When Common Sense Is Not Enough

The below essay was written for the new South African online magazine, The Common Sense, founded by well-known political strategist, Frans Cronje. It was commissioned but never published. Perhaps too close to the bone for the editors?

The aim of the piece was to demonstrate that moderate reform or centrism (the common sense of ‘normie conservatives/classical liberals) will not save South Africa. Perhaps my readers will be interested.

Recently I found myself in an exchange on X with an editor of the Common Sense.

I had quite vociferously criticised a recent Common Sense post, in the bombastic fashion one finds oneself slipping into on social media.

I was challenged by the editor to write a piece on why and how Common Sense is wrong on just about everything (which he said he would happily publish).

Whilst I would not go that far in my critique, I do believe that the framework within which this publication and its associated thinkers and organisations analyse South Africa is deeply flawed – not only in the sense of misunderstanding contemporary political events but on a deeper philosophical level too.

That said, I do believe the magazine is a valuable addition to the local media landscape. Its reporting on the deep roots of South African crime, for instance, may prove to be one of the constructive pieces of analysis of our day.

Equally, the space it has opened up for serious political conversation is extremely valuable. It also publishes that most perspicacious South African thinker, the jurist Koos Malan.

Nonetheless, its appeal to common sense indicates an appeal to the conventional political thought of the day, as though such conventionalism were not complicit in our unfolding tragedy.

The thinking goes: if the ANC simply adopted the wisdom of the west, liberalised the economy a little bit, was friendlier with Israel, all would be well in our distressed and diseased polity.

There is some truth here, but in the hypothetical sense only.

Almost all South Africans would welcome lower taxes, less regulation, and a pragmatic foreign policy (even if a great number of us are skeptical of the global American order).

But in reality, that will never happen within the current constitutional dispensation.

See the example of Trump. Despite being such an ostensible shock to the system, the Civil Rights regime (in many ways more radical than BEE) remains the law of the land, Middle East wars continue, and roughly 100 million illegal immigrants remain within US borders despite massive public support for deportations and for the abolition of affirmative action.

And even if these South African reforms advocated by both moderate and classical liberals could be implemented, there are deeper problems that can never just be solved technocratically, issues to do with ethnic loyalties that I will explore below.

The problem therefore with the Common Sense is that the common sense animating the global liberal order will never be enough to save the South African Republic.

Thus, the search for a new, safer, more prosperous order must go beyond common sense.

The easiest way to explain why, is by looking at the website’s (and its guiding spirit’s – Frans Cronje) errors with regards to recent events, beginning with the dispute that occasioned this piece. These errors and misapprehensions will show the problem that lurks deeper on the philosophical plane.

First: upon Ramaphosa’s insistence on using all legal means at his disposal to delay and disrupt impeachment proceedings, the Common Sense posted on X that Ramaphosa is betraying the moral vision of the ANC in its struggle for democracy, that he had forsaken the moral high ground of his predecessors.

Now, I can only imagine this was rhetoric adopted by an associate editor of some sort and not reflective of the true belief of the founders of the publication, who know well that the belief in a great moral conscience guiding the ANC is a western media meme and a bad local joke.

The ANC launched a People’s War in the late 1970s, the body count of which somehow managed to put the apartheid security services in the shade. Tyres and matches, as Winnie Mandela urged…

This of a piece with the ANC-run torture camps in exile, their vision of transforming South Africa into an African version of the East German dictatorship, and their open admission in their policy documents that reconciliation and liberal constitutionalism are mere compromises on the way to a complete national democratic revolution in which the party will dominate all of South African society.

But the fact that it was even thinkable for an employee of Common Sense to type and post something like this, is demonstrative of a conventional, liberal belief that all would be well, or at least a great deal better, with South Africa under an ANC ruled by its ‘better angels’ and that such an eventuality is even possible. Motsepe save us! This belief forecloses genuine reform.

Frans Cronje himself vivified this belief in his incredible enthusiasm for the burgeoning GNU following the 2024 elections. Speaking to Alec Hogg as the negotiations were taking place (in a completely amateurish fashion by DA political strategists), he publicly urged the DA and the ANC to form a coalition over the weekend and declare a united front which would inspire a market confidence which could turn the fortunes of the South African economy.

Cronje, two days after the election, was almost euphoric:

‘By Sunday afternoon, [the ANC and the DA] should be able to say to the country and the world, there is a plan! You cannot just leave us hanging. On the way to you [Alec Hogg], I just got off a call with the banks, and the point there very much again, was do not leave us hanging for three weeks. You do not want to see what happens to the rand’s going to look like…

‘Understand why this deal can work. Hell, if we can pull this off, Alec, the rollercoaster from where we were three weeks ago to these results this morning to what the government could look like in two weeks’ time will be an incredible story and it’s totally within our grasp. We can’t let it slip.’

Leaving aside the idea that the South African corporations, who have complied with the ANC to the point of handing millions of dollars’ worth of equity to comrades, should be trusted with our political future, it was obvious to mere amateurs like myself, who perhaps have the advantage of not talking to the banks, that this rushed GNU would accomplish nothing.

The glee with which Ramaphosa chuckled his way into a coalition with Steenhuisen betrayed the predictable result: the ANC was only all too happy to allow their ostensible opponents to implement their policies alongside them, keeping the EFF and MK in their back-pockets as a bargaining chip, whilst denying them the spoils of corruption.

