First, a global South Africa... By Robert Duigan

I used to use this phrase a fair deal when speaking to people about the global trend of liberalism – “first a global South Africa, then a global Zimbabwe”. This is because I have seen certain trends play themselves out in my country. As a former communist raised in a country run by a Marxist African-nationalist party, I was raised on such ideas, and it took a great shock to my system in my university years to drop them. But it has helped me understand what drives Western decline somewhat.

South Africa is at a point in its history where all trends of decline are highly visible. The railways are shutting down, power outages are daily, the homicide rate is at civil war levels (20 000 per year on average), and we have the worst, and most proportionally expensive, education system on the planet. 

As a multicultural society with a unitary government where the founding population is a minority, we are like a scale model for a global, Western-led government. The state of South Africa before 1994, when the old Bantustans (small separate states for the black African population) were integrated, resembled the global order of nation-states, with a European core and a “third-world” periphery. The left here called it “colonialism of a special type”. This is fairly accurate.

South Africa as a scale model of the World

The historiography of the old South Africa treats it as a unitary state with segregation policies. This is accurate up to a point, but the “homeland areas” (later the Bantustans) and the white settlements were always geographically distant – the territory of South Africa is three times the size of Germany, and had less than two million inhabitants at the turn of the 20^th century. Community boundaries were drawn according to the then-inhabited zones (with expansive territories for white South Africa) in 1913, a decade after the British created the Union out of the various little kingdoms and republics. The Beaumont Commission found in 1917 that only 12% of the land area was settled or agriculturally developed; 9% by black people. 

In South Africa, all moral virtues became secondary to the demands of British imperialism, and its trend toward globalisation. A former rebel and Cambridge scholar, Jan Smuts, wrote our constitution, and governed our state for most of its first 50 years, upon principles derived from British political Darwinism and German idealism, which saw the integration of human society into a common consciousness under global government as its highest aim – to evolve the black and white parts of South Africa over time into a greater whole. For this reason, he sealed in South Africa as a unitary state, and broke all local autonomy for the old republics.

The opening of borders in the West then resembles what South Africa did in the 1920s to crush the white working class and maintain profit margins for the mining sector, by placing poll taxes on the black “homeland areas” (they weren’t yet called Bantustans) to push them into the goldfields of the Witwatersrand to work the mines at lower wages. White unions were put down. In response, populists expanded the franchise to all white men and women, and worked toward putting black people back in the homeland areas, and developing them as independent states.

But being so dependent on cheap black labour, the economy couldn’t sustain itself without them. This became the state’s Achilles heel. As black wages and bargaining power grew during the post-war boom, union strikes became crippling, reaching a head with the general strike of 1973. In 1976, South Africa brought in television, and society became liberalised very rapidly with the import of American culture. A strong counter-culture began to develop in the white community, which undermined the legitimacy of the white state. It was not hard to though – apartheid was extremely ugly, and required increasing assertion of violence as time went on.

The government based its apartheid theory on culture rather than race, and so attempted to make the blacks living in “white South Africa” (as opposed to those in the Bantustans) Afrikaans. But the Afrikaans-medium education was rejected en-masse in 1976, and the brutal crackdown shamed the state in the eyes of the world – shooting schoolchildren was a horror that was intolerable to everyone. The state realised it couldn’t hold onto power forever, and started unwinding separate development from 1977 already. They lost control of immigration from the Bantustans, and by the mid-80s, were not enforcing segregated housing laws anymore, and had abolished marital segregation.

As they tried to reform, wars on the border of Namibia (then part of SA) with the Soviet Union drained the state as guerrillas campaigns hurt back home. The world placed economic pressures on us and funded militant majoritarians like the ANC to run a vast campaign of violence, in which, together with their rivals, slaughtered at least 20 000 people to gain a monopoly of the liberation movement and be the only black voice at the table by 1994. And that Marxist, African-nationalist party became the government we have to this day. 

The policies they enacted included quota-based racial discrimination like “affirmative action” and the now-infamous BEE program (black economic empowerment), which demands that all companies over 49 employees give away >26% of their shares to black people, and employ a certain quantity of black people in high positions. Even in areas which are mostly inhabited by racial minorities, jobs area allocated by race, making crime and unemployment in the Coloured (a general grouping for mixed race, Malay, and the indigenous Khoi people) areas serious.

This affirmative action impacts every area of governance, public or private, and has seen the decay of every aspect of society, as people are promoted by skin colour rather than merit, within institutions whose cultural norms have not been learned, and which are resented. The decay has been rapid, and there are no functioning institutions remaining, debt is enormous, and a third of the population receive welfare, at least 35% are unemployed, and state debt is unserviceable.

When Zimbabwe found itself in this position (much quicker than us, as they were not as wealthy), it printed away the debt, and then began seizing property to bribe generals and civil servants to keep the ruling party in power, since cash was worthless from hyperinflation. Our government has now begun legislating for the expropriation of white property itself.

Cities have been taken over by massive influxes of black people from rural areas and old black settlements, and settle in the cities in massive oceans of tin shacks, which cannot be evicted from the land they seize because of squatters’ rights. City centres have collapsed into crime and squalor, and vigilantes are now 3-5% of the population. White farmers are targeted by criminal syndicates and politically motivated violence. This influx, which began in the 80s, has made us a minority, not just in the country at large, but in almost every district. The only parties left which consider the interests of minorities make up less than 25% of the national vote together.

