When Donald J Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president on 20 January 2017, he delivered a dystopian speech on the state of his nation, summarised as “American Carnage”.
Leaving that event, George W Bush, the 43rd president and last Republican to hold that office before Trump, remarked on his successor’s oration: “That was some weird s..t.”
Now that Trump is again the Republican presidential nominee in his bid to become the 47th president of the US, the idea of weirdness has re-entered the American political lexicon.
This is a reference point to the sharp departure by the Republicans under Trump’s domination from the sunny optimism of the party during Ronald Reagan’s era. Reagan was by far the most electorally successful flagbearer for US conservatism in the modern era.
His mantra and campaign slogan, “It’s morning in America again”, finds no echo in the dark tones and discordant tunes associated with the Trumpian “Make America Great Again” movement or cult. Ironically, Trump filched the MAGA slogan from Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. Though he stripped out the optimism.
“Weird” was the recent put down of Trump and his vice-presidential running mate, Senator JD Vance, offered by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz who said in an interview last month: “These are weird people on the other side. They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room.”
This bemused response catapulted the mild-mannered, though liberal progressive governor into successful contention as Kamala Harris’ vice-presidential pick.
Jamelle Bouie, a columnist for the New York Times who is vehemently anti-Trump, unpacked why this concept of “weirdness” caught on and spread virally across social media (where many obtain their news and views these days).
“The signature obsessions of Republican politics since 2020 – election denialism, book banning, abortion bans and crusades against trans and other gender nonconforming people – are either unpopular with most Americans or electoral dead weight.”
We will see in less than four months whether being so outside the mainstream on key issues and policy choices drags the Republican ticket down or not.
Amateur political psychodrama
Meantime, back home late last week, South Africa’s punch-drunk electorate was treated to its own “weird s..t”.
Last Thursday’s EFF press conference took surrealism to new heights or at least plunged the EFF to new lows.
Its founding fighter and apparent intellectual heavyweight, Floyd Shivambu, announced before a stricken leader, Julius Malema, that he was deserting the party he cofounded and moving camp to the newly launched Umkhonto weSizwe Party of Jacob Zuma.
As a political equivalent of a patient with Tourette’s Syndrome, Shivambu’s jump and jerk to the other, now larger, force of local populism was quite spectacular.
The day after Shivambu’s political pirouette, Natasha Marrian, writing in Business Day, helpfully curated some of his choice utterances against Zuma, his new patron.
They are on par with the apostasy of JD Vance in respect of his new patron, Trump, whom he once compared to “America’s Hitler”.
In the 2017 no-confidence debate in Parliament against Zuma, Shivambu then compared his new leader, Zuma, to the tyrants Idi Amin and Mobutu Sese Seko, informing MPs that “in future, he is going to kill all of you”.
Wiseacres suggest that Shivambu is an opportunist who will comfort the Zuma clan and cult (and it is indeed a family-run enterprise) since opportunists generally go to where opportunities are.
Others offer a secondary reading bewildered by Malema’s absence of any of the usual hateful bile and vitriol at his deputy’s decamping. On this view, this is not a political desertion. Rather, it is a “strategic deployment” that will lead to a future realignment of the radical populist forces under one umbrella in a merged MK-EFF entity.
Quite why all this personnel upheaval and political psychodrama was necessary instead of a proper fusion of two parties broadly on the same side of the political spectrum is not explained or even explicable.
Maybe the amateur dramatics and thrill of media attention to boost flagging political fortunes are a narcotic for which yet another hit is needed. Or this analysis is just overly sophisticated nonsense.
The unpopular populists
It remains doubtful that the average voter is much concerned with the comings and goings between the third and fourth parties in SA’s Parliament.
Besides being weary of the ever-changing whims and wiles of the red berets, current and past, most folks worry about getting a job (if you are one of more than 8 000 000 people without one); keeping crime at bay (especially if yours is one of 27 944 families affected by murder last year); or getting a decent education.
Once again, this goes to the heart of the mainstream, where most South Africans live and work or just survive, or the weird outside fringe where EFF and MKP policies and rhetoric place them.
Just consider the opinion polls before the 29 May election.
Unemployment, load shedding, corruption, the cost of living, crime, and security were by far the biggest concerns of all voters.
Yet one of the signature tunes of the EFF and MKP was the expropriation of private property without compensation. A comprehensive opinion survey last November by the Institute of Race Relations found this off-key for the majority. Just 13.2% of all respondents thought this the elixir for opportunity. By contrast, 82% in the survey chose job creation and economic growth as the way out of the poverty trap.
In a pre-election survey, the authoritative Social Research Foundation poll of voters asked respondents whether the government should hire people regardless of their race, and 82.6% of all voters, including 83% of EFF voters, said yes
Thus, on two key planks in the rickety EFF and MKP platforms, expropriation without compensation and race-based hiring in government appointments, overwhelmingly, the majority of voters disagree with the parties’ positions.
Similarly, after the election, twice as many voters (40%) preferred an ANC-DA government over an alternative ANC-MKP tie-up (19%). Just 9% of respondents in this Brenthurst Foundation poll favoured a tripartite ANC-MKP-EFF deal.
We won’t know until November whether Bouie is correct in his assertion that “the Republican Party under Trump has fallen so far out of the political and cultural mainstream… that they’ve given the Democrats the opportunity…to make their party the party of the silent majority”.
And the Democrat National Convention this week won’t be short of some rhetorical bomb-throwers from the far left who could complicate that wish.
But here at home, as we watch the musical chairs being played on the radical populist front, we can conclude, on some key issues, that the red and green berets are, in fact, unpopular populists.
So, while Shivambu acclimatises to his new surroundings in Nkandla and his new political family, maybe he should think about the policies and practices on that far end of the political spectrum. A rethink could help him get back into the mainstream.
It’s not a weird idea, either.
