The South African Civil Society Information Service

What Do Julius Malema and Sarah Palin Have in Common?

By Saliem Fakir · 23 Jan 2010

Picture: Fazila Farouk

If there were to be a beauty contest, Sarah Palin (formerly Governor of Alaska) would win over ANC Youth League President, Julius Malema by far in the looks department.

However, as political celebrities for a growing anti-intellectual movement in two different parts of the world, they share a real and symbolic place in contemporary popular culture and politics.

Palin, like Malema, shows no great intellectual curiosity. Their erudition of complex geopolitical and economic issues is not going to bowl you over. They are as dim as you can get.

The Sunday Times, in its end of the year issue, declared Julius Malema the “Mampara of the Year.”

Malema may yet have the last laugh.

The views of a small intellectual class, which have sought to caricature Malema as a buffoonish character is not a portrayal shared by his admirers and supporters.

It is true that Malema doesn’t read newspapers. Nor, seemingly, does he care the least bit about what the Fourth Estate has to say about him.  

The way Palin answers questions also suggests that she doesn’t read much either and has no time for liberal quirks.

Both Malema and Palin are a new breed of politician who play to popular mesmerisation. Their anti-intellectual and contrarian style is a form of defiance to the liberal establishment and its values.

The problem with the Sunday Times’ declaration is that it doesn’t see the mind of Malema as being symbolic of a growing social mind of which Malema is but one of the outcrops.

Instead, it casts him as a lone figure destroying the reputation of the refined art of cultured politics. These are entirely the preoccupations of coffee bar elites (this author included) who think politics must have a certain decorum.

Outside of the four corners of elite intellectual rumination exists a world that is railing against highbrow snobbery. It is a world that fears intellectual elite types as much as we fear them. 

Malema, though, has built a bridge between his world and followers of dumbed-downed politics, the so-called bling generation and another segment of the elite vanguard of which he is also a member -- who themselves despise intellectual types, especially from minorities, as part of their narrow black nationalism.

His rise from semi-education to political stardom is much admired by a generation that has been let down by our poorly performing education system, captivated by the world of glitz and egged on by corporate advertising, free gifts and the money culture.

The anti-intellectual current of Malema is a phenomenon deeply rooted in our consumerist and mass based culture.

Perhaps what the Sunday Times and many of us are missing is a real appreciation of what’s happening in the world of bling where wearing blinkers is actually chic.

It is a world that has been around for some time and has emerged in parallel with the advance and growth of the entertainment industry. It is an industry that extends from Hollywood to Bollywood to the hoisting of rugby and soccer trophies; where people live a plastic life of make believe.

Add to this the educational pauperisation of our youth and you have an interesting cocktail of popular culture in which infantilism and trivialising is celebrated.

This phenomena has also long been understood and studied in the US by different scholars and was noticeably in ascendance when Sarah Palin was John McCain’s running mate for the vice-presidency during the last US elections.

Palin has just been appointed by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News channel as a political pundit and commentator. You can bet Fox is laying the groundwork for Palin’s future presidential bid. Murdoch easily mixes business with politics.

Palin’s primary constituency and popularity is amongst the right wing Bible thumping white conservative electorate who cherish family values and have little time for cosmopolitan liberals occupying the White House these days. In a certain sense, these sentimentalities make her slightly different from Malema.

This emphasis on family values is at once to show how highbrow intellectuals, in giving priority to abstract secular values and ideas are at a distance from ordinary Americans, while those who espouse and strive to preserve good traditions and family values are part of and with the rest of the populace.

Palin displays great kinship with crowds. During her campaign trails, she would organize large family gatherings for her political speeches turning rallies into family picnics.

Her speeches are usually peppered with comments about the types of goods she shops for, the TV shows she likes and the foods she eats.

Malema, too, easily organizes rallies at universities, soccer pitches and stadiums drawing people into a new kind of popular and grassroots politics.

This non-intellectual pretence and being part of the ordinary has immense appeal and attraction. Their power lies in the way they serve as enablers for the general populace in a world long dominated by arrogant intellectual types who confer amongst themselves and who speak little to ordinary people in the street.

Their rise, in fact, comes precisely from the betrayal of the intellectual and cosmopolitan elite class, as it found itself absorbed into the constabulary of the ivory tower universities, the bureaucracy of government, the corporations and the professionalized civic organizations and think tanks.

