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Radical Middle | 147<br />
magazine had stolen precisely the leadership part – lucratively,<br />
too, though a tad pompously as well. I learned that in the<br />
business world life is perceived as a contest, where if you’re not<br />
beating other people other people are beating you. In my view<br />
plain getting-along is fine, better than either beating or being<br />
beaten. Frontline had been front for a long innings, even if not<br />
the highest of scores. Now I was the poor man’s Leadership,<br />
the poor man’s Weekly Mail, and the poor man’s Leon Louw,<br />
suddenly and all in one. It was disorienting.<br />
With the Louws I shared two things. We sought to make the<br />
place better instead of wallowing in how it got to be bad, and<br />
we worked on the theme of power belonging with frail flawed<br />
fallible mortals, us, the people with a small ‘p’.<br />
It astonishes me that privileged people rage at the idea of less<br />
privileged people having an equal vote. They insist it means the<br />
unwashed mass “dragging us down”. That’s a gross mistake, as<br />
De Tocqueville made clear with his thesis on democracy giving<br />
people a “lofty view of themselves and their nation”. That was<br />
radical in 1835, but a century and a half later it should have<br />
worn in. No, flat-earthers dominate the dinner-tables, forever<br />
pronouncing that when the vote “is given” to those who haven’t<br />
“earned” it you get “mob rule”.<br />
Voters never in fact bring mob rule to the ballot box, not<br />
even in the rawest democracy. But the fuller the democracy<br />
is, the more remote the mob. Support for an extreme drives<br />
counter-support to the other extreme and disrupts the peace of<br />
the person on the bus, so majorities vote moderately. You don’t<br />
ask them to, let alone “educate” them to; just be sure that the<br />
vote is re-usable and has visible effects.<br />
On that, the Louws and I are in harmony. But not much<br />
further. I saw the Switzerland model as an artificial escapehatch,<br />
and I’d say so when asked. frances and Leon’s spirit<br />
of love and old friendship curdled a bit at times, and debates<br />
could become snippy. Our best debate, perversely, was in an<br />
american magazine which said this was part of the “frenetic<br />
search for solutions currently under way in South africa”. Ha.
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