PETER BRUCE: SA’s liberal battlefield

There’s a war going on, in case you hadn’t noticed, between SA liberals that makes the ANC divisions look dull and tame. In a way, it’s been going on since at least the liberal wing of the United Party broke away to become the Progressive Party in 1959.

Basically the fight is about who is right. Or what a liberal really is. Or even what “truth” is. Walking where liberals make war is like strolling through the smokey aftermath of the Somme — a fetid, grey and miserable battlefield where no surrender was ever possible, where every soldier was fighting for himself and where, unnervingly, every now and then a corpse would stir, raise a muddy fist, scream “I got you!” and pitch back face first into its foxhole.

On the face of things a traditional SA liberal would believe in the freedom of the individual to make all the key choices in life — who to love, where to live, what to do. They believe in the free markets and the rule of law. It sounds so simple and attractive. I regard myself as a liberal but as I read what other people I regard as liberals, or people who insist they are liberals, do and say to each other, let alone their ideological rivals, I better appreciate why I have no political home.

By way of illustration let me paint a picture for you before introducing you to some really good writing on the many sides of the Great SA Liberal War.

I follow the SA Institute of Race Relations (IRR), the Daily Maverick digital newspaper and the Politicsweb political website on social media and I get daily or weekly “newsletters” from them as a result, on my e-mail. Business Day and the FM do the same. The newsletters are a way of engaging you perhaps more directly than hoping you chance upon one of their articles on Twitter or Facebook. And they are a useful tool.

All three come out of the liberal tradition. The IRR was a beacon of fact and fortitude before and during apartheid. Daily Maverick was founded by an immigrant and entrepreneur who I have no doubt pays some of his staff more than he pays himself — for me, the liberal ideal. Politicsweb is run by James Myburgh, an intellectual with impeccable liberal credentials.

Almost every week now I get, included in the Maverick newsletter, an “editorial” telling me that SA is on the edge of disaster and that one way of stopping it is through making a donation to the journalism in Maverick. Fair enough. It’s a business model. I also get the same from Politicsweb, though possibly less often but no less passionate. And fairly frequently I am sent one from the IRR, though it is by far the most strident and has created its own digital publication, called, I think, the Daily Friend, which seems mainly to carry opinion columns like this one. David Bullard writes for the IRR and Politicsweb. To stop expropriation without compensation, become a (paying) friend of the IRR. To stop the NHI, become a friend once more.

But while both the IRR and a lot of Maverick’s journalism is about exposing and condemning the corruption of the ANC in government, in a roundabout way the IRR and Maverick are also at each other’s throats. Why? Here is an excellent piece of writing from someone I’ve never read but who clearly follows the liberal wars (though she may not call them that because she’s liberal and her targets are not. I think she’s wrong) closely and can track down what you said then and what you’re saying now. Research is a terrible thing.

This piece, by Marie-Louise Antoni, piles into what she calls the “Left” or the “progressives”. That identification is, I think, her only flaw because the people she’s writing about are not, in my view, “Left” at all. But here is an excellent read.

So there you have the problem expressed as well as you could have hoped. In my view neither of the two Maverick writers Antoni picks on, Richard Poplak and Rebecca Davis, are “Left” in an ideological sense, though they may consider themselves “progressive”. I don’t know. I’ve never met them.

But where did the current unpleasantness begin? Idle liberals like me have always taken pot shots at the DA. Me because they never seem to have an economic policy to trade on, and others for reasons of their own. Many liberals would have started out opposing apartheid, drifted into the ANC or the UDF and drifted out again in disgust during the Zuma years.

But this war is different. It began, as all SA arguments do, with a row about race. In 2013. It started when Helen Zille tried to “transform” the DA and put Lindiwe Mazibuko in charge of the party in parliament. Here’s a piece by William Saunderson-Meyer to remind you of how fraught that decision turned out to be for liberalism in SA.

