There is an increasingly prevalent view among some within the broad South African liberal community that liberalism needs more elements of identity politics, group focus, and collectivism; that liberalism needs a tribe.
Part of the underlying appeal is the view that individual rights have no natural army, but identity groups tend to and can form those relatively easier. The biggest party in South Africa mobilises on race and liberation history, so liberals who refuse to organise around something comparable are fighting with one hand tied behind their (collective) backs. They should build communal movements, use that energy, and point it at liberal goals such as property rights and the rule of law.
By a tribe I mean a group a person is born into and cannot easily leave, such as a race or an ethnic group. Others place you in it, whether you agree or not. A political party, a trade union or a ratepayers’ association is a different kind of body. People join it by choice, around a shared idea or interest, and they leave when they stop sharing it. Liberals have no quarrel with the second kind. The risk lies in the first.
I understand the appeal. Liberal ideas win few votes on their own, and a movement needs people who will turn up. But the argument rests on a hidden assumption about means and ends; throughout history, in most cases the assumption has been proven wrong.
The assumption is that a means is a neutral tool. You pick it up, use it for a ‘good’ purpose, and put it down. Aristotle saw it differently. We become what we repeatedly do. A person who practises courage becomes courageous. A movement that practises group loyalty becomes a movement of group loyalty.
The habits it builds and the leaders it rewards shape its character. After ten years of organising people around “us” and “them”, the movement is a tribe, or whatever it may call itself. Afrikaner nationalism shows how this works. The Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners was founded in Paarl on 14 August 1875 to promote the Afrikaans language. In 1948 the National Party, which drew on the same loyalty, won power and began building apartheid.
Friedrich Hayek made a related point in The Road to Serfdom. A movement built around a common cause attracts the people most willing to put the group first. Agreement comes most easily over a shared enemy. Members who ask awkward questions about principle are the first to be sidelined. Identity movements select for grievance and loyalty. Those qualities rarely sit well with respect for the individual who disagrees.
Individual persons
There is a second problem. The liberal case against racial preferences, quotas and cadre deployment rests on one idea: rights belong to individual persons. Nobody’s claims should be raised or lowered according to the group they were born into. This is close to Kant’s insistence that every person be treated as an end and never merely as a means. Liberals who defend their own constituency on group terms give that idea away. Their opponents can then reply that both sides agree group membership grounds political claims, and the only dispute is over which group counts. In South Africa that argument ends in a headcount. Inevitably, liberals lose headcounts.
A third problem is that groups do not speak with one voice. Someone must say what the group wants. In practice, the job falls to the most committed members, who are usually the most aggrieved. Members with liberal views get told they are betraying their people. A defensive identity movement turning illiberal is not a story from another country.
People should be free to organise around a church, a language, a school or a town. Alexis de Tocqueville thought such associations were the best protection a free society had against concentrated power. A liberal can defend them with a clear conscience. Local self-governance belongs in the same category. Cultural groups fall between the two kinds. Many people are born into them, yet taking part is a choice, and they are a natural part of any society.
They are the right bodies for cultural questions, such as keeping a language alive or running a school. They are the wrong bodies for questions that have nothing to do with culture.
A language society has good reason to speak up for Afrikaans. It has no special standing on property rights or the independence of the courts. Those protect everyone. A body that defends them for one group alone makes them look like a favour to that group.
The slide starts when group identity becomes the basis for political claims. The question then shifts from what is owed to a person to what is owed to “our people”. A simple test shows the difference. Ask what the strategy does when the group’s interests (however narrowly or broadly defined) and liberal principle part ways.
Convenient label
If the answer is that the movement follows the group, liberalism was only ever a convenient label.
A pragmatic case can be made. There may be moments when a community under real threat has little choice but to organise as a community, for example when its schools, its land or its language are under direct attack. Liberals who wave that away are asking other people to carry a risk they do not carry themselves.
But anyone who chooses to take this route needs to exercise great care. The aim should be narrow and stated openly. The tactic should be temporary, with a clear point at which it ends. And someone should keep asking whether the movement still serves the principle, or whether the principle now serves the movement.
The deeper damage is to first principles. Liberalism starts from one claim: each person has an inherent worth that no group can add to or take away from. Each person is an end, in and of themselves. While a tactical exception looks small, a principle that is set aside whenever it becomes inconvenient is only a preference. Once avowed liberals show that individual rights can be put on hold for a good cause, they have given their opponents the same licence.
Every movement thinks its cause is good enough. Supporters of racial redress say exactly that. The exception also tends to outlast the emergency that justified it. Leaders who gain votes and loyalty from a temporary measure rarely give it up.
In Lebanon, the 1943 National Pact divided the top offices by religion. The president had to be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim. After the civil war of 1975 to 1990, the 1989 Taif Agreement called for an end to sectarian politics in phases. More than 35 years later, the quotas remain.
More patient
In the short term this will be unsatisfying to many, but the honest liberal position is more patient.
It means persuading people one at a time that they are better off in a country that treats each of them as a person. It might fail. But a liberal order won through group loyalty would last only as long as the group’s interests happened to match liberal principle, and nothing guarantees that they will.
[Image: by LightFieldStudios]
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