DA’s policies support class
Carol Paton says the DA’s new post-BEE policies are “conservative”, even “ultraconservative” (DA’s growth creates identity crisis around race and liberalism, August 14). Actually, they are not. It is nationalism that is conservative.
Supporting class, not race, in seeking redress is far closer to progressivism than the ANC’s nationalist alternative.
Whereas a focus on race would and does provide “redress” to extremely rich and powerful people simply because they were born black, a focus on class and poverty will ensure it really is the poor who benefit from redress policies. Under our emerging new policy, most, if not all, of these beneficiaries will be black, but the black middle and upper classes will not be able to home in on redress policies they no longer need.
We do not think it a good idea to continue granting “disadvantaged” status to people who live in Hyde Park, send their children to Roedean and Michaelhouse, and then perhaps to Oxford or Brown University, and who have probably already benefited from past redress policies. We believe now that a middle and upper class has been created, it should be left to flourish on its own.
ANC hegemony has skewed the political compass of most people. Many DA policies would be considered on the left in the US, for example. Our approach to the provision of health care is similar to that of Barack Obama; our support for social welfare places us far outside the “conservative” ambit; and our emphasis on supporting both mining and manufacturing while upholding the human rights of workers and the unemployed are the bread and butter of most liberal democracies worldwide. It’s only in the weird universe of the ANC, which continues to punt a sort of 1940s semi-Stalinism, that such things would be considered conservative.
In fact, in the US “liberal” is a code word for “ultra-leftism” among actual conservatives, who believe in stripping the poor of their social support and allowing the most brutal forms of capitalism free rein. In SA, the ANC has so captured the minds of our commentariat that they have come to believe that its statist, self-enriching race obsession is actually the “left” way of thinking. In fact it closely resembles Afrikaner nationalism — Volkskapitalisme — in more ways than one.
A small middle and now upper-middle class continues to mobilise the poor through populist slogans and millenarian dreams to cement its pole position in the accumulation of wealth, through plunder where possible and using the state as anchor and source of funds. It is they who tell us race-based redress is what is necessary.
No one but themselves will benefit from that, at the expense of the poorest parts of our population, who they have apparently abandoned to the wolves of crime, poverty and social anarchy.
Prof Belinda Bozzoli, MP DA higher education spokesperson