South Africans who remember those heady, long-ago days of state capture are finding what’s happening in the US eerily reminiscent. It’s only long ago in internet years, of course — what was it, 2010? — when then president Jacob Zuma started his backyard sale of our country. Quite how many of us do remember the details is uncertain. From the support Zuma’s new fire-sale political party received at the last elections, it certainly seems that a forgetting, wilful or not, has taken place for some.
But we’re not here to reminisce over the bad old days when we have bad new days to talk about. There are loads of articles that discuss the similarities between Zuma and US President Donald Trump, going back years. In The Nation in 2017, former Mail and Guardian editor-in-chief Nic Dawes wrote a prescient piece about how poorly US journalism was dealing with the growing threat of Trump and his “alternative facts”.
The things he and others warned about have all played their part in enabling Trump’s second coming. Things such as a media that insisted upon the illusion, or perhaps delusion, of objectivity and telling both sides of the story, even when it was obvious that one side was a lie designed to destroy the very trust that journalists thought they were maintaining.
How we laughed at Kellyanne Conway, then counsellor to the president, when in 2017 she defended White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s lies about how big the crowd had been at Trump’s presidential inauguration. Asked to explain why Spicer would “utter a provable falsehood” in an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd, she said Spicer was giving “alternative facts”.
At the time, Todd’s comment seemed both an incisive riposte and eminently rational. “Look, alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.” Now, I think, we all realise that comment was not only entirely wrong, but even quaint in how it harks back to a distant world, or distant information ecosystem if you prefer, where we still thought things such as truth and trust existed.
What we’ve learnt is that Conway was right. The world is swilling in alternative facts. These facts are not defined by any sort of objective validation as truth or untruth, but by whether they’re believed. We’ve returned to the mindset of the queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. You’ll recall the scene.
Look, alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods
— Chuck Todd
Speaking to Alice: “‘That’s the way it’s done,’ the Queen said with great decision: ‘nobody can do two things at once, you know. Let’s consider your age to begin with — how old are you?’ ‘I’m seven and a half exactly.’ ‘You needn’t say ‘exactually’, the Queen remarked: ‘I can believe it without that. Now I’ll give you something to believe. I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.’
“‘I can’t believe that!’ said Alice.
“‘Can’t you?’ the queen said in a pitying tone. ‘Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.’
“Alice laughed: ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said; ‘one can’t believe impossible things.’
“‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was younger, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’”
I once understood that passage as being about the joyous freedom of thought. Reading it through the chilling lens of our present state of disinformation, and in the light of attacks on the notion of truth itself, it reads rather differently. “You needn’t say exactly,” says the queen. She can believe things without demanding exact facts, and so can you.
That creates a state of cognitive dissonance, which the queen fills with her own truth. “Now I’ll give you something to believe. I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.” When she lies about her age, she mimics exactitude with a number that is precise to the day. And most ominous of all is the suggestion that if you practise believing impossible things, it soon becomes effortless. It’s more than an allegory of the terminal stage of the US empire, it’s a how-to manual.
In Dawes’s piece, comparing the US with South Africa he wrote that the US media was, theoretically, in a better place than South Africa at the time. “The United States, where I work now, is not South Africa: its democratic traditions are older, its legal protections for speech more absolute, its media more diverse and, despite the carnage in print journalism, vastly better resourced. And yet the features of an authoritarian populism, centred on the personality of a demagogic leader, are emerging with stunning rapidity here.”
“And yet.” And yet, here the US is. Here the world is. An authoritarian populism, centred on the personality of a demagogic leader. It turns out that South Africa did a better job of holding on to the ideals of democracy than the US, which makes it even more annoying that Trump and his Muskrat have now decided that we’re not democratic enough for their liking.
An article on The Bulwark news site describes the present state of play. “The main divergence of the Zuma and Trump stories is that South Africa’s democracy — just 30 years old — has responded better to its authoritarian threat than the world’s oldest, richest, most powerful democracy.”
It also describes the similarities between the two. “Zuma swept in on a populist wave of diehard support from his ethnic Zulu community, a major political bloc. He effectively spun a persecution narrative to explain away his alleged crimes, while deftly playing on the (very real) frustrations and hardships of poor, black South Africans, as well as their racial, ethnic, and class prejudices. His demagoguing of immigration continues to fuel waves of violent, xenophobic attacks on refugees from other African nations.”
There are other parallels, and (via the Public Affairs Research Institute’s “bite-size summary”) the Zondo commission gives us a handy list of the key elements you need to effect state capture. Americans — well, all of us — will recognise them.
There’s “the allocation and distribution of state power and resources, directed not for the public good but for private and corrupt advantage; a network of persons outside and inside government acting illegally and unethically in furtherance of state capture [hello, Elon]; improper influence over appointments and removals; the manipulation of the rules and procedures of decision-making in [the] government in order to facilitate corrupt advantage; a deliberate effort to undermine or render ineffectual oversight bodies and to exploit regulatory weaknesses so as to avoid accountability for wrongdoing; a deliberate effort to subvert and weaken law enforcement and intelligence agencies at the commanding levels so as to shield and sustain illicit activities, avoid accountability and to disempower opponents; support and acquiescence by powerful actors in the political sphere, including members of the ruling party; the use of disinformation and propaganda to manipulate the public discourse”. And so on. I won’t list them all.
Here we are, then, with countries such as South Africa, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Senegal, Malaysia and Namibia the unlikely heroes of democracy. They’ve recently launched a campaign, The Guardian writes, “to protect and uphold the rulings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the face of what they describe as defiance of ICJ orders and attempts by US Congress to hit the ICC through the use of sanctions. The aim of the nine-nation Hague Group is to defend the institutions and rulings of the international legal order.”
So while we all suffer because of Trump’s “executive order”, which is now what I’m going to call it when a cat pees on my carpet to mark its territory, it’s at least a little heartening to know that South Africa is on what I believe the pundits term “the right side of history”. As if history ever took sides and ever could now, given the existence, I presume, of alternative histories.
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