Way back in 2019, Helen Zille was caught on a hot mic making an extraordinary statement. Aside from the now well-trodden aspect of her remarks in which she demonstrated contempt for smaller parties, and a desire to form a coalition with the ANC, she made a commitment to consolidating DA support at a mere 22%.
This is an oddly conservative ambition for a national political party which aims to change the country, but the context in which it fits is the pivot away from Mmusi Maimane’s leftward strategy for capturing the black vote.
The party parachuted him into leadership, and saw a long list of left-wing black party members angle for the party to align itself with the racial policies of the ANC.
In this period, Helen Zille took a back seat from party politics, under pressure from a party who saw her comments about the benefits of colonial governance for countries like Singapore, for which she was disciplined.
Their public communications strategy shifted to praise of struggle heroes, including praise for Winnie Mandela, and a push for white people to acknowledge their privilege and embrace the second-class citizenship status offered by the dominant political party.
This did not do very well for them - they lost 3% points on the ballot from white voters who moved to the VF+, and their black support did not increase, as most saw Maimane as a “deputy white”, an “askari” a “housenigger”; in short, they felt he was bait, and wouldn’t take it.
Tony Leon and Ryan Coetzee were employed to do an evaluation on the reasons for the party’s mediocre performance, and came to the conclusion that they were alienating their base - racial minorities and the middle class.
In the study, their collection of data concerning black support was dismal. In no part of the country had the DA ever crossed the 10% barrier of black support (except once, in Gauteng), and at a national level, 5% was an unattainable summit.
What the party subsequently did, was to invite Helen Zille back into the fold. She now had her Salazar moment - much like the Portuguese dictator, his expertise was sought and rejected twice, and when it was sought a third time, he demanded plenary authority, and got it.
What had happened, is that the DA had realised that they could not penetrate the black vote without abandoning their minority base, and that even a moderate turn away from nonracial messaging would both scare away minority support and be insufficiently radical to grab black votes.
Any realistic foray into the black electorate would involve a total transformation into a black supremacist socialist party, like the ANC and its offshoots.
And so Zille and her allies replaced Maimane and all his followers, triggering the “black exodus” much remarked upon by the left-wing press, and arranged for John Steenhuisen to take the lead, while pushing Coloured representation in the Cape.
The party was now seen once again by its left-wing critics as “the white party”, but white and Coloured voters were reassured that their people were back in control.
According to Gareth van Onselen’s research for the party after the 2024 election, the DA remains at the same level of support, with 4.3% of the black vote, but has won back the votes it lost to the VF+.
This means that the DA has contained the minority vote exceptionally well. Their fears of Gayton McKenzie are real, but are also limited, since his conversions are for now mostly contained to former ANC voters.
The game the DA are playing is a game of containment - they will die as a black party, because they simply are not a black party. Yes, their party is racially diverse, more so than any other, but they are not drawing their black cadres from a typical pool, they are drawing them from the fringe contrarians with the least racial in-group preference of any cohort in the country.
To see what the remainder of the black population thinks about “liberalism”, one need only look at the following two polls. The first is from the IRR from 2019:
And the second is from the Cape Independence opinion surveys from 2023, which were conducted by Victory Research, Gareth van Onselen’s polling company, which was celebrated for having achieved the most accurate prediction of the 2024 election outcomes:
What emerges here then, is a clear picture - roughly 2/3rds of the black population (63-69% - let’s split the difference at 66%) are unashamed and open black supremacists who regard other races as second-class citizens.
But even the furthest fringe, that 4% who vote DA, still seem to support some form of racial redress - after all, Maimane’s turn in the lead saw broad support across the DA’s left and black caucus faction for BEE, among other racial policies (which just needed the right people to administer them, of course).
This assumes of course, that a black DA politician is representative of black DA voters, which is a big assumption, but it seems reasonable to assume that they would deviate to the “right” of their civilian counterparts, since the social barriers to a political career are higher than the barriers to the ballot box, where people often vote pragmatically rather than idealistically.
This leaves almost nobody (statistically speaking) in the black population willing to support equality before the law, and the statistical weight behind this sentiment is so overwhelming that it takes a real iconoclast, a real contrarian, to push for anything different.
And yet somewhere between a tenth and a third of minorities (including whites) support black supremacy themselves, judging by these polls. This means the minority population are trying to be accommodating to an ethnic bloc that disregards their interests entirely.
