After The Revolution
A movie usually ends when the villain falls from power. Real life never does - and that can be a problem.
What does it mean to be in power? What qualities make a man fit to wield authority? What does a ruling elite owe to the rest of society? What do they in turn owe to their elites? What do a society’s various power-holders owe to each other? What lessons should they draw from their collective past? What do they owe to future generations?
These are the questions that have occupied philosophers and statesmen, historians and prophets since time immemorial. And they’re no less of a concern to Homer and Virgil, or to Sophocles and Shakespeare and Luo Guanzhong and the rest of the world’s great poets and dramatists.
They’re also questions with which about half of the world’s population is having to grapple this year, with 2024 being the biggest election year in history, when measured by the sheer number of people voting in national elections.
One especially interesting 2024 election is South Africa’s. This year, on 29 May, South Africa will hold its seventh set of general elections since universal suffrage was established in 1994. Observers from around the world are watching closely, since most of the polls indicate that the African National Congress (ANC), which has won comfortable majorities in every previous post-Apartheid election, will fail to reach 50 percent this time.
The ANC’s popularity has slid quite a ways since it triumphally ushered in the modern era under Nelson Mandela. The reasons for this slide – rampant crime and corruption, plus the decay of the rail and water and electrical infrastructure that were once the pride of the African continent – have been described in plenty of detail elsewhere. What matters now is who the disillusioned populace will turn to to govern in the ANC’s stead. And since South Africa uses proportional representation, coalitions are a serious possibility.
The largest opposition party is the Democratic Alliance (DA) which has governed the most prosperous province, Western Cape, since 2009. Media outlets often refer to the DA as a “party of the white minority,” but if you look at the numbers, you’ll see that this doesn’t check out – the DA got 22.2 percent of the vote in the last election, in a country where only 8.4 percent of the people are white. It turns out that a lot of black people and coloured (i.e. mixed-race) people share the DA’s vision of a post-racial society that respects private property, suppresses crime, and looks at ability rather than race or political affiliation when filling public-sector jobs.
Then there is Action SA, a party headed by the black businessman-turned-Mayor-of-Johannesburg Herman Mashaba. After growing up in poverty, Mashaba built a successful hair-care company and later diversified into mining, construction, and real-estate. So when this self-made multi-millionaire started saying that South Africa can only be turned around with merit-based hiring and tough-on-crime, pro-private-property policies, a lot of people listened.
Rounding out the right-wing opposition bloc are the Inkatha Freedom Party, a traditionalist, Zulu nationalist party that’s been around since the 1970s and whose platform calls for devolving power to local authorities, and Freedom Front Plus, a Boer party that consistently takes 2 or 3 percent of the vote.
And then, entering at stage left, are the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), led by Julius Malema, and umKhonto we Sizwe (MK). The EFF is a Marxist-Leninist party whose main quarrel with the ANC is that the ANC doesn’t go far enough, and Malema’s main promise is that, once in power, he will finally get around to expropriating the remaining white-owned land. The Freedom Fighters are a growing movement, known far and wide for marching through the streets in their distinctive red berets, getting banned from parliamentary sessions due to brawling, loudly praising Hamas and Vladimir Putin for their “anti-imperialist” wars, holding giant rallies at which the crowd chants about killing white farmers, and threatening to invade South Africa’s neighbours in order to install governments less friendly to the United States.
Meanwhile the MK party is led by former president Jacob Zuma, who was forced out of office back in 2018 on account of his turning out to be too corrupt for even the ANC, but who maintains a loyal following among many former ANC voters – voters who seem to believe that any opposition to such a popular liberation figure as Zuma must come from a desire to uphold white power.
Right now, the outcome that looks most likely is that South Africa gets a hung parliament, with neither the ANC nor the bloc of four right-wing parties having enough votes to choose the president on its own. This will lead to coalition rule: either the EFF and MK join the ANC as a junior partners and drag the country further to the left, or one of the right-wing parties deserts the others and agrees to prop up ANC rule for another five years in return for minor concessions. Or perhaps the EFF and the MK will bite the bullet and align with the right-wing parties in order to avoid reneging on their promises not to enter a coalition with the ANC.
