DA must remember its liberal roots
The quest for a new party leader must balance issues of race and gender against the principles it represents
IT IS open season speculating who will succeed Helen Zille as the next leader of the Democratic Alliance.
What I believe the DA needs is a liberal.
Despite its commitment on paper to the ideals of liberalism as espoused by its ideological ancestors such as Peter Brown and Helen Suzman, there is nothing that a visitor to South Africa can immediately see of the DA that it is a party of liberalism.
Every party in South Africa promises to eradicate poverty, create jobs, jail criminals and improve the economy. The DA promises this too. Even the DA’s stated aim of being for “an open opportunity society” is shared by its detractors and opponents.
The difference is usually on the choice of words and how they hope to achieve this.
What the DA does not share with any other party is that they are liberals.
As with many social science concepts, the definition of a liberal is contested andwhatever attempt one tries to make there will be many who find it insufficient. I hope political scientists will accommodate that liberals are known for their insistence on societies that prize equality and social liberties.
Even with that, there is a dissonance over whether the DA believes equality means treating everyone as the same regardless of their current space or the inherent equality of the person regardless of their life station but recognising the need to advantage the person previously disadvantaged so as to achieve the envisaged equality.
One of the reasons for the ZilleLindiwe Mazibuko fallout was on the question of the racial nature of inequality and that the redress must inevitably have a racial nature to it.
In an interview with the Mail & Guardian in November 2013 explaining why her party would support amendmends to the economic empowerment laws, Mazibuko said: “Inequality is racialised. We can’t ignore it, but neither do we want to entrench racial categories as a function of who you are”.
Zille, speaking at the Cape Town Press Club a few days later, hit back at Mazibuko. “There was absolutely no excuse for the DA supporting Verwoerdian measures like that.” This was why the party needed to reject the BroadBased Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) Bill and the Employment Equity Amendment Bill.
While Mazibuko probably spoke in an attempt to make the party more appealing to black middleclass voters, Zille recognised that its core support comes from groups that see employment equity and economic empowerment as attempts to unfairly punish whites in general and white males in particular.
Perhaps this explains why the DA has abandoned its hope of attracting the black middle class and instead concentrates on the rural, peri-urban and informal settlement black vote; this is informed by its inability to respond satisfactorily to what it can offer black people who already have a comfortable home, water from their tiled bathrooms and kids at a model C or private school, who still have apartheid wounds or scars.
It is easier to talk about the tangible fact of not having running water than to address perception of subliminal racism. What currently holds the disparate DA strands together is historic antipathy towards the ANC by many of its historic voters and the disappointment of its new voters over what they see as the ANC failure to deliver “a better life for all”.
That is why it can appeal to wealthy libertarians such as Herman Mashaba who believes that the poor and the unemployed should be allowed to take slave wages if they and their bosses agree; and still forge election pacts with Abahlali
The DA needs to find a leader who will make an ‘I am a liberal’ speech with the same pride and effect ...
baseMjondolo – an organisation for the homeless.
The ANC has the same in Cyril Ramaphosa and the squatter camp community leaders, but the difference here is that the ANC has always been a nationalist movement and a self-described broad church.
The DA, on the other hand, is its liberal genes. Its mission must not only be to take power from the ANC but also to show why it believes that liberalism is the future and to defend this claim.
The DA needs to find a leader who will make an “I am a liberal” speech with the same pride and effect that former president Thabo Mbeki made the “I am an African” speech.
The party needs a leader who will ensure that it reverses the tendency to use being described as a liberal as a swearword for whites who are “too soft on the native” or blacks “who are Orios” – black on the outside and white inside.
As with every political philosophy, liberalism is not perfect. What cannot be argued against even by its most strident critics is that it has made a positive contribution to the evolution of society and political thought.
The question though is whether the DA is too fixated with the sex and the skin colour of its next leader to remember its liberal traditions and be proud to defend them?