The decline of cosmopolitan intellectual grassroots activity has left open a void and space for its counterculture -- a new political elite that flourishes on popular anti-intellectualism and narrow-mindedness while being suspicious of elite intellectuals as well as intellectual politicians.

It is with great disappointment that one receives a recently published book on the death of intellectualism in South Africa: ‘The Poverty of Ideas: South African Democracy and the Retreat of Intellectuals’ by William Gumede and Leslie Dikeni. 

It only reinforces the point made here that the intellectual class is out of touch with the real world -- this grassroots movement of bling.

Gumede and Dikeni’s book dedicates a great deal of time to the typology of intellectuals, i.e., who is and can’t be an intellectual -- an altogether conceited and vacuous exercise that says nothing new and misses the point.

The book also simplifies the issue as merely a conflict between the state and a critical intellectual class.

There is an element of sociological truth in this. We have seen how the Mbeki era was marred by conflict between certain vocal intellectuals who were critical of Mbeki’s HIV/AIDS policy and his economic policies. Mbeki himself intellectualised his presidency and was arguably distant and aloof from the general populace, unlike Zuma. 

However, the death of intellectualism will not come from the State’s suppression of a minority of intellectuals, but the growing distance of intellectuals themselves from the populace.

Most contemporary intellectuals have few, if any, mass popular base that they can be said to be speaking on behalf of. The transition from apartheid to post-apartheid has merely allowed intellectuals to imagine they are part of the grassroots. However, what they really carry is the mere phantom of a grassroots past -- one they may well have been part of, but are not truly immersed in today, giving them neither grassroots authority nor legitimacy.

One of the reasons that Zuma’s era will be marked by greater freedoms for these voices is precisely because our intellectual elites are not rooted amongst the masses despite their pretensions to be so. They pose no real threat.

The space of the populace is being occupied and carved out by our new populist politicians, especially the post-apartheid generation.

The day intellectuals mobilise ‘full on’ against the state with popular support will be the day that our populist politicians feel the fear. That day is not too soon though.

The problem with the Gumede and Dikeni book is its failure to recognise that anti-intellectual currents are not a result of political forces residing in state institutions only, but are also a consequence of undercurrents outside of the halls of power and policy wonks that threaten to swallow our politics with mindlessness.

The truth about democracy is that the tools of the mass media coupled with the general decline in reading and analysis has contributed to greater anti-intellectualism, conformity and servitude to new authority figures.

This is a far greater danger to our political culture than the silencing or censorship of the political establishment. A general anti-intellectual culture amongst the populace actually helps vindictive populist political culture.

Malema marks a new transition in our political culture where the art of politics has less to do with robust debate and conversation and more to do with pulling the pants off your opponent in public, so we can all have a good laugh at schoolyard antics. 

It is one of the reasons the media focused so much on Malema being booed at the SACP congress rather than the substance of the congress because we have just allowed ourselves to be part of this new game: laughing at seeing peoples pants being pulled down in public.

The anti-intellectual currents of Malema may have their own unique character that is a product of the effects of personality and rudimentary education, but they represent the present emerging political culture in South Africa.

It has a great deal of resonance with segments of the US populace immersed in their own form of bling or rather blinkeredness, which is easily comfortable with superstition, conspiracy, witch-hunts, deep prejudices, a crude form of nationalism and intolerance towards anything that does not conform to faith.

In the bling world reality is unreality. Fantasy itself is a welcome opiate. 

In the bling world, all that matters is a taste for style, music, noise about the lives of celebrities and political gossip. In the world of bling everyday is a party.

The bling world perpetuates a willing unwillingness to care about knowing. Politics is turned into amusement and many times into vindictive turns of play and mocking of opponents.

Intolerance and expressions of rabid bigotry against different races, sexual preferences, religion and anything different is part of turning politics into a game of making fun. 

This is a descent into triviality and infantilism. Sound bites and rhetoric have a certain efficiency because of their political expediency rather than patience for nuance and detail.

Liberal values are for the astonished intellectual elite still worrying about the decorum of culture and politics.

These trends are not be celebrated or lauded, as American scholar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in 1837, would like to have warned us, “The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.”

Be warned, we are there already.

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