Last Thursday, as I sat listening to remarks by Justice Albie Sachs of the South African Constitutional Court, it occurred to me that when this man uses the word 'democracy' he really knows what he's talking about.
Albie Sachs is a major figure of the South African freedom struggle. He is in the US promoting his latest book, The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law. He and colleagues Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela, Ahmed Kathrada, Walter Sisulu, and millions of South Africans of every hue (Albie is a white man), transformed their country from a rigged 'democracy' for the privileged few, to an actual democracy for all. It remains a work in progress. But like the United States, it is founded on a profoundly enlightened set of documents that it continuously struggles to live up to.
Albie helped to write those documents. And before that he spent most of his life working to free his country from the racist system of apartheid. On Thursday he spoke softly and effortlessly about his astonishing life, using lovely metaphors. He even sang occasionally. Like when he demonstrated how he endured over a hundred days of solitary confinement, and the marathon interrogations by secret police, (during which, he admitted, he was "almost broken," and from which, he says, he will "never completely recover").
When he speaks, Albie gestures freely, almost impishly, with what is left of his right arm. He lost the rest of it, and his right eye, to a car bomb placed by agents of the South African government. Those agents were following orders to assassinate him, because his non-violent efforts to bring down apartheid had qualified him as a "terrorist."
Albie smiles when he describes his transformation from terrorist to collaborative author of his country's new constitution, and he jokes that he didn't feel any different as a terrorist than he does now. He believed in democracy then, and he's still working to close the gap between the ideal, and the reality, of democracy now.
He is, therefore, a man with deep understanding of the big words that are freely -- and often disingenuously -- bandied about by political partisans on all sides here in the US. Words like freedom, sacrifice, rights, service, liberty, citizenship, etc. It occurred to me as I listened, that our democracy is in peril precisely because it's loudest and most adamant "defenders" don't seem to have any idea of what those words really mean.
The great achievement of Albie Sachs and his colleagues was not that they brought out the best in their allies. They also brought out the best in their adversaries. Nelson Mandela didn't walk out of prison determined to get back at his captors; he resolved instead to give each of them a vote in their new country. Albie Sachs may have wanted vengeance on his interrogators when they were prying his eyes open with their thick fingers and dousing him with cold water. But instead he came to identify with their fears, and even empathize with how, as children, they were taught to see enemies all around them. That's why he was able to help write a constitution that gave his former enemies much more freedom after he and his fellow 'terrorists' ascended to positions of authority, than they'd had before.
The people that voted in South Africa's first free and fair election did so after a political crisis which was resolved through negotiation between mortal enemies. The process was messy and arduous and almost collapsed countless times. But it didn't, because the participants on both sides came to realize that their country's future mattered more to them than their ideology. So they found enough common ground to make a real democracy. The lofty words, once used to impugn eachother's motives, took on their real meaning for a while, and a perilous confrontation became the gateway to a hopeful future.
During the Q&A after his talk, Albie quickly acknowledged that the new South Africa has its share of demagogues, political hacks, corruption, violence and inequity. He admits that change has been slow to arrive in the areas that need it most, and he doesn't pretend that some of his allies in the journey to freedom abandoned the principles that got them there.
It is disheartening that the two candidates who've followed Mandela as President have been most successful only in proving what a rare and inspired leader he was. The ideal, and the real, spend too much time apart in today's South Africa. But as the center of a functioning democracy, Pretoria makes Washington look like a bunch of spoiled children fighting over the remote control.
Incumbency is not the (almost) insurmountable advantage that it is here. There is enough political range within the society that fear of alienating the "base" is a concept they find hard to understand. There's real freedom of the press in South Africa, not the brand name variety we have here. Votes are counted correctly, by hand, the first time. The electorate is impatient, but they are not cynical. Excessive ideology makes them laugh because more than anything, South Africans are for what works.
A corrupt, isolated police state that called itself a democracy, is now the real thing.
I submit that our country is in danger of having more in common with the old South Africa, than with the new, and that unless we admit that rigid partisanship is a habit we can no longer afford, things will only get worse.
During apartheid, many liberal whites in South Africa, and most conservatives, clung to the conceit that they knew how to govern in ways that the poor oppressed blacks could not, and therefore change had to be meted out in small, gradual increments. Liberals adamantly despised hard line conservatives and blamed them for the torture and oppression of black people, while secretly sharing their fear of annihilation. Thus they left themselves little choice as the crisis deepened, but to throw up their hands and blame the evil supporters of apartheid, as if their passive support had nothing to do with it. Liberty was, in their trapped and fearful imagination, still too lofty and exclusive for the poor, unwashed 'other'. They seem to have thought of democracy as an exclusive club, where it was best to only allow new members one at a time. Conservatives masked their fears less delicately, but there was more than enough hypocrisy to go around.
Looking back it is tempting to be scornful of such blindness, rather than to learn from it and perhaps recognize a common danger. After all, it was because they blamed political adversaries within their false democracy, and not the system itself, that they rendered themselves obsolete. It was more important to place blame, than to identify with their adversaries and work together on the real crisis before them. They failed their country, only to be saved by the very people they feared the most.
