Cleft state

The past week has seen spats between the DA and the ANC on several policy issues. While the DA has no power to implement any policies which substantially differ from the consensus position, they nonetheless insist on trying to pull in the opposite direction.

This has led to a few peculiar exchanges on X between

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Vincent Magwenya (Pres. spokes.):

The DA retains the right to maintain its own foreign policy position. However, that position can not be imposed on the President under the guise of the GNU. The President will not be micromanaged by the DA in his execution of South Africa’s foreign policy.

Hill-Lewis:

The ANC retains the right to maintain its own foreign policy. However, that position cannot be imposed on the GNU. The ANC simply still has not fully internalised that the policies of the former ANC-majority govt are not just superimposed onto this new govt.

This is whole charade honestly getting both tedious and ridiculous – a petty impotent farce.

A government needs a common FP, and a common approach to major reforms.

Failure to reach that common position before acting in public shows that the country is simply not united.

This seems like a trivial observation, but the reality is that this government represents a coming together of all racial groups in government for the first time since 1996.

The fact that minority and majority representatives have nothing in common is reflective of the core observations of the political philosophers of classical society, whether Aristotle, Livy or Cicero.

They all agreed that for any polity to succeed, it needed to have a common set of values, and a commonly perceived general interest.

There is no way in which we can be said to possess these.

And yet, despite all the grumbling, there appears to be so much the leaders do all agree on – South Africa should be a progressive, egalitarian mass democracy with a central government, a massive welfare system, a libertine penal code, and some degree of racial discrimination in favour of the majority.

Somehow this is not enough to facilitate trust and common purpose, and the reason for this, while abstract, is fairly simple.

The difference is the difference between the standard Anglosphere Fabian model of Scientific Progress, aka “neoliberalism” (low-tariff trade, public-private partnerships, govt by intel-NGO-blob, welfare-based redistribution) and the third-worldist inheritance of the Marxian revolution (ownership of the means of production; expulsion of successful minorities/settlers; monolithic political systems)

The DA are perfectly happy with unlimited erasure of any and all forms of civil liberties, equality before the law, corruption, etc, so long as the system is legible from the top, and can be steered along to some degree with the central planning doctrine handed down from the UN and their affiliated cluster of trans-Atlantic elites.

The ANC want to loot, sure, but they do sincerely want to get to the point where minority ownership of property can be abolished and capital ties with the West can be severed once and for all

And each of these stances hinge on the alignment between East and West – the East will allow you to do what the West does not, so long as you don’t disrupt their trade interests or insult them; the West wants a total political programme and tolerates no deviation

And this is why one of the very few things the DA truly have the energy to push back on (instead of chiding the ANC to be more efficient at their own chosen policies) is foreign policy

Henry Kissinger once referred to white South Africans as a “pressure group”, a term he applied elsewhere too. The division in perceived vital interests and our basic vulnerability means we are dependent on foreign support to punch above our weight and survive.

But someday, the balance of power will shift to the East, and then all bets are off, and it all becomes a matter of hard power.

By then, we had better hope that Solidarity has achieved the potency required to command territory, or by some miracle the Cape Independence movement rises again, because the DA will never be able to prevent the Big Bad in this country for very long.

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