It seems strange that Marco Rubio, who in 2016 described Donald Trump as a “con artist” who was a “serious threat” to the future of the US, and who urged his supporters to “fight back” against a political movement that was “the opposite of what Americans stands for”, has ejected Ebrahim Rasool from the US for saying more or less the same thing.
In a similar vein, it also seems peculiar that in 2025, after all those wasted years, and state capture and the Zondo commission, with the ANC’s support plummeting, that North West education MEC Viola Motsumi thought it a good idea to use R1m of our money to take herself and her team to the special Winter Olympics in Turin at precisely the moment she was supposed to be appearing before the SA Human Rights Commission to explain why schoolchildren in her province continue to take dangerously unreliable buses to school.
These things seem strange, but both can be explained quite easily. As a senior diplomat Rasool had a professional duty not to rock any boats, and by saying what he said essentially violated the terms of his employment contact. As for Motsumi, well, as MEC for education she clearly felt she had a moral obligation to remind us that no teacher could ever afford the time or money to fly business class to Italy, and that the only guaranteed path to riches in SA is to become an ANC politician.
Still, I understand if some readers look at both these cases and feel a slight twinge of hypocrisy, as if — to recoin the old phrase — there’s one set of rules for us and another for them. Until recently I might have agreed. But over the last few months I’ve been reminded that there aren’t two sets of rules. There is only one.
One version of it that’s become quite popular recently was written in the comments on a blog in 2018, when an American composer named Frank Wilhoit offered his definition of current US conservatism, writing that “there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect”.
He was writing about Donald Trump’s Maga movement, but “Wilhoit’s Law” (as it has come to be known online) seems equally applicable to many of those who famously and explicitly opposed conservatism, whether Stalin, Mao or, on a far smaller and thankfully more benign scale, our very own ANC.
Wilhoit’s Law is a pithy idea, but its cleverness or even prettiness slightly elides the cold, hard rule it is trying to describe; the rule Rubio showed us last week and the ANC will almost certainly show us concerning Motsumi — namely that as you move closer to the source of power, rules and consequences become negotiable, then ephemeral, and then finally entirely theoretical.
For many years the so-called “rules-based order” and liberal consensus did a great job at denying this reality: when big countries leaned on little ones, or a huge “coalition of the willing” invaded Iraq using fabricated evidence to quadruple the oil price over five years and supercharge the US energy industry into its current orbit, critics were inevitably pooh-poohed as Guardian-reading naïves who were selfishly refusing to accept that this was all necessary for the greater, globalised good.
But since the financial crash and Brexit, and the descent of Trump down his golden escalator, many voters within the rules-based order have made it clear that they think the rules are holding them back from the broad, sunlit uplands invented for profit by Rupert Murdoch and his social engineering team. Bipartisan committees, consensus-seeking commissions, even parliaments and congresses, are out: executive orders with a large celebrity autograph at the bottom are in.
Even Teddy Roosevelt’s vision of power — of speaking quietly and carrying a big stick — is starting to feel too demure: now, you speak loudly, even if it’s nonsensical, and you swing that stick, obviously not at China or Russia but definitely at those Danish and Canadian fiends. It feels chaotic, but perhaps only because none of us have any experience of power being wielded in its traditional form, free from the schoolmarmish restraints of liberalism.
An ancient river, as old us the first god-kings, wants to run again. The dam that has held it back — over-engineered, complicated, unreliable, misunderstood, taken for granted, finally resented — is cracking, and in the next months and years we might find ourselves swept away by the untherapised incontinence of unbound men with access to nuclear weapons and vast fortunes.
For the ANC, and perhaps even the government of national unity, it’s too late to escape, and not even the highest moral ground will keep them dry. All they can do now is post Rasool somewhere less important — Johannesburg perhaps, since nobody seems to care what happens there — and then try to find some way of surviving the coming maelstrom with the minimum amount of pain, keeping whatever dignity they have left intact as they are bowled head over heels by the flood, joining thousands of minor politicians from hundreds of small countries, all insisting they definitely meant to hit their heads on that submerged rock, and explaining that — glub, splutter — swallowing all that water is a challenge but one they are embracing with — blub, wheeze — enthusiasm …
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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