One can mourn the disappearance of, even the forgetting of UDF, and how hard it is the constitute a meaningful and competent opposition. In all sorts of situations, I am wondering where a strong regard for competence went. It seems never listed among questions in political polling. It’s a disappeared village, like the UDF, but maybe I’m tossing together the wrong fruits.
I really think the way the exiles pushed aside the UDF/Soweto generation is pretty important here. And I also think that's a story that has some parallels and echoes in the history of African nationalism generally--the overvaluation of educational credentials obtained elsewhere, the undervaluation of local experience and knowledge, the suppression of pluralism in favor of claims of unity by leaders who had thin social ties with their own populations, and the relentless use of 'party discipline' as a way to forestall or suppress active debates within nationalist parties or between those parties and other organizations. But the South African case can be read narrowly in meritocratic terms: the UDF generation knew things the exiles did not and they weren't called upon for that expertise in a way that informed the everyday work of governance to nearly the extent that they should have been.
Exactly, as a general understanding. So much research could be done within all these points to understand how this happens across so many sectors. There are parallels in the forgetting of the production and trading capacities of people before the colonial period outlawing or sidelining so much capacity, so much expertise. So much made to disappear.
I think your recent excavation of layers of knowledge that *qualified* as knowledge production within the archival/written register, and parallel work by Derek Peterson and many other scholars, shows how long this history is. And I think it bears comparison with states that were able to reproduce longer histories of administrative norms/deep cultural histories of 'competency' in their transitions out of postcolonialism because the substrate of their understanding of competency was less perturbed by a kind of dredging process.
I have some hesitation about this: "You didn’t have to make the state even bigger in order to create an overnight middle-class, you just had to shuffle out a certain number of Afrikaners via retirement or emigration. And as you did, you had a form of state capture already underway well before 2009 and a constituency that would avidly look to expand state capture even further and support leaders who provided those opportunities. Which in turn meant that managerial competency in key areas was not at all valued or selected for, and that the government’s more ambitious goals had to funnel through administrative bottlenecks where there were people positioned from an early moment to divert funds to themselves and to help create networks of support for tenderpreneurs and so on..."
The hesitation is that it seems just a little too close to neoconservative critiques from the 1960s to the 1990s of the governance of America's dense "chocolate cities". That does not mean that it is (or was) **totally** wrong, but...
I think if you expand this somewhat, the critique of American cities in that era should have been seen (but often wasn't seen by neocons) as a continuation of the critique of patronage and municipal corruption back into the 19th Century in the US. Which, if they'd seen it expansively, might have attuned them to forms of state capture in the US in many places besides Atlanta, Washington DC, etc.--say for example many white-majority counties in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, etc., or in nationwide public-private collaborations like the prison industrial complex. It's not specifically a question of the size of the state, either, which was the neocon obsession; it's a question of whether the government is accountable to its citizens and to basic standards of performance, and whether the state is transparent to overlaying sovereignties, to civil society as a whole, and to some form of law enforcement. If neocons had been remotely consistent about standards of probity, performance, transparency and outcomes and less hung up on the assumption that the state *can't* achieve those standards, they would have been on to something.
On some level, I think it's because rulers or elites or even just mid-level administrators honestly believe in what they're doing and believe that what they are doing is consistent with some kind of values, ethics, or mission. It's cultural, but not arbitrarily so, in the sense that that a civil service or political leadership that can be shamed accepts the validity of some kind of real, material evidence of its failure or success and has some kind of real practice that it associates with being successful in these terms. A shameless nation-state no longer cares whether the lights are on or not, and is happy to declare that they are regardless of whether that's true. There are some state governments within the US that are pretty close to that line right now, I think.
Honestly believing that what you do matters has a cost. These is probably also a piece about taking what people think about you seriously. The cost can be as high as suicide.
So, what social circumstances, including upbringing, make experiencing that cost worth it rather than just stonewalling and saying you didn't do anything wrong?
You can think about this externally or internally; politically/legally/institutionally or culturally/psychologically. Meaning, on one hand, there are mistakes where there is some kind of external structural consequence that makes people who make those mistakes resign or assume responsibility, perhaps sometimes cynically to try and minimize legal consequences or do some reputation management. Those systems take maintenance and they tend to be operated because there are strong popular demands for accountability or there are legal systems which push their extension into every domain. Psychologically/culturally because people have internalized some sense of values and mission and are truly ashamed when they recognize they have failed to live up to those values. (That was the case of the minister in Zimbabwe, I think: he actually believed in the version of the ruling party that was seeking revolutionary change.)
I think we very recently had a federal administration that blew all the way through that line. The second Bush Administration had notable failures, foreign and domestic, but they pretty clearly understood that they'd screwed up. The recovery from Hurricane Katrina was woefully mismanaged, but you didn't have Bush declaring that, actually, they did the best cleanup job ever. Fast forward a decade and a half, and you had "we did the best job ever dealing with Covid, but also it was the Jews and Dr. Fauci's fault." Seems not very distinguishable.
