'South Africa’s seventh national election is a clash between the tribalised political cultures of progressives, conservatives and libertarians and the sacredness of keeping the individual human central in our political frameworks.’ Picture: Oupa Mokoena/Independent Newspapers (Archives)
Conservative economist Arnold Kling’s 2013 book, The Three Languages of Politics, simplistically outlines what he calls “The 3-Axis Model”.
In observing the global political system, Kling suggests that the main role-players are progressives, libertarians and conservatives.
Each “tribe”, as Kling calls them, is rooted in political polarisation that will not lead to unified outcomes, is busy promoting a tribal affiliation that demonises others, and is developing a political language that intentionally excludes others, thus preventing the finding of broadly acceptable political or economic solutions.
Each axis also has a view of moral superiority over the others. Kling states that progressives view the world as a struggle between oppressor and oppressed and seek to help the latter.
Libertarians view the world as a struggle between coercion and liberty and seek to uphold free choice and prevent an ever-expanding government.
Conservatives view the world as an epic struggle between civilisation and barbarism and see it as their duty to protect what are essentially their views on civilisation.
In this tribalised ideological-political warfare, the individual becomes non-existent. They only matter if they are “part of a tribe”. If they cannot speak the tribe’s political language, participate in the political polarisation of the tribe’s identified enemies or promote affiliation to the tribe, the individual will be destroyed by the tribe by drowning their individuality in a sea of supposedly superior political and ideological tribal talk.
While I am no promoter of Kling’s conservatism, I find that his observations lead me to see the dangers of the growing political tribal dominance groups and the evisceration of the individual.
The individual, as in the surgery technique of evisceration, becomes an empty shell in which an implant is placed to “maintain appropriate orbital volume”, but whose individual usefulness doesn’t matter any more.
South Africa’s seventh national election is a clash between the tribalised political cultures of progressives, conservatives and libertarians and the sacredness of keeping the individual human central in our political frameworks.
My travels across the country over the last three years have shown me how the voices of ordinary individuals have no value to our tribal political cultures. Their political utility is only as scene fillers in news reports, radio and television interviews and, most recently, as props in Sona and Sopa speeches.
The president and his premiers have been pointing out members in the audience who have benefited from their tribal politics, little knowing that by doing so they are spewing forth the politics of tribal toxicity. For the informed observer, the nausea loads, for as each name is gloriously mentioned, it is also soon forgotten, for only the tribe matters.
Perhaps our biggest challenge in 2024 is not to elect a new party. For it will be nothing more than getting another tribe to replace the old one. Perhaps our biggest challenge is to deepen our democracy in ways we haven’t explored before.
What if, instead of ghosting people for their politically incorrect speech, we had a conscious programme to grow new languages together, using words that mean something to everyone, on which to build our democracy? This is necessary because words are deeply personal.
What if we stopped for a moment and took the time to find value in opposite and contrasting political ideas and grew a unique political offering for democratic diversity, unity and prosperity instead of aligning ourselves to the global ideological and cultural warfare that is creating a more dangerous world for all of us.
Our failures at national, provincial and municipal levels are abundant evidence of the failure of tribal ideological politics. We, sadly, still believe that one group can run the country better than the other.
What if we listened and looked at 65 million humans and saw the disappointment on their faces and began to design a new South Africa, built, not on tribal ideologies, but on the sacredness of every human? Can we vote to end this trite tribal politics?
* Lorenzo A. Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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