In other words the predominantly white liberals in the DA stood up and said that “under no circumstances will race be used as a proxy for disadvantage in our ideology”. Black party members new to leadership positions weren’t so sure. The immediate result was that Mazibuko left the DA and Zille eventually found Mmusi Maimane, though the only way her white male colleagues would let that happen was by her giving Maimane her job as party leader. They weren’t giving up anything themselves then and they’re still not.

The Antoni response to the “Left” as she sees it would have been enough to chew on for a week were this not SA, where the news cycle moves insanely quickly. No sooner had Antoni appeared than Zille, now free of the constraints of political party or provincial leadership and newly welcomed fellow at the IRR, appeared on News24 with a column that suggested that the attempt by the SA National Editors forum to litigate in the equality court against Julius Malema and the EFF for threatening individual journalists for supposed bias in favour of Cyril Ramaphosa was in itself a threat to the freedom of speech.

Zille only knows how to move in a straight line and this biting piece turns out to be an extension of the liberal war. Here she has a real go at former City Press editor Ferial Haffajee.

To which (now Daily Maverick writer) Haffajee responded thus.

And in the process the accusation that Zille, or more widely the IRR, is now “alt-Right” raises its head again. I don’t think I saw traces of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson in the Zille piece though as someone who has had a political protest outside my house I know now I would think nothing of seeking the protection of the courts if it happened again. And as an opinion writer I am not a “politician” as the Zille piece might infer.

I am a journalist. I have been a subeditor, a reporter and news editor and editor of two publications. Each required me to be a different kind of journalist. These days I am a columnist. My currency now is my opinion. My opinion, whether it be on who to vote for in an election or how to save Eskom or the economy is just that. I should be free to express it without being threatened with death for it.

I can change my mind and contradict myself without the slightest shame. I often try to have an argument before I write a column. That gets the blood flowing. Suddenly you have a cause. You can take a stand, hell, take the hill, and walk away That’s not to say I can’t be held responsible for it. But I’m thinking only when I’m writing, not when you’re talking to me about what you read.

Anyway liberalism has always had its shades. The Progressive Party types used to call (the now defunct) Liberal Party types “extreme liberals”. Cape liberals back in the 1960s were considered “conservative”.

Trying to find holes to peg the IRR or the Maverick journalists into doesn’t help anyone but we seem determined to try nonetheless. For myself as a wandering liberal I want to find the shade that best suits my liberalism. It would have been with Alan Paton and Peter Brown back in the 1960s had I been able to. The women of the Black Sash were liberal heroes. Now there seems to me to be no comfortable liberal home.

But there is something creepy about the newsletters I get in the mornings. Perhaps the IRR’s most particularly. I get the opposition to the ANC — it has been a disgraceful party in government. But if there is a land problem (and I think there is) what does a liberal solution to it look like and how long would it take? Does it have to be race-free? Does it have to be identity-free? The same with health. How do you help the poor and the sick?

Not being corrupt and incompetent is only part of the answer. You can tell from the pieces I’ve used here that liberals are stuck in their shaded foxholes just like every political being in the country is. But what with Zille becoming an IRR fellow and Tony Leon making a major speech to the IRR at the beginning of this month, maybe there is something new in the offing. A new party? Less than two years ago Frans Cronjé, head of the IRR, was openly canvassing for a liberal breakaway from the DA, which he saw moving increasingly Left and anti-liberal.

Nothing happened then but could it now? Are conditions right for a DA split and is there a place for liberalism here? The real activism and courageous liberalism of Paton and Brown? A glance at the media and in parliament says there obviously is.

Build in a little philosophical drift, for we are only human, and liberals cover the centre and shades to the Left and Right of it. Liberalism’s become a dirty word here and it faces headwinds around the world. But unlike race and other forms of populist identity politics, liberalism is an idea, not a fact. That makes it much more powerful. It must not be hijacked. It’ll outlive its rivals if it practises the freedoms and tolerance that it has always promised.