One can mourn the disappearance of, even the forgetting of UDF, and how hard it is the constitute a meaningful and competent opposition. In all sorts of situations, I am wondering where a strong regard for competence went. It seems never listed among questions in political polling. It’s a disappeared village, like the UDF, but maybe I’m tossing together the wrong fruits.
I really think the way the exiles pushed aside the UDF/Soweto generation is pretty important here. And I also think that's a story that has some parallels and echoes in the history of African nationalism generally--the overvaluation of educational credentials obtained elsewhere, the undervaluation of local experience and knowledge, the suppression of pluralism in favor of claims of unity by leaders who had thin social ties with their own populations, and the relentless use of 'party discipline' as a way to forestall or suppress active debates within nationalist parties or between those parties and other organizations. But the South African case can be read narrowly in meritocratic terms: the UDF generation knew things the exiles did not and they weren't called upon for that expertise in a way that informed the everyday work of governance to nearly the extent that they should have been.
Exactly, as a general understanding. So much research could be done within all these points to understand how this happens across so many sectors. There are parallels in the forgetting of the production and trading capacities of people before the colonial period outlawing or sidelining so much capacity, so much expertise. So much made to disappear.
I think your recent excavation of layers of knowledge that *qualified* as knowledge production within the archival/written register, and parallel work by Derek Peterson and many other scholars, shows how long this history is. And I think it bears comparison with states that were able to reproduce longer histories of administrative norms/deep cultural histories of 'competency' in their transitions out of postcolonialism because the substrate of their understanding of competency was less perturbed by a kind of dredging process.
I have some hesitation about this: "You didn’t have to make the state even bigger in order to create an overnight middle-class, you just had to shuffle out a certain number of Afrikaners via retirement or emigration. And as you did, you had a form of state capture already underway well before 2009 and a constituency that would avidly look to expand state capture even further and support leaders who provided those opportunities. Which in turn meant that managerial competency in key areas was not at all valued or selected for, and that the government’s more ambitious goals had to funnel through administrative bottlenecks where there were people positioned from an early moment to divert funds to themselves and to help create networks of support for tenderpreneurs and so on..."
The hesitation is that it seems just a little too close to neoconservative critiques from the 1960s to the 1990s of the governance of America's dense "chocolate cities". That does not mean that it is (or was) **totally** wrong, but...
Yours, Brad DeLong
I think if you expand this somewhat, the critique of American cities in that era should have been seen (but often wasn't seen by neocons) as a continuation of the critique of patronage and municipal corruption back into the 19th Century in the US. Which, if they'd seen it expansively, might have attuned them to forms of state capture in the US in many places besides Atlanta, Washington DC, etc.--say for example many white-majority counties in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, etc., or in nationwide public-private collaborations like the prison industrial complex. It's not specifically a question of the size of the state, either, which was the neocon obsession; it's a question of whether the government is accountable to its citizens and to basic standards of performance, and whether the state is transparent to overlaying sovereignties, to civil society as a whole, and to some form of law enforcement. If neocons had been remotely consistent about standards of probity, performance, transparency and outcomes and less hung up on the assumption that the state *can't* achieve those standards, they would have been on to something.
Yes. Well put...
You're pointing at a large question. What makes being shameable worth it to people?
On some level, I think it's because rulers or elites or even just mid-level administrators honestly believe in what they're doing and believe that what they are doing is consistent with some kind of values, ethics, or mission. It's cultural, but not arbitrarily so, in the sense that that a civil service or political leadership that can be shamed accepts the validity of some kind of real, material evidence of its failure or success and has some kind of real practice that it associates with being successful in these terms. A shameless nation-state no longer cares whether the lights are on or not, and is happy to declare that they are regardless of whether that's true. There are some state governments within the US that are pretty close to that line right now, I think.
Honestly believing that what you do matters has a cost. These is probably also a piece about taking what people think about you seriously. The cost can be as high as suicide.
So, what social circumstances, including upbringing, make experiencing that cost worth it rather than just stonewalling and saying you didn't do anything wrong?
You can think about this externally or internally; politically/legally/institutionally or culturally/psychologically. Meaning, on one hand, there are mistakes where there is some kind of external structural consequence that makes people who make those mistakes resign or assume responsibility, perhaps sometimes cynically to try and minimize legal consequences or do some reputation management. Those systems take maintenance and they tend to be operated because there are strong popular demands for accountability or there are legal systems which push their extension into every domain. Psychologically/culturally because people have internalized some sense of values and mission and are truly ashamed when they recognize they have failed to live up to those values. (That was the case of the minister in Zimbabwe, I think: he actually believed in the version of the ruling party that was seeking revolutionary change.)
I think we very recently had a federal administration that blew all the way through that line. The second Bush Administration had notable failures, foreign and domestic, but they pretty clearly understood that they'd screwed up. The recovery from Hurricane Katrina was woefully mismanaged, but you didn't have Bush declaring that, actually, they did the best cleanup job ever. Fast forward a decade and a half, and you had "we did the best job ever dealing with Covid, but also it was the Jews and Dr. Fauci's fault." Seems not very distinguishable.