The spectacle of the ANC trampling on its heritage in defence of a man almost as dubious as Donald Trump, provoked a hankering for moral clarity, writes Craig Dodds.
No confidence, no surrender
From the wars against disorder
From the sirens night and day
From the fires of the homeless
From the ashes of the gay
Democracy is coming to the USA
- Leonard Cohen
He could hardly be accused of misty-eyed optimism but it’s hard to share even this morsel of faith this week, crowned by word of Leonard Cohen’s death.
Possibly, after a life of “holding out little wild bouquet(s)”, he simply gave up.
Who wouldn’t? In Cohen's words: Everybody knows the war is over, and everybody knows the good guys lost.
Worse, perhaps, there never were any good guys. Anyone in this country still baffled by the US election results should see Hell or High Water screening in cinemas now.
It’s a glimpse into the blistered soul of blue-collar America in a post-financial crisis wasteland, scorched by the merciless algorithms of globalised corporate capital.
A Western-styled bank robbery yarn, it describes the craving in this upside-down universe for the instant clarity of the bullet, the ultimate moral arbiter when certainty has been swept away by forces greater than comprehension.
Black and white simplicity is what Donald Trump - like any good fascist - has to offer, along with not much else.
He dispatches ambiguity with the sneer of a gunslinger - cruel, passionless and, when there is nothing left to lose, fatally appealing.
He is the worst possible type of leader for these times of industrial parochialism and surplus human capacity adrift in an unmoored geopolitical order.
The US military has already been honing its readiness for large-scale conventional warfare - shifting its focus from counter-insurgency and peace enforcement (see Huffington Post: Donald Trump says the US Army Isn’t Ready for War. That’s Just Not True) - and the president-elect’s pledge to tear up all the “unfair” trade deals struck by his predecessors and penalise “cheaters” like, say, China, should send shivers down the spines of peripheral nations like ours.
Not that China hasn’t hoovered up jobs with its vicious labour regime, helping to make US tech companies fabulously profitable along the way, but the solution would require a little more finesse than bombing the crap out of the offending parties.
The point: Trump is not some accident of history, he is precisely an expression of its morbid trajectory.
Closer to home, the squalid spectacle of the ANC trampling on its 100-year heritage in defence of a man almost as dubious as Trump (though lacking his toxic ideology), provoked a similar hankering for moral clarity.
What would people of fibre on the ANC benches do? We allowed ourselves to wonder when the moment came to choose between the ejector button and the cyanide pill. Predictably, the ANC took the poison, knowing exactly how it would taste.
Of course, the opposition parties knew this would happen.
The idea was never that somehow a secret ballot would be permitted or that a sufficient number of ANC MPs would be pricked by their consciences into rebellion.
The idea was always to call them out on national TV to neutralise the lingering belief among its supporters in a “real ANC”, whose integrity and principles remain intact and which might yet, somehow, wrest control of the party back from the unscrupulous leeches feasting on its blood.
But let’s consider what would have happened had a cohort of ANC members suffered a sudden infusion of idealistic purity and voted against their party.
The possibility, remote as it may have been, seems to have been sufficiently plausible for President Jacob Zuma to make an unwonted personal appearance at the caucus meeting that morning, just in case anyone was thinking of having ideas.
But, first, the record of voting would have instantly identified the culprits and retribution would have been swift and final, at the least resulting in the loss of their seats.
More than the material discomfort this would have caused, it would have significantly weakened the anti-Zuma faction, leaving it incapable of taking the fight to the president from within.
Second, though Zuma would no longer have been president of the country, he would still have been president of the party and, if anything, been strengthened by the revolt. Lastly, the looters would have won complete control of the state and been free to raid the coffers unchecked, while also training the unrestrained might of the security arm on their enemies.
This may have been what EFF chief whip Floyd Shivambu was referring to when he warned, perhaps melodramatically, that imprisonment and death awaited Zuma’s internal opponents.
Rather than going out, cowboy style, in a blaze of glory, they chose to remain and continue the grubby trench warfare they have started in Parliament, in which victory is measured in inches.
Bit by bit Zuma’s hold on key institutions - the SABC, the National Prosecuting Authority and state-owned enterprises - is being prised loose.
This is a long game, aimed at disrupting the patronage network on which his power rests. Even if it cannot be dismantled entirely, cutting off its supply lines from parastatals and the cronies that feed on them, and neutering its offensive capabilities in the form of the captured prosecuting and law-enforcement agencies may be enough to weaken its control of the ANC itself.
Based almost entirely on the distribution of material largesse, it may be vulnerable to starvation. That would seem to be the strategy, though victory is far from certain.
What is clear is that, while the governing party’s internecine battle rages, the same economic dysfunction that spawned Trump’s presidency is propelling our polity into crisis.
The racial contours may be different but the material outlines are similar - except that the degree of deprivation and disparity is exponentially worse.
There is a risk, then,we will suffer a similar fit of populist excess in the vacuum left by a party that once channelled the aspirations of the majority.
But, just as Trump is also, along with being a threat to global peace, a bellwether for a world order, so the moment he represents is also ripe with possibility in the US and elsewhere.
To borrow from Cohen again: “There is a crack, there is a crack, in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
Political Bureau