Is it a case of the pot calling the kettle populist?
With elections just two days away, perhaps it’s a good time to ask how populist we are. One of the more interesting international headlines of the past week was in the UK’s Guardian newspaper. “How Brazil and South Africa became the world’s most populist countries,” it read.
Perhaps my initial reaction was a touch defensive because the first thought was this is a bit rich coming from the country of Brexit, where on issues such as allegedly out-of-control immigration “how the people feel” has long replaced research and evidence as a driver of policy.
Like many “isms” before it, populism has become one of those phrases that one can apply to anything. Not long ago it became fashionable to describe Julius Malema as a fascist, in the same way that as students we used to talk about the “fascist apartheid government” without
really having a proper understanding of what the term meant.
Of course, if you try to defend Malema against this particular charge you get bombarded with a list of things that make him an unsavoury character. But do they make him a fascist?
It doesn’t really help that finding a single uncontested definition of fascism is virtually impossible. One can have some traits, such as a tendency towards authoritarianism or xenophobia that are often associated with fascism, without actually being fascist.
It wasn’t that long ago that Malema was portraying himself as the arch pan-Africanist, saying he didn’t want xenophobes voting for the EFF, so it might be hard to describe him as fascist in relation to xenophobia.
But his comments about racial minorities, notably South Africans of Indian descent, mean he sails close to the wind, as the fascist’s enemy need not always be an outsider.
He also doesn’t generally make appeals to some glorious past that needs to be restored and, outside of the land policy, one doesn’t get the impression that the brain trusts of the red berets have had time for such concepts as the remodelling of society.
The list of characteristics that make one a fascist is so long it’s not surprising that PW Botha and Malema can magically find themselves sharing an ideological home. Back in the 1940s, George Orwell said the word was almost meaningless, noting that he had seen it applied to Gandhi, women, astrology and even dogs, among other things.
The Guardian study identified whether people were populist on the basis of their answers to questions on a range of topics, from corruption to the suitability of direct democracy.
What seems to mark SA as populist is that most respondents expressed frustration with rampant corruption during the Jacob Zuma era and this has eroded support for the ANC, with some of that going to the EFF.
Similar to Brazil, another society that has long been plagued by high levels of inequality and corruption among its governing elite. In Jair Bolsonaro the country elected as president a far-right figure who has had to cancel a trip to New York after an event to honour him caused an outcry, including from the mayor of the city who decried what he called the latter’s overt racism and homophobia.
Across the political spectrum, other than those who are involved in the thieving, it would be hard to find anyone who thinks having a corrupt governing elite and an electricity monopoly that cannot keep the lights on, while at the same time leading us towards a catastrophic debt trap, is a good thing.
On that score, we are all populists, and the term, like Orwell’s fascism, means nothing. The idea of government in most democracies being run by self-interested elites is hardly a huge revelation. The bigger surprise is that making this observation now leads one to being labelled a populist.
Does SA have that unifying figure or political party where all these disaffected people are housed, in unity against a governing elite?
One thing that failed to come up in the study is that from Brexit to Donald Trump’s election as US president the populist revolutions that succeeded in portraying those in power as elites far removed from “the people” were themselves driven by elites and advocates of antipoor policies. The likes of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage are not exactly men of the people.
Maybe a better definition of populism has to include the use of deception on an unsuspecting populace, which might see SA trail behind the established democracies because we seem to be decidedly more sensible and cautious in comparison.
There’s no revolution in store here on Wednesday. The ANC and DA will remain the top two parties and the EFF will come a distant third if the polls are to be believed. My conclusion is that we are not so populist.
GOVERNMENT IN MOST DEMOCRACIES BEING RUN BY SELFINTERESTED ELITES IS HARDLY A SECRET. THE SURPRISE IS THAT OBSERVING THIS LEADS ONE TO BEING LABELLED A POPULIST