There’s little point to trying to predict the future in more detail, especially when the election in question is only a few days away. But it is worth asking how South Africa got to this point – how the buoyant optimism of the Nelson Mandela years and the “Rainbow Nation” gave way to a country known for rampant crime, abandoned railways, cholera in the water supply, and “load shedding” – the government utilities’ euphemistic name for the rolling blackouts that have crippled South Africa’s economy for several years now. And how the ANC’s commitment to “Black Economic Empowerment” has ended up being interpreted as a license for rich, well-connected black businessmen – people like Jacob Zuma – to engage in wild amounts of graft and embezzlement while the majority of blacks continues to struggle with poverty and soaring unemployment.
It would be naïve to claim that this situation has just one cause. And yet – even though it may sound odd to say this – I think that a key piece of the puzzle can be found in the common pop culture that most of the world now shares.
Back in December of 2015, when I was still living in my childhood home in Arizona, I watched Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens with my family. I recall being disappointed with the movie, though I had to think about it for a while before I could articulate why.
Basically, the story that J. J. Abrams chose to tell in Episode VII was not the kind of story that I was expecting. I wasn’t enough of a pop culture junkie to actually read more than one or two Star Wars novels, but I knew that, up to that time, the authors of the Expanded Universe books had taken the title of Return of the Jedi at face value, assumed that the Jedi Order was restored at the end of that film, and written thousands of pages of prose about the challenges that Grandmaster Luke Skywalker faced while leading this reborn Order, and that Leia and Han faced as they rebuilt the Galactic Republic.
For nearly three decades, devoted Star Wars fans had looked through the eyes of more than a dozen novelists as their favourite characters followed the same story arc that George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Knox, and most of the other heroes of the American Revolution had followed. With the old rulers defeated, these brave but at times hot-headed men had to settle down under the heavy burdens of government, knowing that the victories they had won on the battlefield would be useless if they couldn’t follow them up with years of astute statesmanship.
And then Disney came along, bought the Star Wars franchise, and swept all that away. In Episode VII, we find out that Luke and Han and Leia failed. There is no new Jedi Order. The Empire has been resurrected as the “First Order.” We get to watch the rebellion happen all over again, only this time with an overpowered female protagonist whose total flawlessness screams “Mary Sue” loud enough to drown out John Williams’ booming soundtrack. And of course Episode VIII and Episode IX only made things worse.
As bad as it is to watch the Disney corporation take a big dump on a franchise that once had a fair bit of artistic merit, the real problem here is that it’s so utterly typical of modern pop culture. Just as a typical romcom ends on the wedding day, so does the typical action-adventure film end when the evil overlord is defeated. We rarely get to watch either the years of hard work that go into a happy marriage, or the years of skilled statesmanship and clear-eyed compromising that go into steering the ship of state after a new regime has come to power.
Even the fact that phrases like “regime” and “come to power” are usually only used for the bad guys reveals what a lopsided worldview most of us have. We only notice power when it’s being abused. This is why, to us, an “authoritarian” society isn’t just one with strong authorities, or one where the people have a lot of respect for the authorities – it’s one where the authorities do bad things. We don’t say “I got fed up with the crime in Oregon, so I decided to move to a more authoritarian state.”
And it’s also why the worldview nurtured by our lowbrow entertainment has no answer to the question: What comes after the revolution? Here, a world in which the malign power has already been pulled down must be just and conflict-free; therefore, the only way to make a sequel to Star Wars is to do a soft-reboot and fight out the old revolution all over again.
But the ability to answer “What comes after the revolution?” is what separates the canny Americans of Lexington and Bunker Hill and Independence Hall from the French mob that stormed the Bastille. And the voters of South Africa – unless they change course soon – may well end up finding themselves reliving the French experience.
At the end of the day, people who only notice power when their enemies have it – and who think that beating one’s enemies means doing away with power and not having to worry about how power gets wielded thereafter – are in for a world of misery.
