Right-wing shadow looms over world

Vie

I’M IN the US this week and it certainly feels different. If Donald Trump’s policy plan of a “Muslim ban” is implemented, this might mark the end of my frequent trips here.

We know there has been a steep incline in anti-Muslim feelings in the US. Numerous incidents of Islamophobia and hate have been reported recently, including one where a teacher in the south was left a note telling her to hang herself with her hijab, which “isn’t allowed anymore”.

Trump’s election to the American presidency is a political disaster. He has expressed feelings of racism, xenophobia, global warming denialism and does not have the temperament for public office. Yet he’s the most powerful man on the planet.

A number of commentators have argued this disaster was first presaged with the election of the corrupt right-wing millionaire, Silvia Berlusconi, in Italy.

It does make some sense to point to the election of Berlusconi as the arrival of “post-truth” politics in Western democracies.

But Trump is also part of a more contemporary wave of right-wing, sometimes neo-fascist, authoritarian populists that have been elected around the world.

This wave includes Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin and Rodrigo Duterte. It also includes politicians like Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen.

This wave of far right-wing, sometimes neo-fascist, authoritarian populism is usually organised around charismatic and often demagogic figures who blame vulnerable groups, often ethnic or religious minorities, for the economic crisis caused by unrestrained capitalism.

It has made effective use of social media to whip up fears and anger. This has often taken the form of organised and well-funded attempts to push “post-truth” propaganda through social media outlets.

In South Africa, Jacob Zuma and Julius Malema are both authoritarian populists – a movement which has also displaced more democratic forms of politics among students on some campuses.

Figures like Zuma, Malema and student leader Mcebo Dlamini are all demagogues trying to mobilise nationalist sentiment to bolster their own authority and power. They present themselves as men of the people and have alarmingly authoritarian tendencies.

Dlamini’s disregard for the truth is extraordinary. Malema’s recent invocation of the spectre of genocide is chilling. Zuma and the Guptas, as we now all know, are running a social media propaganda operation along the model of the so-called “Alt Right” in the US, complete with twitter bots, foundations, like Jimmy Manyi’s Decolonisation Foundation and posttruth propaganda publications like Andile Mngxitama’s Black Opinion.

We, like many countries in the world, including the US, are at a dangerous juncture.

There are a number of reasons so many societies have succumbed to authoritarian populism. The most important for the turn away from democratic and progressive values is that the extreme form of neoliberal capitalism supported by the likes of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, and before them Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, has plunged millions into destitution while the new managerial class has grown excessively wealthy.

The left has failed to win a critical mass of support. But the right has been extremely successful in stoking various kinds of prejudices that result in Muslims being blamed for the crisis in India, Mexicans and Muslims in the US, immigrants, including Poles, in Britain and so on.

This has been supported by the decline of the traditional media and the rise of social media that is vulnerable to the proliferation of fake news and post-truth analysis and opinion.

In South Africa we are already quite far down the rabbit hole. To avoid hitting rock-bottom, we need to take urgent action to turn things around.

The first step is to understand that millions face a serious economic crisis and take effective steps to begin to resolve it. Lazy sloganeering by the left has not helped.

Recent research by people like Ivor Chipkin, as well as Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattress, has shown that South Africa is not a classic neoliberal state.

The progressives in the ANC have built an innovative welfare state with massive investments in public housing, social grants and so on. There is currently a real possibility of attaining a minimum wage.

Of course more should be done to rein in capital and prevent the export of profits. But the fundamental problem with our society is that the state has been deeply corrupted.

We have to turn this corruption around. Pravin Gordhan has become the figurehead for a growing revolt against corruption and looting.

While his courage must be applauded, this is not about him. It is about making the state work for society rather than just a predatory elite.

We need to throw everything into the growing movement against corruption. We also need to do all that we can to oppose the emergence of fake news and post-truth politics. We need to support rational debate based on solid empirical evidence.

The third task we face is the urgent need to build a mass-based and democratic left. If there was a credible left in the US, Bernie Sanders would be the president-elect. If there was a credible left in the UK, Jeremy Corbyn would be the prime minister. If there was a credible left in India, Modi would not have been able to take power.

Previous NGO-led attempts to build a united left in South Africa, like the United Front and the Democratic Left Front, ended in failure. We need to learn lessons from those failures and base future attempts at building a real left on popular organisations.

Numsa is the obvious starting point. But Amcu should be engaged too, as well as social movements. If these organisations could come together, we would have hundreds of thousands of people in factories, mines, informal settlements and schools united in a single progressive project.

If we fail to build a mass-based and democratic left, we will, like the US, Britain, India, the Philippines and many other countries, face an increasingly bleak and dangerous future.

• Buccus is senior research associate at ASRI, research fellow in UKZN’s school of social sciences and academic director of a university study abroad programme on political transformation.