And so we can see how we are sitting on a conveyor belt to doom, unless we change direction. My hope is that the Cape (with a higher concentration of ethnic minorities who, though mostly non-white, are generally more Westernised) can secede, and keep hold of an at least partly Western mode of governance, and achieve for once a non-racial system of government among cousins and neighbours who share some real cultural ties. Otherwise it seems unrealistic that things will improve here.

The Downward Spiral of Western Liberal Democracy

A friend put it to me that the first step down from the peak of Western civilisation is actually California, not South Africa. And indeed, if you gaze even casually across the Atlantic, you may clearly see the looted trains, the mushrooming homeless encampments, the looting epidemic, and the steady but significant population decline as people choose to move elsewhere. Public intellectuals like Michael Shellenberger have attacked progressive policies for their destruction of major cities – the leniency on law and order, ever-increasing welfare, and unmanaged immigration.

But progressive ideas are not called such by accident – they are the definition of moral progress these days. It may seem like madness, but it is merely the earnest and uncompromised distillation of ideas universally observed in the West. Democracy is good, looking after the weakest in society is good, liberty is good. 

These were once ancillary values in the West – which before it was called “the West”, was called Christendom. Christianity was the moral foundation which justified all of our political frameworks until the Enlightenment, and still for some time after. But without Christianity to place moral limits on society, those fruits of Christian civilisation took on a life of their own. 

Without Christianity, liberty stopped being a necessary concession to political dissent and personal privacy, and became a fundamentalist worship of egoistic desire.

Democracy ceased being a consultative process between the rulers and the stakeholders of society, and became a heedless appeal to the mob. Christian charity was transformed into philanthropy (social engineering projects run by oligarchs) and welfare (state-sponsored robbery and state-dependency, which liquidated community ties and strengthened the state and industry.

All these modern forms of government in former Christendom became tools for the expansion of the state. Liberty required the intercession of the state to prevent common morality from policing individual behaviour. Mass democracy took power away from the aristocracy, then the middle class, and made political parties dependent on modern propaganda, corporate funding, and increasing handouts to stay viable. Welfare made even the family superfluous by making the state the primary breadwinner for less-well-off families. 

And welfare cannot be decreased without threatening a party’s survival at the polls. This leads to a ratcheting effect – each electoral cycle, one or both main parties will increase free goods and services, not just for the masses, but for the major corporations which influence public communication and party funding. The expansion of the state is set in motion, and has increased from single digits to nearly half of GDP across the West since WWII. This increasingly forces states to take on chronic debt, which then has to be serviced by “quantitative easing” – depressing interest rates and spending money. This benefits the financial sector and major corporations, but hollows out the quality of life for most people. 

This was remarked on by German economist Philip Bagus in his book “The Tragedy of the Euro”, in which he tracks the ECB’s attempts to defend the monetary union during the sovereign debt crisis. And it is well-known that this is an ongoing crisis that has not so much been solved as kicked down the road. It impacts the United states now too, who have printed more money under Biden and the last months of Trump than in the entire history of the dollar until now.

Affirmative action in the West, combined with open borders, now resembles the massive urban influx we saw from the 1980s onward. White Americans will be a minority soon, and within a generation, so will many European nations. This may not have been so lethal if not for the act that racial discrimination is legitimised at the highest level of the international political economy, and at every level of society.

Racial quotas exist in broadcast, employment, admissions, and investment guidelines (see the use of ESG codes by global financial giants like BlackRock), in every institution of every Western state. The concepts of white privilege make criticism of this system of discrimination deeply taboo. But the consequences are the gradual displacement of the native European population. And the racialisation of social norms with concepts like privilege, collective redress, and colonial inheritance, mean that incomers are morally entitled to better treatment than natives. This does not end well.

It still has not caused enough harm to be obvious to everyone, but by the time it has, it will be far too late to change. Integration only works with a strong will to enforce social norms and standards, but elite attitudes are very much against this. I fear even efforts by reactionaries such as Eric Zemmour may be a little too late, much as the Afrikaner National Party were when they tried to stem the influx in the 1920s. 

Not a Parallel, a Model

South Africa is also not just a parallel for the world, it is a model. Jan Smuts was not just a philosopher-statesman who designed a paternalistic constitution and political economy for South Africa, he was the architect of the League of Nations, the author of the preamble to the United Nations, and a key figure in designing those institutions within it which would penetrate most deeply into national governance. His thinking was at the heart of the early trans-Atlantic establishment.

The Western world is starting to see the impact of trying to govern the globe centrally, and it is not looking good. UN SDGs suffocate all areas of policymaking, private or public. Not one state in the Western world has its own policy agenda, and the trends of liberal-democracy have congealed into a managerial technocracy on which popular sentiment has a negligible impact – its momentum has outpaced all but the most short-term of political demands, and when one country bucks the trend, the others brutally hem them in, as we now see in Hungary and Poland.

If you want to avoid the same end as South Africa, it will be necessary to avoid the utopian modern ideas that led to its current destiny, which see human beings as fungible commodities with identical aspirations. A recognition of community and place, the preservation of culture, and the return to older wisdom about the nature of man.

Because if we all remain on the same course, all the major incentives and trends observed here lead in only one direction, and that way is down.