Wednesday’s nationwide by-elections produced some dismal results for the Democratic Alliance, suggesting that its new strategy of taking on the FF+ in a game of Minority Chicken hasn’t got off to a very good start.
Wednesday, however, also produced something else that needs closer examination: another serving of a very specific sort of dishonesty that the DA has been trying for some time to sell as truth.
As the votes came in, and former DA voters scampered away to the left and the right, dumping the party in favour of the ANC and the FF+, Helen Zille went there yet again.
“We have to face the fact,” she wrote on Facebook, “that we have an extremely hostile media environment, where the DA is judged by a totally different set of standards from other parties.”
Apparently not wishing to be confused with those she often accuses of exploiting “permanent victimhood” or promoting “Grievance Studies”, Zille added a pragmatic and long-suffering coda: “That’s life. We deal with it.”
Now this is nothing new. As I said at the outset, the DA has been making this claim for years, and often with the same air of aggrieved victimhood. But seeing as how we’re going to hear it more and more as 2021’s election approaches, I think it’s important to get one thing very straight, right now.
The media does hold the DA to a different standard than the ANC.
As a columnist, I do it all the time.
And I do it because the DA has asked me to do it. Over and over and over again.
The media does hold the DA to a different standard than the ANC ... As a columnist, I do it all the time. And I do it because the DA has asked me to do it.
In every noisy condemnation of the ANC, in every tweet, in every policy statement or press release or Facebook post, the DA has told me that it must be held to a different standard – a higher standard – than its political opponents, because it is more capable, more honest and more virtuous than any of them.
Because what would it mean if I held them to the same standard as the ANC?
Simple. It would mean that I had come to assume that the DA was also a morally bankrupt extraction machine, hollowed out and collapsing under the weight of its own greed.
It would mean that, if it ever emerged the DA had helped steal R500bn, or had reappointed to high office a senior DA member who had overseen the deaths by neglect of 143 mentally ill people, I wouldn’t be particularly surprised. Because, if I had reached the point where I was holding the DA to the same standard as the ANC, I’d expect it of them.
Bizarrely, DA leader John Steenhuisen actually tried to make the same point, sort of, two weeks ago, but his message was severely hamstrung by the fact that he was trying to deny it as he said it, and that his speech had clearly been written by a B-grade motivational speaker who’d dialled it in that morning.
“We are indeed held to a higher standard and we are judged on a completely different scorecard by the commentariat who cannot seem to escape the ANC’s grip on SA politics and life,” Steenhuisen said shortly after being elected party leader. “Believe me, this frustrates me as much as it does you.
“But here’s the thing: we can either throw our hands up and complain of our unfair treatment by the press, or we can see it as a reflection of the expectation people still have for us. The fact that the DA has been set a higher pass mark than the ANC is a recognition of our capabilities.”
It was all over the place, but its subtext was clear: the DA wants to claim the positive implications of being held to a higher standard, but also wants to use it to claim victimhood.
And that, I’m afraid, is the sort of two-faced bullshit that will see the DA getting exactly what it’s asking for: an opportunity to be held to the same wretched standards as the ANC.
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