This week, the DA’s appointment of Roman Cabanac, which has been in the pipeline for some time, has come under fire, as every leftie on the subcontinent has screamed bloody blue murder about his “racism” and “extremist” positions.

What was really surprising, has been the person who triggered the outrage - Gabriel Crouse of the Institute of Race Relations.

This is nominally a liberal organisation, which claims to fight against racial discrimination. But they have proven singularly useless at this, and are now attacking the only decent advocate of their own values in government at present.

Crouse dug deep to find the worst he could on Roman, and all he could find was that he gave Cape secessionists a platform, noticed the obvious truth that only 4% of the black electorate vote DA, thinks the constitution is up for debate, and thinks that putting criminals behind bars is a good idea.

Crouse has engaged in the lowest form of petty-leftist ostracism, what is colloquially referred to as “cancel-culture”, not against socialists like Leon Schreiber, nor against the party’s continued implementation of racial discrimination in preferential procurement (yes, the DA still enforces BEE contracts in the Cape despite the 2022 ConCourt ruling that said they were unenforceable).

Nor is the idea that the constitution is flawed a particularly unusual idea - the DA in particular has been attempting to pass an amendment that would establish a prosecution body not subject to any higher authority (it sort of reminded me of the First French Republic’s Committee on Public Safety).

What Crouse has proven, is what First Things author Gabriel Saul Morson remarked about Russian liberals prior to the Bolshevik Revolution - they think it “better to side with people a mile to one’s left than be associated with anyone an inch to one’s right.”

Roman is a hard market-liberal, a staunch supporter of the rule of law, and a skeptic of the idea of leftward progress, who unlike all his colleagues, considers a constant advance toward socialism to be directionally wrong, not merely an inevitable process to be carefully managed. He sees South Africa as an overwhelmingly conservative country that is ill-served by an elite obsessed with delusional notions of "progress".

Despite Roman’s occasionally blunt and often cheeky descriptions of South African political dynamics, which are unavoidably coloured by racial dynamics, his position on all live issues has been remarkably sensible and centrist.

The DA has become, despite being the rightmost acceptable political position in Marxist-dominated South Africa, an extremely left-wing organisation.

In 2021, they attempted to ram through transgenderism and Critical Race Theory struggle sessions in the Western Cape. They have supported draconian central planning doctrines from the UN as their main policy framework. They support racialist land reform. They refuse to push back on BEE in local procurement.

And this week they have cheerfully adopted the land reform policies of the ANC, backed off from legal opposition to the NHI, dropped calls for devolution of policing powers, and taken a fat loan from the World Bank so they don’t have to cut free services to land invaders while they expand the infrastructure to cope with the strain.

Crouse’s attack was pathetic, and the predictable black-nationalist dogpile that has ensued as everyone combs through his past social media for infractions against their fragile and sacred African esteems, is a predictable consequence.

In initiating the witch hunt, Gabriel Crouse has provided the DA with the distraction needed to announce these weaselly betrayals of their voter base.

This smear campaign serves only one end - to remove the one voice in the room likely to inject any healthy skepticism into the constant leftward ratchet our country has been straining under. This is not playing both sides, it is policing the rightmost boundary of acceptable speech, and encouraging anyone who does not kowtow to the establishment ideology to be declared persona non grata.

Roman Cabanac is not a dangerous radical, he is one of the few sensible men in the room. Cabanac's appointment, from a policymaking perspective, is the most positive development to occur in the DA’s candidate selection process since they got rid of the racial redress-obsessed revanchists under Mmusi Maimane.

If anything, Cabanac is the first open window in a very stuffy little room.

‍