the DA seeks to bring back Apartheid.
I found this analysis of among others the DA’s support by Gareth van Onselen interesting. He explains that some 12.8% of registered black voters are very favourable towards the party, and 6.7% are somewhat favourable. In total, that is 4,359,367 black voters. On election day, only 502,696 black South Africans voted DA.
These are unactivated DA supporters.
Activating these people would not be easy, but the obvious place to start is for the DA to stop worrying about the unfair treatment it gets in the press, and start its own press media.
As in Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and South Africa’s own past, having a diverse press that represents various perspectives (the feigning of ‘objectivity’ is not a perspective) from around the political spectrum is an important ingredient of a dynamic democracy.
The National Party established the National Press (Naspers) in the same year it was founded: 1914. The ANC, from its founding in 1912, also had a very influential place among the black press.
In contrast, the Progressive Party, when it was founded in 1959, on the other hand relied only on the peripheral sympathy it received from the English press that used to be organised around the United Party. That continued until 1994 and the transition, when English sympathies all but disappeared, and sympathy began trickling in from the Afrikaans press.
At no point did the Progressive movement – the liberal movement – establish its own press. The DA is still one of the biggest victims of this today; but it is a victim of its own making.
Having one liberal national paper and a small handful of regional papers, each with an online presence, alongside at least one liberal news radio programme and one liberal news television channel, is a good place to start.
These should not be uncritical DA propaganda machinery but must be constitutionally sympathetic to liberal values. This is how some German papers function.
Websites like the Daily Friend and Rational Standard are invaluable parts of such an ecosystem, but they are very clearly political commentary platforms, rather than fully-fledged news and opinion platforms with opinions on a wide variety of (not strictly political) issues encompassing culture, society, and economics.
But it is not only a liberal press that should be established.
Playing the game
The DA should also – for goodness’ sake! – get around to playing the Machiavellian games that South African politics demands.
The EFF and ANC recently played this brilliantly when they made old videos by Renaldo Gouws go viral. The whole national political conversation, during a time when the DA was trying to negotiate a coalition with the ANC, turned to how the DA is a refuge for rabid racists.
There is no point in blaming the EFF or ANC for this. They played the game brilliantly. The blame falls squarely on the DA for virtually never reciprocating.
Off the top of my head, the DA should be spending real time and money in the foreign press ensuring that whenever there is a report on South Africa, the EFF is described as ‘genocidal’ and the ANC as ‘endemically corrupt.’ The ANC, after all, has succeeded in creating a narrative for the foreign press that the DA is ‘white-led,’ despite the multiracial character of its Federal Executive.
The ANC and EFF will not stop playing this game, and they will continue to play it well. Nobody but a few analysts care that the DA is being decent and not ‘stooping to that level.’ The DA, in my view, needs to stoop to that level.
[Photo: by Piotr Makowski for Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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