In the blink of an eye Steenhuisen was supporting BEE and legitimising one of the worst governments on earth in terms of socio-political performance, in the Oval Office itself.

I believe that this misjudgment stems from a misapprehension of the nature of the South African polity itself, being an instantiation of an unworkable mass, multicultural, liberal democracy, the likes of which would induce horror and disgust in Aristotle or even John Locke.

This misapprehension is most evident in Cronje’s common refrain that the South African electorate is fundamentally moderate, socially conservative, and wants a pragmatic government that deals with unemployment and crime. He believes that not delivering on these basics is what alienates voters from the ANC and that this could lead to their downfall.

(He also seems to think that the educated, middle-class wing of ANC’s supporters are these moderates par excellence. I don’t have statistics on this, but this is not true at all in my personal experience.)

Well, maybe he is right. But fat good this does anyone. When the ANC loses support, who does the support go to?

It does not move to the centre; it moves to the radical left.

If one compares the 2024 election results to the 1994 election results, one can see that absolutely nothing has changed in terms of the electorate’s support for radical racial leftism.

Under Mandela, the ANC won 63% of the votes, while racial minority support saw the National Party, the Democratic Party, and the Freedom Front win just over 24% combined.

By 2024, the flagbearers of minorities’ support had become largely the Democratic Alliance, with smaller support for the new Patriotic Alliance and the still existent Freedom Front.

What percentage of the popular vote did they win collectively? Just over 25%.

What of the ANC, embattled by the growing disillusionment of the moderate voter?

They were beaten down to a shocking 40%, yes. But add in the votes of their breakaway parties who simply believe in the hastier implementation of the ANC’s National Democratic Revolution… And you get 40% plus Zuma’s MK’s 14.5% plus Malema’s EFF’s 9.5%, equaling…. 64%.

As historian Hermann Giliomee pointed out decades ago, in a multicultural democracy, there is no real floating vote on a national level. Elections become mere ethnic census. The DA received only 500k black votes out of 11 million in 2024... 4.5%.

Equally ignored in conventional, sensible criticism of the ANC was the more realistic view of electoral politics brought to light within an important Yale/Princeton study in 2014 that showed average American citizens have no influence on public policy and legislation. Zero. The country is run by elites, who shape public opinion and not vice versa.

Yet Cronje, the Common Sense, and the Social Research Foundation still map out South Africa’s future using opinion polling.

Yes, the average South African opposes gay marriage, cares far more about jobs and crime than racial redress, but, again, so what? Count the votes.

We need hard-nosed, even tragic thinking, not a common sense based on opinion polls and democratic romanticism.

As I also pointed out on X, this lack of judgment, this enthusiasm for conventional solutions to the failed state that is South Africa (and, yes, despite the well-off segment of the citizenry maintaining breathing room to escape the state, the crime and unemployment rates point to utter, disastrous failure), was not the first example of common sense failing Cronje and the Common Sense eco-system.

A brief online search for Cronje’s position during the Covid Event as it played out in South Africa displayed this same conventionalism which only serves to affirm the legitimacy of the existing, failed order.

Yes, to his great credit, he and the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) consistently condemned the lockdowns as being far too draconian, and that livelihoods should be taken into consideration as well as lives.

But this is the problem. This kind of policy entrepreneurialism was not, and is not, helpful to any effective dissidence. This is classic elite containment of genuine opposition. Because by suggesting that there was any value at all in the measures, any criticism of those measures serves to entrench the narrative.

My proof for this: Cronje ended up arguing for disastrous and inexplicable school closures even as he criticised the wider lockdowns.

He described schools as ‘petri dishes’ and a site for cross-pollination of the virus, which would see too many people restored to social circulation.

This was wildly wrong. And this kind of rhetoric led to the absolutely shocking treatment of children for over two years, where they were effectively denied a childhood: bubbles, masks, cancelled dances and sports fixtures, and constant treatment as germ vectors.

It was a war on youth and joy. And elites never apologized, never had to apologize, for their catastrophic lack of judgment.

Similarly, under Cronje’s leadership, there is no record of IRR opposition to the heinous mask mandates. Opposition to this only begins after his tenure, all the way into 2022, after two years of one of the most irrational, personally oppressive measures in South African history.

At the same time, whilst he was still in the chair of the IRR, he pushed for legal action to force the government to provide mass vaccination of experimental gene therapies. All whilst nothing was said against masks.

The ‘opposition’ to the revolutionary therapeutic state mirrors opposition to the national democratic revolution. The nature of the opposition, and its eagerness to appear mainstream and acceptable to ANC sceptics in the liberal ecosystem, undercuts said opposition completely.

It becomes part of the dialectic and tames itself. We continuously wait for new dawns that never come.

No, what the condition of South Africa calls for, is a radical break with the entire rainbow theology of the system, that recognizes tragic, intractable realities, as long as we pretend there is anything noble or serious in the ANC.

One thinks here of the likes of Nick Hudson and Panda who had no concern with appearing mainstream in their courageous stand against the very notion of a global health crisis separable from an elite attack on freedom.

One thinks of the quixotic Cape Independence movement, who at least see the impossibility of an electoral solution to our failed republic.

One thinks here of Orania, who happily acknowledge and embrace (as Aristotle and Locke did) the futility of any pretense in a stable, mass, multicultural democracy.

These groups are willing to be outside of the mainstream, to be scorned by common sense, and that’s why they have a shot at a chance of making a meaningful long-term impact.

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