The Common Sense’s Diary

South Africa’s trade department wants to put a 50% tariff on imported Chinese vehicles to protect Western car makers from Chinese competition. South Africa’s Western-dominated car assembly industry employs around 100 000 people, or 0.6% of the country’s workforce, and is heavily subsidised by taxpayers. But because Chinese cars are better and much cheaper than their European and American counterparts, the latter are losing market share to Chinese (and Indian) imports.

The ANC side of South Africa’s government, which controls the trade department, has virtually led a global charge against Trump tariffs. It has argued that the 35% tariffs the US seeks to apply to South African exports are part of a racist and imperialist agenda. It has argued for the “Global South” to rise up against US “imperialism” and challenge “capitalist” hegemony. It has championed the BRICS grouping as an alternative fulcrum of power to Western hegemony. Now it wants to hike tariffs on Chinese and Indian goods to levels well above what Trump has applied to South African goods in order to protect the very Western capitalist corporations it rails against from the competition posed by the “Global South” the ANC is purportedly allied to.

South Africa’s agriculture department, this time under the control of the free-market- and capitalist-allied DA, has launched a fierce attack against a grouping of business and agriculture lobbies, which are advocating for commercial farming ventures to privately source and administer foot-and-mouth disease vaccines to curb the crippling outbreak of the disease. In a scurrilous statement, the department implied that the groups in question were party to an underhanded effort to raise funds for themselves to the disadvantage of farmers. That is a lie. The Common Sense knows those involved, and they are great and patriotic South Africans deeply committed to the success of the country. The department has argued that, as the disease is classified as “state-controlled,” the state would determine the response protocols and vaccine sourcing arrangements. The attacked organisations, Sakeliga, Free State Agriculture, and SAAI, represent a core political constituency of the DA, and the ideas they lobby for are firmly aligned with DA economic policy thinking. The damage to the party’s vote share will likely be marked.

After border patrol agents shot and killed a legally armed US citizen on the streets of Minneapolis during an immigration protest, Republicans were quick to argue that he had no business carrying a firearm to a protest. Senior White House leaders were disgraceful in suggesting he was an assassin in waiting, while other Republicans suggested he was seeking to massacre law enforcement. It took Democrats to make the case that he was legally armed, broke no laws, posed no danger to society or the police, and that the Second Amendment was an important US constitutional safeguard. The US gun lobby came out on the side of the Democrats and had to remind the Republicans of their forgotten principles.

The slaying of that protestor ultimately produced an empathetic and conciliatory response from the Trump White House. Harsh immigration enforcement sweeps will be dialled back, agent numbers will be reduced, the head of the border patrol who devised the harsh approach has, in practice, been demoted. Common ground is being sought between the warring Democratic state leadership under Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and the White House. That’s good. Immigrants are a net benefit to any society. By all means, close the Southern border, identify those who have committed serious and violent crimes, and remove them, but the sweeps by gangs of masked US cops hauling working people off the streets to an uncertain fate are fundamentally anti-American and did great damage to the ideas and values of Western society.