The answer, Mr Maimane, is to break free of collectivism

DA leader Mmusi Maimane is right about one thing: South Africans are looking to his party for a way out of the quagmire their lives have become under the ANC.

This, anyway, is what he told alumni and guests at the Wits School of Governance last Thursday.

He is right because, well, the ANC is haemorrhaging support and the DA is the obvious beneficiary, making room for a catholic range of ANC dissidents and everyone else across the ideological spectrum.

Maimane said a few other things too, but he said nothing new. His now-hackneyed message is that the DA is against corruption and nationalism and big government, and that small is beautiful, so to paraphrase. That is, the DA’s policy is to be against the ANC. That’s it. Granted, it is the curse of opposition politics, and its blessing, but it is not enough. The narrative is determined by the incumbent; the incumbent is an easy target.

You may argue that in SA, things are trickier. The ANC’s venality is in a league of its own and the culture of racist nationalism deeply entrenched. But, as Business Day says in an editorial comment, conditions are extraordinary, which requires extraordinary measures. What Maimane calls liberalism and proposes for a post-ANC country is too banal to inspire hope or action.

On paper, the DA and the ANC appear just the same. The ANC also declares against corruption and for nonracialism. They mouth the same condemnations of crime and cronyism and incompetence. The ANC proposes small business tackle unemployment and small farms appease hunger.

The DA embraces the vague small-is-beautiful fantasy and wants better and appropriate education.

In a mad world, as Maimane calls it — in a world in which a Donald Trump would lead a free world, in a world in which a Jacob Zuma would lead a destitute people — liberalism is the go-to ideology. The western liberal model is the measure against which socioeconomic wellness is assessed.

For a nation desperate for change, it is alarming that the DA does not propose alternatives to the ANC’s policies, that Maimane promises no more than a change of style. Is he suggesting, sotto voce, that our society has truly achieved the best possible ideology (as Francis Fukuyama would have us believe) and in which SA’s political poles are mere iterations of each other? We will have answered that in retrospect, when the ANC has turned blue and the DA red, when it no longer matters. In the meantime, if Maimane wants to occupy the Union Buildings yet spare the nation more than that to which we have become accustomed, he must hang his activism on the ideological peg of individualism.

Material comforts and status may be motive for corruption, but corruption would not be possible without the supremacy of collectivism. The hive mind subordinates individual will, thus exonerating people from taking responsibility for their actions. When necessary, collective action benefits the team, but if the choice to act in concert is not that of each individual member of the group, they are mere supplicants. Hive dwellers never grow up.

WHAT THE DA LEADER CALLS LIBERALISM AND PROPOSES FOR A POST-ANC COUNTRY IS TOO BANAL TO INSPIRE HOPE OR ACTION

Thus, collectivism makes right-wing racism possible and collectivism is what feeds the disdain with which the mandarins of the left treat individuals.

Collectivism manifests as tribalism, feudalism and class war. It is what entitles Us to rob Them, that is, when we pass it off as in the interests of the group.

The challenge to Maimane and the DA is to change the culture of collectivism SA has inherited from the apartheid regime’s ideology of national socialism. He is right, too, when he asserts nationalism is passé, but his audience at the School of Governance might have wanted to hear a solution to the collectivist contradiction posed by his policy to continue race-based redress, “when” as he says, not “if” the DA assumes power.

To measure up to the ruling standard of national governance, the DA must take a principled stand in defence of the supremacy of individual freedom over the tyranny of the collective.