“Black people are not liberals.” -- Roman Cabanac
So when Roman Cabanac said that “black people are not liberals”, he was not merely making a generalisation, he was expressing the decisionmaking dynamics of the DA at the time.
In realpolitik decisions, one is forced to make choices on the balance of probabilities. Pivoting the party strategy to capturing the black vote means ditching liberalism, and to get a black leadership group to retain the liberal direction of the party, one would have to either police them (meaning they wouldn’t actually be leading the party), or you would need to find some way of inculcating an internal moral code among these leaders which was rigidly intolerant to black nationalism.
This is simply not realistic.
But the Zille-era reforms have done some of the above - the DA now has rigorous ideological training for all its candidates, who are vetted for not only knowledge of the legal and institutional environment they will be operating in, but a thorough agreement with a narrow ideological formula and institutional trajectory of the party’s history, much as any Leninist would have done.
What ideology they are being trained in is not exactly public knowledge, but it isn’t secret either - the DA has adopted the United Nation’s Social Development Goals as the sole ground of their policy framework.
The party is now nothing more than an arm of foreign control, and aims to dissolve all differences and parochialisms among its members, and eventually the country it governs, through ever-deeper penetration into the private lives, economic and social, of its subjects, carrying out, perhaps without knowing it, the ultimate philosophical project of Jan Smuts, who wrote in his 1926 philosophical treatise Holism and Evolution that the grand purpose of all mater and life in the universe was to become subordinate to a single governing consciousness under a world government.
Smuts had enormous influence over this project for a world government, as he had singlehandedly written the constitution of the League of Nations, and done much of the groundwork in the United Nations, shaping its economic control policies. He was also the sole author of the unitary constitution of South Africa which lasted 51 years, and under which he used extortionate poll taxes to force cheap black labour into white settlements, with the notion that in a distant future, the racial groups would eventually accept a form of common government.
And so, much like the ANC, the DA does have a transformative goal, and let the racial ballot strategy not fool you - the fractiousness of black-nationalist politics and the fear of the minorities (a “pressure group” as Kissinger once called us) provide a solid pillar on which to build South Africa as a model for how to run a global government with universal central planning doctrines.
Hence the abandonment of opposition to all of the ANC’s policies, and the support for draconian interventions, like the economic totalitarianism of the Climate Change Act.
The DA also aim to digitalise the state, to prepare for the total surveillance and control of all aspects of private life, much as the West has already achieved.
They thoroughly resent the fact that they must govern as they do, but for their plans to work out, they must act in this way.
They have to prevent racial minorities from rejecting mainstream politics, despite there being no representation for their interests within it, or else the entire country will fall apart.
As a secessionist, I do not consider this to be the end of the world. A fragmented South Africa, represented by several nationalist governments, would be able to resist global planning protocols, and avoid implementing draconian policies that harm us.
Helen Zille herself, having felt the effects of the experimental vaccine her party were forced to mandate, has come to be a skeptic of the obviously fraudulent scientistic basis on which the lockdown and vaccine mandate policies were justified.
But there was no way in which a party that draws its support form an internationalised oligarchy could possibly have objected to this.
There are many nominally liberal and left-wing people out there who share the same fears, but for fear of looking racist, or for fear of so much as thinking any thought that could, even by the most unreasonable opponent, be hypothetically seen as racist, they refuse to reckon with the obvious cultural group dynamics which govern democracy in our divided polity.
By taking these forces seriously, and using them not to bolster the Western global order, but to shield ourselves from its excesses, we have a slim but non-zero chance of actually gaining meaningful long-term guarantees of freedom and prosperity.
But if we are going to sit and wring our hands over mere appearances, or the possibility of appearances, as the snakes at the IRR have done, we have no chance of carving out our own future, and will forever be subject to decisions made by a distant and anonymous oligarchy embedded in the ruling classes of foreign nations.
Black South Africans too resent this trajectory, and actually have an admirable resiliance to the ideas they are being sold.
But it is for this reason that those among them who are educated enough to appraise the situation are so ardently opposed to liberalism - they know it is a gateway to foreign institutional control.
And so it is best that each pursue his own interests as he or she sees fit, and let us avoid conflict not by smothering everyone under the same blanket, but by pragmatic and realistic negotiation, with our eyes open.
This by-election forms part of the DA's broader campaign to starve the VF+ out of the province, but comes with some questionable behaviour