When Mandela walked out of prison twenty years ago, he enlarged the imaginations of all South Africans, by insisting on their shared humanity. It wasn't just rhetoric, or clever politics. If it had been, all sides would have seen through it soon enough, and a political crisis might easily have toppled into civil war. He gave all of his people credit for deserving equal citizenship; even those who wanted him to spend the rest of his life in jail. This is the essence of democracy.
There's no comparison between the situation South Africa faced twenty years ago, and our present political stand-off here in the US, right?
After all, South Africa called itself a democracy even when only a privileged few held real power. They had liberals, conservatives, and even some independents. They pretended to deal with the important issues of the day, and they convinced themselves that there's was the only game in town.
We're not like that, yet, are we?
In South Africa, the white rulers finally agreed to give up apartheid, but never gave up even one penny of the assets of that nation that they had stolen. Never gave up control of the economy. Never gave up the gold mines, the diamond minds. They kept the loot. They kept enough control of the government to make sure nobody could ever take any of the assets of that nation from the small group of white people who claim to own them, and use the assets and wealth to lift up the 95% of the population that lives in such extreme poverty.
In the U.S., the corporations bribe the politicians to do what they want. Regardless of which party wins an election, it is always the corporations who dictate what laws will be passed. Why didn't the Democrats pass a national usury law to prevent the credit card companies from charging obscene interest? Because the Democrats, just like the Republicans take bribes and sell their votes. Why haven't the Democrats provided a Medicare for All system, to let anyone buy into a non-profit medical care? Because they take bribes from health insurers.
As for the people, nobody pays us any attention at all. We are irrelevant, what we want is disregarded, what we need is ignored.
washington is the only place were two wrongs make a right.
Thanks for the prospective.
We're a totally dysfunctional nation, so comparisons, such as this one to the old South Africa, are not far-fetched at all.
Wasting time on semantics seems like a waste of time.
It is just a trick to confuse and lead astray from the point of debate.
It is used expertly by conservatives to convince idiots of half-truths.
Beyond rhetoric, the American system of government is one of profoundly limited democracy. There are all kinds of things our representatives are not allowed to vote on, and if they do, those votes are meant to be ignored by the courts.
Corruption of our system is.
The will of the senate is the will of special interests. We are irrelevant in our faux democracy.
Campaign Reform would heal the split of the American people that big money has encouraged in order to weaken us and keep us fighting with each other.
ONE CAUSE-ONE FIGHT-ONE AMERICA
We cancel each other out if we insist on playing their game. The corruption that is tearing our country apart is hurting ALL of us. Not the right or the left. The corrupt are laughing at us all the way to the bank while we try to one up each other.
We are ALL Americans—are there none out there that believe that anymore? Let us work TOGETHER on what is for AMERICA"S interest.
http://www.fairelectionsnow.org/volunteer/petition
(FENA) http://change-congress.org/ sign the petition
I don't think that the Dems are under any obligation to bend over backwards to reach out to a Party whose leadership is intent on the President's ruination--and has been since the Republican National Convention in which speech after speech demonized Obama. At least an ideologue has principles, but the Republicans in Congress don't vote like ideologues, although it's commonplace in the media to label them as such. Time and again Republicans have shown that their chief objective is to defeat Democratic legislation, regardless of whether it incorporates Republican proposals.
There is nothing wrong with partisanship, Mr. Spenser, when it is based on sincerely held principles.
The comparison I make is not, of course, perfectly symmetrical. In fact the stakes here in the US are not yet as high as they were in South Africa. But the regime that was in power when Mandela came out of prison failed to initiate any kind of meaningful change in their country, because they were mired in corruption, small-minded political gamesmanship, and willful blindness to the depth and urgency of the real problems before them. I would hope you can admit that our reps in Washington are showing similar ineptitude, on both sides.
Many Republican proposals already have been in the the Senate health care bill, yet now their position is to scrap everything and start over. The whole irony of the dance over the health care legislation is that American people are further to the left than either Party. The want a Public Option.
Similarly, the Dems compromised on the stimulus, incorporating one-third tax cuts instead of more direct jobs, yet no Republic voted for this piece of this legislation. Most people don't even know they received a tax cut because it is incorporated in their paycheck.
The Dems are majority Party, and at the end of the day, their job is to lead. Sure give the Repubs a place at the table, but it doesn't mean that the Dems have to bend over backwards to accommodate them. The comparison to South Africa pales.
Last week I had a conversation with a woman who was jailed as a teenager in a small southern town and when she and her group were released a deputy sheriff raised a gun toward her and fired. She survived only because a man named Jonathan Daniels put himself between the bullet and her.
Here in Alabama we commemorate Jonathan Daniels every August.
I would love to share this essay with those involved in that commemoration.
The "passive support" you write of is the guilt so many whites in the Jim Crow era are guilty of. We wanted to sweep the terror under the rug then and we continue to do so today because it is a "post-racial" USA - isn't it???
both parties are at fault here. what they say of each other in public, on camera is far different from their private let's get to work and see what we can do for ourselves. do you think the partisanship is real? could you sit there with someone who just terrorized your reputation, without walking across the aisle and settling it. people wake up. we need to clean out congress. take a chance and vote for someone no matter what affiliation they are. if they're unafraid of the establishment or of us voters choosing another next election, put them in. if their not looking for a life-long career, it's for our benefit. serve your term in washington, then come home and live with what you did there.
You think the S Africans are smarter?