**Liberalism in South Africa: Beyond Ideology**
Liberalism has long been seen as common sense in the English-speaking and white public discourse in South Africa. Today, it has become a mainstream in which a diversity of people move.
The ideology of a demographic minority has gradually become normalised in many sectors of society. In journalism, business, think tanks, NGOs and much of the academy, liberalism is often taken for granted, rather than as an ideology.
There are relatively pragmatic forms of liberalism that are willing to compromise on certain issues, such as the acceptance of minimum wages and affirmative action. However, on the right of the liberal spectrum, a form of liberalism, sometimes referred to as ‘classical liberalism’, is seen as an ideological crusade.
In the dense network of public-facing think tanks operating in this space, there is often a sense of moral superiority, perhaps fuelled by a white revanchism induced by the collapse of the ANC’s moral legitimacy and by the West’s open claims to civilisational superiority in the ongoing New Cold War.
This arrogance often has a paranoid side, accompanied by a strong propensity for conspiracy theories. There are hallucinations about non-existent Marxist conspiracies and sometimes extraordinary and entirely unsubstantiated claims about Russian, Chinese and Iranian conspiracies involving South Africa. This paranoia is very familiar to anyone who lived in South Africa during the last Cold War.
The refusal to understand that ethics is not simply the moral expression of liberalism was evident in the way in which leading public actors of the liberal stream responded to the government’s decision to take Israel to the International Court of Justice.
Ray Hartley and Greg Mills have argued that South Africa’s action at the International Court of Justice has exposed the ANC… The ruling party is clearly not an ally of liberal values.
James Myburgh, editor of Fatshimetrie, took a more extreme view, saying that “South Africa has resurrected Hitlerism in The Hague.”
Frans Cronje, former director of the South African Institute of Race Relations, wrote that “opinion in Western-style liberal democracies” is not sufficiently supportive of Israel and “tends to evade or deny the unpleasant choices that are necessary for some free societies to survive.”
Nicholas Woode-Smith roundly dismissed South Africa’s case against Israel as “shameful” and “insincere.” He added that it made South Africa “a laughing stock among the nations that matter in the world.”. According to him, South African foreign policy is regularly influenced by bribes from foreign dictators and it is “very likely” that South Africa took this step because it was bribed to do so by Iran. He provided no evidence to support his statement.
Liberalism has always been associated with whiteness and Western claims of superiority, by what Woode-Smith, with casual neo-Trumpian racism, calls “the nations that matter in the world.” It has never extended rights to all and has always excluded certain nations and people, for whom certain nations and peoples matter less. These are “the nations that matter in the world” that recently destroyed Iraq, Haiti and Palestine, nations that do not matter to the liberal West.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog was right to say that the assault on Gaza is “destined – truly, sincerely – to save Western civilization, to save the values of Western civilization.” Hartley and Mills were right to characterize the approach to the ICJ as contrary to liberal values, because it was based on the principle that people outside the West, people who are not white, often not Christian, count .
The liberalism championed by organizations such as the Brenthurst Foundation and the Institute of Race Relations takes a very right-wing position geopolitically. Liberal organizations such as the Free Market Foundation and the Center for Development and Enterprise take a similarly right-wing stance on economic issues. They are pushing for even more brutal forms of austerity than those currently imposed on our society and the reversal of the limited forms of social protection introduced by the ANC.
These economic policies have enabled the enrichment of elites at the expense of greater social deterioration wherever they have been implemented, often producing forms of right-wing populism. The deplorable state of the United Kingdom under the Tories is a good example of this, among many others.
In contrast to this, progressive governments in Latin America, notably Brazil under Lula da Silva, Bolivia under Evo Morales and Mexico under Andrés Manuel López Obrador, have enabled simultaneous processes of democratization and social progress for the most disadvantaged .
They certainly have limitations and contradictions, but they offer a much more favorable model than the hard-right formula of austerity.