Disturbing parallels between SA and the USA

“THIS kind of populism with its undercurrent of implicit violence may go down a treat with the politically unsophisticated, but he could never become president.”

“This country is too wedded to its inclusive, democratic traditions to tolerate a racist, sexist bigot who spews hatred and bile.”

That’s the US intelligentsia talking about one Donald J Trump, of course. Well, it might have been, for those are exactly the kinds of assured but – we now know – hopelessly out of touch assessments made by Americans about the man just elected to be the 45th US president.

But, actually, no. Those naively optimistic predictions are a distillation of the current political wisdom of South Africa’s commentariat about one Julius S Malema.

It’s just a reminder that it is not only the US that is vulnerable to an ugly, pseudo-fascist populism. Sometimes nightmares do come true, whether they believe themselves to be, in Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu’s words, the “rainbow nation of God”, or “that shining city on the hill” that was the vision of Ronald Reagan.

Sometimes nations experience a definitive paroxysm of angry frustration over an underclass’s socio-economic disadvantage that drowns out rational discourse. A hunger for change that swamps compassion, conciliation and good sens.

No one could have argued more eloquently against the dangers of electing as president a maverick, a reality star demagogue with a predilection for scapegoating minorities, than did Barack Obama.

The first black president, a man elected twice on his ability to appeal to the loftiest, most generous aspects of the American psyche, warned that Trump embodied the nation’s basest instincts and that to elect him would be rued by the next generation as a betrayal.

He was completely ignored. Hillary Clinton, the woman who was supposed to be a shoo-in as the first woman president of the US, was handed a crushing defeat.

A measure of her humiliation is that the woman who wanted voters to entrust her with the leadership of the most powerful nation on earth – at least for the moment – couldn’t summon the courage to face supporters at her campaign headquarters. Despite having already phoned Trump to acknowledge his victory, she had nothing to say to those who had worked their hearts out for her.

Come back tomorrow if you want to hear her concession speech, her campaign manager told the crowd. It was a display of crass selfishness that one would have expected more readily from The Donald, who has never held elected office, rather than from a person who has lived her whole life immersed in politics and the noblesse oblige that public service demands.

In the same way that the election of a fire-breathing populist would be a disaster for South Africa, the election of the tub-thumping Trump is potentially so for the US and the world that it is so influential in. But the hysterical reaction is overdone.

The difference between SA and the US is that we are a fledgling democracy, with a history of hate and conflict. Disorder and chaos are endemic to our politics.

We kill foreigners because they are better shopkeepers. Our government tolerates incitements to violence because it has expediently betrayed the non-racial precepts of the Freedom Charter.

The US, however, is a democracy that has weathered many crises. It is a system stacked with checks and balances.

And contrary to the assertion of the surely soon-to-be-ex French ambassador to Washington in a tweet – since deleted – that the “world is collapsing before our eyes”, the world is a robust place.

Just as Britain, contrary to the doomsayers, will survive Brexit without imploding, the US under Trump will not only survive but will explore options that were previously inconceivable.

There is, in foreign policy, the endearing bromance between Trump and President Vladimir Putin. Clinton has mooted a militant containment of the nationalistically resurgent and expansionist Russia. Trump, who holds the EU in low regard, sees instead a potential ally.

But what certainly has changed, and it will undoubtedly be accompanied by political and economic volatility, is that the establishment elites that have scripted Western politics for scores of years are being displaced, one after the other. The era of cosy deals made between privileged private school chums is reaching an end.

Or maybe not. Trump’s ghostwritten autobiography cum bromides-for-serially-bankruptbillionaires is, after all, called The Art of the Deal. Trump might transmogrify into a puppet of the Washington elite that he ostensibly despises. The sushi-slurping, Breitling-brandishing Malema would understand perfectly.

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