A Week of Ideological Incoherence

It has been a strange, disorienting week in politics, one in which familiar ideological reference points seemed to dissolve almost overnight.

In the United States (US), Republicans found themselves denouncing a legally armed citizen for carrying a concealed weapon at a protest, with senior figures in and around the administration even suggesting that he deserved to die for it. At the same time, prominent Democrats discovered arguments in defence of the Second Amendment, winning applause from sections of the gun lobby. Positions that have defined American political identity for decades were inverted almost casually, as if ideology had become a costume to be swapped depending on the moment.

South Africa offered its own version of the same confusion on three occasions.

Foreign policy officials staged a pantomime of hostility toward Iran, cultivating the idea that Pretoria wished to malign its Iranian ally at the behest of the US.

Trade policy followed a similar pattern. South African officials floated proposals to impose steep tariffs on Chinese and Indian vehicles to shield already heavily subsidised Western manufacturers from competition, while punishing producers from BRICS partner countries. The saga stands as a near impossible contradiction to South Africa’s loudly proclaimed opposition to Western economic dominance and further runs directly against the interests of domestic consumers and the growth of the economy.

Perhaps the most extraordinary contradiction played out around the Democratic Alliance (DA). The leader of the party, John Steenhuisen, now serving as agriculture minister, went on the offensive against commercial farming organisations lobbying for the right of private actors to source and administer vaccines during the ongoing foot-and-mouth disease crisis. Rubbishing the notion that private actors could better manage the crisis than the state, he argued that the state must protect what is now being described as the national herd. The tone and language were straight out of the Soviet Union.

More damaging still was the attribution of malign motives to these organisations, which sit squarely within the DA’s historic support base. They were cast not as allies seeking pragmatic solutions, but as reckless actors endangering the interests and authority of the state. Inside the DA, this has set off alarm bells.

What links all these episodes is not policy detail, but something more fundamental. Ideology has become unmoored from principle. Positions are adopted not because they fit a coherent worldview, but because they serve an immediate tactical need, or deflect a short-term pressure – hardly the basis of coherent policy making.