The hidden tyranny of #fallism
SA’s constitution is being denigrated as an ‘elite pact’, but the truth is it is our only safeguard, writes
THE rise of Fallism on South Africa’s campuses is, at heart, a local manifestation of a global phenomenon. It is a rage against the machine of liberal democracy and its corollary, a market economy.
Already, there are disturbing signs that this fury is being turned towards the constitution. Yet, properly fulfilled, our national covenant remains the greatest guarantor of social justice.
All politics is driven by the struggle for recognition — of needs, rights, dignity and identity. Liberal democracy is simply a set of political institutions designed to achieve that. Twenty-five years ago, it seemed unassailable.
In 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell and Soviet-bloc countries convulsed, the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “end of history”. Humanity, he wrote, had reached the peak of its ideological evolution. Liberal democracy had been universalised as the “final form of human government”.
Yet, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of liberalism’s immortality were greatly exaggerated.
Since the turn of the 21st century, there has been a backlash against liberal democracy from both ends of the political spectrum. On the left, it drove Occupy Wall Street activists who protested against inequality in 2011. Their cause has now morphed into a worldwide Occupy movement, fronted by hashtagging millennials. On the right, it mobilised Donald Trump’s base. Followers were left high and dry by a subprime crisis in 2008, sparking the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The last time capitalism faltered on such a scale, fascism flourished.
In South Africa, our transition to nonracial democracy in the 1990s seemed to prove Fukuyama’s thesis. It was expedited by the collapse of communism. And it showed the triumph of liberal democracy over rival racial nationalisms. This was the historical context in which our constitutional settlement was forged.
Now, the constitution has become the object of resentment and wrath. It is cast as an “elite pact”; the product of Nelson Mandela having sold out to “white monopoly capital” on the transfer of land and wealth. It is the foundation stone of (continued) post-apartheid white privilege and black pain.
This anti-constitutional ire is stoked by racial demagogues promising economic freedom under a socialist banner and portending, as Julius Malema did this week, a future “slaughter” of whites.
These authoritarian populists don the robes of constitutionalism in order to style themselves as progressives. But at some point, if it has not happened already, the constitution will join various “colonial” art works and books on the bonfire in a ritualised revolutionary purge.
Yet, the poorest South Africans — trodden down by the ANC government’s job-stifling policies and its slothfulness in progressively realising the constitution’s Bill of Rights — are not at the forefront of Fallism. As with many insurrectionary movements, the middle class is in the vanguard.
There is clearly a complex set of class (and psychological) dynamics at play in the student movement, some of which manifest themselves in virulent racial identity politics. Among comparatively advantaged black students who have attended ’COLONIAL ART WORK’: Cyril Ramaphosa looks on as Nelson Mandela signs the constitution at Sharpeville in 1996 institutions that they believe reproduce “whiteness” (Model C or private schools), there seems to be a consuming need to affirm a pure brand of “blackness”. They must define blackness, embody blackness and police blackness on behalf of other blacks. In its pathological intensity, it is an impulse almost akin to survivors’ guilt.
Needless to say, “whiteness” func- tions as the unassimilable other in this process. In fact, whiteness — ostensibly a sociohistorical construct, but spoken about by student rhetoricians as if it were a contaminated essence — can neither be assimilated, nor, more important, can it be assimilated to.
Whiteness, on this reading, is liberal democracy. The constitution — not in spite of, but because of, its universalist aspirations — is an artefact of whiteness.
This is the kind of volkisch thinking that animated the Romantic nationalism of the 19th century and produced the totalitarian movements of the 20th century.
There is nothing historically unusual about the deferred anger that gives rise to chauvinist politics.
It took 20 to 30 years for a majority of Afrikaners to question the Treaty of Vereeniging, the Act of Union and the postwar consensus around “conciliation” that they engendered.
By the 1930s and ’40s, the inclusive Anglo-Afrikaner South Africanism championed by Louis Botha and Jan Smuts was steadily giving way to a narrower ethnic nationalism.
In all such epochal shifts lie the seeds of totalitarianism.
In her brilliant study, On Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt draws on Alexis de Tocqueville’s insights into the French Revolution of 1789 to explain the rise of anti-Semitism in the modern era.
According to De Tocqueville, on the eve of the revolution, the French aristocracy was loathed more than it ever had been because it had lost political power without any decline in its economic fortunes.
Similarly, Arendt deduced, “wealth without visible function” lay at the root of modern Jew-hatred. Anti-Semitism reached its climax in Nazi Germany when Jews had lost their public functions and were left with only their wealth.
It would be alarmist to suggest that we have reached the totalitarian tipping point in South Africa. But our eyes should be open.
Unlike most totalitarian ideologies, Fallism has no fixed doctrine (it is a movable feast of insourcing, free higher education, decolonisation and African socialism), no fixed leadership, and no clear utopian vision. If fact, Fallism is nothing if not nihilistic. In many ways, this makes Fallism potentially even more tyrannical.
And in South Africa, the only real bulwark against tyranny is the constitution.
Cardo is a DA MP
The constitution has become the object of wrath. It is cast as an ‘elite pact’