Every day people compete to contribute an opinion piece to this newspaper. Some are politicians, others are business people and academics, and some are PR professionals writing in their clients’ names.
It has always been hard to get into Business Day and BusinessLIVE, and our opinion editor — a veteran of more years than he’d probably care for me to mention here — continues to set the highest bar in the country.
As we move into election season his inbox will groan under the weight of the incoming invective and thoughtfulness, and it’s worth considering the risks to all political parties of being trapped in social, cultural and ideological bubbles.
A perpetual chore is explaining why you can write 1,100 words at the most. This has its basis in the newspaper, where physical space is the restraint, but I encourage opinion writers to maintain this discipline on our website too.
The internet is practically infinite, and news websites here and overseas publish interminable screeds of opinion that I usually don’t finish. The problem is that they are seldom much good. In journalism, as in marketing, corporate communications and electioneering, brevity is everything. If you can’t explain it quickly and simply there’s a fair chance you don’t understand your own message.
Most importantly, you see this with political campaigns. On Friday the Irish political class in almost its entirety was handed a clattering rebuke from the public. A referendum was held on changing the Irish constitution’s wording on what constitutes a family (marriage is at its core) and the state’s role in protecting from economic hardship those women who choose to stay at home to raise families.
In the end, 67% rejected the family amendment (32% voted yes), and 74% rejected the care amendment (24% voted yes). It was, as a rattled Guardian newspaper noted, “a stunning defeat not just for the government but the entire political establishment”.
These things keep happening. In 2016 people were surprised by Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House. People were also surprised by Brexit — even, I think, the political leaders of the campaign to leave the EU. In 2023 more than 60% of Australians dismissed a proposal seeking to create a consultative body for aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in parliament.
The lazy approach is to characterise these events as reactionary, but these are the same populations that have embraced progressive positions on gay marriage and abortion. As usual, if you think it’s simple you need to look again.
It’s unfashionable to point out that norms are norms because they are norms, and that the onus to explain clearly is on those who wish to change society, not the other way around.
Clear and fair campaigns for political change do work — the civil rights movement in the US, the Conservative Party’s drive to legalise gay marriage in the UK, and the difficult work towards the dismantling of apartheid all show that most ordinary people are not instinctively oppressive ogres but that they do need clear sight of the issues, the risks and the proposed remedy if you want them to vote with you. Voters are cautious and mistrustful, not caustic.
SA is a country of a vast number of intersecting bubbles of culture, race, language, class and wealth, and while a big part of the job for any political party is to get its voters out on the day, the conquest of other voters is where the opportunity for change lies. In SA that’s a challenge opposition parties embrace with varying levels of competence.
Social norms are like supertankers — to move them you need enormous heft. For many in politics and activism heft is just cash — and sometimes that is right. Political parties will spend a fortune in the coming weeks as we run up to the election on May 29, and in the US a mountain of dollars will pour into advertising and lobbying ahead of November’s showdown between Trump and Joe Biden.
But cash isn’t the only form of power. The embarrassing collapse of Change Starts Now in SA, which was apparently brimming with cash, shows that politics — like chairing a bank — requires skill as well.
The party that succeeds in taking voters from other parties will do it either illegally (food parcels and that sort of thing) or via getting into spaces where it is not normally seen and having meaningful conversations with ordinary people who are influential in their communities.
This is where the Irish political establishment failed. As the Irish Times pointed out in an editorial, “the timing was rushed, the rationale unclear, the propositions confusing and the campaigning lacklustre. It was an accident waiting to happen.”
Perhaps most revealing was the Irish government’s decision to hurry the referendum through on Women’s Day, presumably because it felt neat and symbolic. That exposes the performative motivation of the political class’s desire for something that looked good, but not bothering with the distasteful business of engaging with voters on the merits of the constitutional amendments.
The Irish experience is a timely reminder for local political parties. A whizz-bang performance with popular slogans for your home team will always feel nice. For opposition parties, the dirty work of getting into different places and in front of different people to specifically persuade them not to vote for the ANC, and instead to vote for you, is the real work, the hard work, and the work of growth.
And be in no doubt, the ANC is off to a flying start. I’ve said before that its message is ingenious because it is simple and true: life is better for most South Africans than it was in the 1980s. The framing, the scale of the lost opportunity and the simplistic bombast will infuriate opposition political parties — but that’s the nature of the game. They’ll need to persuade voters to be infuriated by it too. How well they do that remains to be seen.
• Parker is Business Day editor-in-chief.
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