BOSA, Rise Mzansi, GOOD unite in centrist project: Simon Lincoln Reader

Key topics:Centrism balances left and right, grounded in common sense and law.Centrists support fairness, generosity, and pragmatic policies.Modern parties often distort centrism for opportunistic gains..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up for the BizNews channel here..By Simon Lincoln Reader*.A new centrist bloc is reportedly being formed between South African opposition parties − namely Musi Maimane’s BOSA, Songezo Zibi’s Rise Mzansi and Patricia de Lille’s GOOD. ActionSA was also said to be willing, until it withdrew − a practice the party has some form with. This is a sound idea. Centrism is a wonderful position − the idea that you can poach the best of the left or the right and discard the excess. Some of centrism’s foundations are universally appealing, including but not limited to common sense, the rule of law and of course, two ideas existing simultaneously. A theoretically centrist view is that there are only two sexes. Though there are exceptions and the documented trauma of gender dysmorphia, a centrist believes that rules should not be adjusted to accommodate an extreme minority, and that protections for this group must be extracted from strong human rights legislation instead. A centrist believes that picking on someone suffering gender dysmorphia is jerkish, but also believes that members belonging to a political party who bully gender-critical feminists for seeking to protect hard-won rights are also jerks. This would make the Liberal Democrats (Lib Dems) − the UK’s most (supposedly) centrist party − a party of many jerks. A centrist believes that nobody should be judged or evaluated for anything on the basis of immutable characteristics. At the same time, a reasonable South African centrist in the mid-1990s would look at the practical application of a policy like black empowerment in its initial form as a means of black participation in the economy, and be willing to accommodate it. Once it had demonstrably failed, say, a few months later, the centrist would encourage alternatives to economic inclusion as a matter of urgency. If it were revealed that the same policies were in fact just a party-political wealth-generation scam, recycling the same profiles through trillions of rands in deals, the centrist would most likely vomit. .Read more:.Ipsos poll: ANC, EFF losing support as Zuma-backed MK party gains ground.A centrist doesn’t have to like someone like Donald Trump, and indeed, he may appear too louche and gaudy for the centrist’s tastes. But that doesn’t mean the centrist won’t credit him with, say, awakening Europe from its slumber, or shaking off the complacency that has permitted generations of Scandis and Western Europeans to retire early. Peace, another foundation of centrism, should also be pursued as much as is humanly possible, and when it is located, parties responsible should be celebrated. Encourages generosityA centrist looks to a hyper-capitalist environment and encourages generosity. Welfare, the centrist believes, is necessary for those unable to support themselves. In this way, the centrist tempers a society into a peripatetic, happy one. But when jobless benefits peak, when the system shudders because of intense dependency upon it, the centrist is one of the first to acknowledge that something is wrong, and intervention is needed. The centrist doesn’t view the climate as an emergency. Rather, it is system well beyond our knowledge, and thus unhinged finger-pointing and recriminations serve only to divide us more. Centrists believe in science, and in the act of believing in science, rely on predictions made by the scientists they believe in. When those predictions do not materialise, the centrist reverts to type: here is a system beyond our knowledge, and the best we can do is to keep our spaces tidy and encourage our neighbours to do the same (without prescription). A centrist believes in borders, and at the same time, empathises with war displacement, so promotes the idea of genuine refugee assimilation − with conditions. These include efforts to adapt to the prevailing culture, norms and traditions of the new environment that refugees find themselves in. This is where the centrist’s common-sense view of history becomes critical: free and fair societies were made by adherence to order. “Presentism” is not centrism. In academic institutions, the prevailing orthodoxy allows history to be examined through today’s standards. Apart from being intellectually fraudulent, this view is fundamentally regressive: in the way the centrist forms arguments from both the left and the right, the good of history remains an essential component for the future. Selfish, craven and opportunisticBut most of all, the centrist is honest. He or she knows they are not entitled to drag the word to wherever they feel they are, as doing so would be selfish, craven, and in hyper-partisan circumstances, opportunistic. This is exactly what the UK’s Lib Dems have done, and in doing so have earned for themselves the most unenviable reputation: as cosseted suburban boomers, easy on the property ladder and willing correspondents to easy cash, who now insist that the generations succeeding them pay through the nose for energy prices in vanity expeditions (“net zero”) and attend to the cultures being imposed upon them, rather than the other way around. I’m not convinced that Musi, Songezo and Co actually know what centrism means. Worse, they will be tempted to blag from the more radical quarters of the Lib Dems, UK Greens and the US Democrats in formation talks. This wouldn’t be good: these parties concern themselves with luxury centrism. In the perpetuation of ideas and “values”, parties like the Lib Dems bully and belittle their opponents, Democrats call them racists and bigots and Greens do whatever it is greens do, usually a combination of those practices. Classic centrism thus might not be appealing to the likes of GOOD’s Brett Herron. “Too far right”, he may conclude, once presented with the definitions. Might be better to create an Antifa..*Simon Lincoln Reader grew up in Cape Town before moving to Johannesburg in 2001, where he was an energy entrepreneur until 2014. In South Africa, he wrote a weekly column for Business Day, then later Biznews.com. Today he is a partner at a London-based litigation funder, a trustee of an educational charity, and a member of the advisory board of the Free Speech Union of South Africa. He travels frequently between California, the UK, and South Africa. All on his green passport..This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission

BOSA, Rise Mzansi, GOOD unite in centrist project: Simon Lincoln Reader

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