The DA’s sanitised reference to “the family” in its draft values document doesn’t get us far, writes Eusebius McKaiser.
Freedom, fairness and opportunity: those are the three “new” foundational values that the DA will be selling you in the weeks, months and maybe years ahead. It is all contained in a draft values document ahead of the party’s elective conference next month. I took some time looking into this document. You won’t believe what I found! (Jokes: It’s probably more exciting to watch the paint on The Spear dry, but this stuff matters, so stay with me asseblief.)
The most striking thing in this document is the prominence given to “the family”. It affirms the centrality of family to our wellbeing and flourishing.
In fact, the word “family” appears more often than “individual”; and that’s besides the fact that when “individual” does appear, it doesn’t feature as you might expect for a party that – I think – is a liberal party.
What unites liberals across our differences as liberals is a basic and foundational value we place on the individual. Social structures are important to me, as a liberal, only in so far as they may help me enjoy and exercise my autonomy. But my individuality is basic: I participate as and when I want to in communal activities and social structures like church or family.
I have previously argued in this column, of course, that liberalism cannot be reduced to a philosophy that imagines us to all be atoms floating freely in space. That is a caricature.
What is crucial, however, if you want to call yourself liberal is to give the right kind of justification for why you value social structures.
There are liberal and illiberal reasons for valuing family life. This values document of the DA doesn’t make clear why it is giving so much prominence to “the family”. We are left to guess, I’m afraid.
Let’s think about the practical differences between liberal and illiberal ways of valuing family.
When a homophobic family ostracise their son for being gay and tell the son to think of the effect of being gay and living as a gay man on the family, they are oppressing him. They are telling him to place less value even on his own autonomy than on “the family”. Here the individual is pleaded with to give primacy to social structure over authenticity, autonomy and individualism.
In such a case, the family becomes a site of hurt and pain and a source of hate and alienation. The family, in these kinds of situations, comes out thoroughly illiberal.
On the other hand, I might of course decide – in fact, I might just know it to be so without deciding it to be so – that my family is a profound source of emotional joy, and partly constitutive of my very identity.
In practice, this may include sometimes choosing, freely, to take decisive account of how my personal choices will affect my family and make choices that don’t burden my family unduly.
If my family is deeply committed to Catholicism, for example, I may well decide to marry only a woman who is Catholic or willing to convert to Catholicism, even if this matters more to the rest of my family than to me.
But here’s the snag: I must be free of undue influences when I participate in social structures. And the moral basis of my participation in family or church life should be that doing so is an expression, solely and wholly, of my autonomy.
Which is it for the DA? I’m frankly at sea here. I’ve written plenty on what kind of liberalism the DA should adopt for contemporary South Africa. But a friend caught me off guard last year when he saw me arguing for liberal egalitarianism: “What makes you think the DA is (still) liberal?”
Um…um… aren’t they? I was kinda sheepish.
So the debate I’ve been getting excited about – what kind of liberalism is best for us? – may be hasty. This values document demands that a prior question be raised: “Is the party (still) liberal?”
I still believe there is a place for liberalism in our politics. And I remain convinced that the right kind of liberalism has a lot to offer all South Africans – atheists and believers, family-oriented folk and loners. But I wonder how many DA supporters, voting delegates and leaders self-identify as liberal at all?
I can’t shake off the feeling that the prominence given to the family in this new values document is tactical. It’s not flowing from liberal premises.
Remember, the DA don’t like bluntly telling you that despite their professed non-racialism, they see race when they do polling. And they secretly obsess with scientific attempts to see what things preoccupy black voters so that their messaging can track black voter preferences as much as possible.
Some almost-bright spark probably thought that while a value like ubuntu may get the DA lampooned for trying comically to reach out to blacks, references to “the family” may be a safe and effective proxy.
I think the hope is that when black voters hear or read “family”, they will get all warm and fuzzy and be like: “Aaaah, this party finally gets me, mos! Ayeye!”
The thinking further might be that no white voter would misread this as an abandonment of the party’s classic liberal roots, because even liberals have family.
I’m afraid this kind of gimmick can’t work. Ask any of my black friends to wax on about how family really features in their lives: you’ll get everything from hilarious in-jokes about black funerals and traditional ceremonies and rituals and seven-colour food to black tax draining your credit. The point being that a sanitised reference to “the family” doesn’t get you very far. What do you mean by it? What do you say to the gay son whose family tell him that coming out as gay will destroy the family?
Without detail or texture, I don’t know whether you and I have similar kinds of emphasis on family. And I wonder how the DA would tease this out when they are pressed to.
What’s at stake here is the difference between liberal and illiberal justification for social structures. And what the moral limits on, and hazards of, “the family” are.
It’s dangerous territory. There are classic conservative descriptions of the family in political philosophy. Despite not being atoms, classic liberals are suspicious of the nefarious consequences of affirming social sites uncritically and without massive and careful qualification.
One safe way out would be to give an explicitly liberal exposition of the family. This document doesn’t do that. It just dumps the family in there and makes no mention of the individual. It talks of “individual freedoms” but there is no basic priority given to the individual as fundamental to the party’s outlook on (political) life.
In the end, the document might disappoint both old-school liberals and liberal egalitarians.
Old-school liberals – the ones who love moaning on the letters pages that the DA is selling its soul – will be scared of unqualified references to conservative structures.
Liberal egalitarian types will demand to know whether the family matters for liberal or illiberal reasons.
But let’s first, perhaps, answer my friend’s awkward question: Is the DA (still) liberal?
* Eusebius McKaiser is the best-selling author of A Bantu In My Bathroom and Could I Vote DA? A Voter’s Dilemma.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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