Everything I’ve read since Donald Trump’s victory in the US elections on Tuesday tells me it was worries about the economy that drove Americans — white, black, Latino, men and women, young and old — into his camp. His Democrat opponent failed to muster even the most basic case for improving the lives of ordinary people.
It was former president Bill Clinton, a Democrat, who leapt upon the advice of an adviser when he first ran for the White House in 1992. “It’s the economy, stupid,” James Carville told him, and he stuck to it and won. Twice.
Somehow, the team running Kamala Harris’s campaign thought they could nail Trump on abortion, but they were dead wrong. “You can rant about whatever you like but you lower people’s standard of living and you’re out on your ear,” read a pithy comment on the result.
It’s all you need to know.
Even the poor voted for Trump, though he is so careless he may yet sacrifice his volcanic mandate. But, equally, he may not. His vice-president-elect, JD Vance, would succeed him in four years’ time and cement a deeply conservative but rational era in the politics of the industrialised West. The Democrats are lost in a cultural spiral of choosing pronouns, open borders and sneering at the poor that will take a decade to escape.
Not all populism is a bad thing.
Voters respond to what’s in front of them. Address that and you have their attention, and it’s only in very few democracies that governments get away with repeatedly failing to improve the lives of their voters.
Voters respond to what’s in front of them. Address that and you have their attention, and it’s only in very few democracies that governments get away with repeatedly failing to improve the lives of their voters. South Africa is one, but it would be mad to think it can last forever.
The devastation we see around us all the time is real. Staggering unemployment, staggering poverty, staggering destruction of value in cities like Johannesburg and Durban, beggars everywhere, rock-bottom standards in education and health, and the persistence of racial, gender and economic inequalities just can’t keep producing conventional political outcomes for another 30 years.
What will happen?
The worst would be the growth of ethnic division, and we are fortunate that our post-apartheid leadership has given tribal politics no space to breathe. Even the rise of Jacob Zuma’s MK Party doesn’t threaten much in this regard. At least not yet. Because if he put his mind to it, and if he was even remotely well advised, he could easily become our Donald Trump.
It’s easy to forget that Trump has been running for office for nine years
He has the balls and the audacity to try to rally the country, even though he cannot be president again and even though he is 82. Fortunately, none of the people he has gathered around him has a clue about how to run the country, so a viable successor as MK leader is not immediately apparent. But that is all he may be missing right now — a plausible (probably Zulu) human to start working for a democratic majority.
It’s easy to forget that Trump has been running for office for nine years.
I doubt the ANC will win another majority soon, unless it persuades MK to rejoin, which could happen after President Cyril Ramaphosa leaves office, and if he fails to protect his “reforms” by controlling his succession.
But a black South African with a compelling economic proposition would surely have a shot at pulling this broken society together, given enough time and money. It isn’t going to be Herman Mashaba, who has tried and failed. It isn’t going to be Mmusi Maimane, who doesn’t understand the economy, nor Songezo Zibi, who does but who doesn’t have the machine.
The only places this person might emerge from are the ANC or the DA, and the ANC has contorted itself to such an extent to keep itself in power, I can’t think of a leader in it who could take the country by the scruff of the neck.
A black DA candidate - forgive the fantasy - would enter the fray with a finely tuned machine behind them, but the party makes no effort to appeal to black voters and has no African remotely close to leadership. This is absurd. It is in a coalition government with the ANC now but there’s easily another 10% of the electorate out there for a confident new DA leadership to chase. There’s no long-term future for the DA without it.
There surely has to be a huge market for political leadership on matters of enterprise, some personal wealth and economic self-sufficiency. Every South African should be capable of selling a product or a service, or a skill, whatever their start in life.
While our conventional liberation parties feed off the plight of the African poor, what we need is a promise and a plan and a leader determined to set them free.
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