Lying politicians face wrath of voters
READERS may not be surprised to learn that politicians tell lies. “How do you know when a politician is lying?” one popular joke runs. “His lips are moving.” But lies can come back to bite them. The rise of Donald Trump has been attributed to xenophobia and alienation among lower middle-class American workers. But one big factor has also been the outrageous lies Republican Party politicians have told, year in year out, about the state of the country. Trump’s intolerant populism has been generated in part by the party establishment that he now threatens to destroy.
The political fallout from last week’s Brexit vote in the UK has dire implications for the EU. Brexit followed a campaign in which the Leave camp peddled blatant untruths. Such dishonesty flourished in a culture of popular ignorance, itself a culmination of three decades of manufactured ill-will towards EU institutions. English politicians cannot now reason with the wider electorate because so many ordinary people have mostly become unplugged from relevant political realities.
The leaders of the ANCare heading towards the same cliff. They have been relentlessly destroying the grasp of reality citizens need to participate constructively in democratic politics. This cultivation of ignorance centres on the economy. Participation in a global capitalist economy is not a choice, yet ANC leaders continue to generate an endless stream of meaningless anticapitalist rhetoric.
The South African Communist Party (SACP) bears a special burden of guilt. Its historically white and Indian leaders have used quasi-Marxist mystification to deflect attention from their race to claim possession of special theoretical insights, and to justify their right to unelected power. Deputy general secretary Jeremy Cronin recently struggled to explain why the open theft of public resources by corrupt politicians and businesspeople is bad. After all, in the party’s view, the whole capitalist system is by its nature unjust.
Organised labour has, meanwhile, used anticapitalist rhetoric to protect its members’ privileges at the expense of the half of the population who are not active in formal labour markets. Now breakaway mining and metalworker unions are using the anticapitalist exaggerations of the past to undermine the established unions that first propagated them.
Income inequality has become a political football. The top 20% of earners account for 70% of expenditure, while the bottom 40% account for only 7%. But ANC leaders know that inequality, unlike poverty or unemployment, is not subject to rapid adjustment. Educated workers will continue to enjoy a skill premium, and competition for scarce jobs will drive down unskilled workers’ wages. Even reduced unemployment cannot much dent inequality, because additional employees will still be on low wages. The remedies for inequality are long-term ones, and require improvements in early child development, schooling, and postschool training and education. This is the work of decades.
Politicians are, meanwhile, pre-emptively blaming global institutions, such as the IMF, for the consequences of a self-induced fiscal crisis. Progressive Professional Forum president Jimmy Manyi took irrationality a stage further last week when he suggested capitalists should be relieved of their capital to drive an economic recovery.
The ANC has, meanwhile, vilified market actors so relentlessly that it cannot even argue for the creation of a favourable investment climate. The desperate struggle to avert a sovereign rating downgrade has been cast as subservience before sinister agencies of exploitation. Refusing to be frank with citizens about what can and cannot be changed, in the world we actually inhabit, is often a temptation for politicians. But the wrath of disappointed electors is likely to be directed against the parties that have lied to them.