The worldview in which power is invisible when one’s own side has it is primarily a pathology of the Left. Perhaps you recall how so many American leftists insisted that the US Supreme Court was acting tyrannically, or granting more power to itself, when it decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center in 2022? On its face, these claims make no sense – how is it a power-grab when the Court refuses to impose its opinions about abortion on either the red states or the blue states? To a person who thinks in premodern categories, this might be seen as an abdication of duty, but it’s definitely not tyranny. To see this as tyranny requires a political philosophy in which “wielding power” just means “whatever the other guy is doing.”
Which is the philosophy that you see in popular entertainments like Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and the new Star Wars trilogy, where the hero lacks any ambitions to wield power, while the villain’s fall from power is all that’s needed to ensure a happy ending.
And this is the philosophy that, when implemented in South Africa, gave that country rampant crime, embezzlement, and graft, plus load shedding, the disappearance of a once-great rail network, and cholera in the water supply.
Too many people treated the victory over Apartheid as the end of their country’s problems, rather than the end of one set of problems and the beginning of a new one.
Also, Nelson Mandela retired too soon. By leaving office after a single term, he showed humility, but he also left the country in the hands of the corrupt and vindictive elements within the ANC, elements which he had never tried hard to suppress in the first place.
And finally, by thinking of “power” only as something that the whites had wielded prior to 1994, and not as something that the ANC was wielding – and perhaps not wielding well – in the present day, voters became complacent, and for the most part failed to give their votes to parties which were up to the new challenges of a new century.
And then there’s Julius Malema and the EFF, who have taken the idea that power is only power when the wrong people have it to its logical conclusion, and are insisting that since South Africa’s problems haven’t gone away, the whites must still have too much power. If ending their monopoly on political power didn’t bring utopia, then it’s time to expropriate their farms and their businesses. Does it matter that this same policy had disastrous results in Zimbabwe? Not to the Red Berets!
(When it comes to not noticing power when your own side has it, Marxists everywhere are the very worst. This is how Deng Xiaoping’s government, after massacring the protestors at Tiananmen Square in 1989, was able to announce, in typically Orwellian terms, that it had defeated the “counterrevolutionaries.” How can a teenager or twenty-something who’s resisting a government that’s been in place for his or her entire lifetime be a “counterrevolutionary?” Because, to a Marxist, your enemies – no matter how weak they actually are – are the established power that’s resisting your noble “revolution.”)
All of us – whether we live in the United States, South Africa, or somewhere else entirely – are only going to get out of this mess if we not only learn to talk more frankly about politics, but also learn to tell more stories about the proper uses of power and authority.
In a way, stories about justified rebellions are easier to tell. Good stories usually start off with the protagonists in a weaker position and follow their struggles to turn the tables on their adversaries. Thus, in a simpleminded tale of conflict between individuals or small groups and the state, the audience must sympathize with the rebels, or else there isn’t much of a story. (Detective stories are the exception that proves the rule. In a detective story, the villains, though weaker than the police in terms of numbers, weapons, etc., have a crucial advantage in intelligence – they know what happened at the crime scene, the heroes don’t, and the challenge of closing that intelligence gap is what gives us the story.)
In a balanced literary or film canon, stories about justified insurrections have their place, but it’s not as big of a place as they’re getting in the present day. It may take a bit of creativity to tell engaging stories where the heroes are confronted with formidable challenges that don’t involve pulling down the supreme authority or turning their society on its head. But the task is certainly doable, and for nearly all of human history, most storytellers managed to do it.
Authority can only be replaced with authority. It’s a straightforward truth that lies at the bedrock of every long-lived civilization, and it’s a truth that shows up in our oldest cultural narratives. (This is why when Moses leads the children of Israel out of bondage in Egypt, the first thing he does is go to Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments. Everyone must have laws.)
And at the end of the day, the object of politics can’t just be liberation; it can’t just be pointing to abuses and saying, “this needs to stop.” Effective politics – whether in the United States, South Africa, or anywhere else – involves thinking about what comes after the revolution. It involves thinking hard about what qualities make a man fit to rule, and it involves telling stories about authority used rightly.
Clowsrd and Plivin didn't write "How to Rule