Great Expectations

But that was then. Since 2004, the ANC’s share of the vote has declined in every election, as the country’s economy has deteriorated and corruption has grown—to a point of the president stashing millions in mystery cash in his sofa. Today, South Africa has the world’s highest unemployment rate—32 percent—and, by some measures, the world’s highest level of income inequality. More than half the county’s population lives in poverty, and since 2012, its GDP has dropped back to 2005 levels, adjusted for inflation. The ANC government, meanwhile, struggles to provide electricity and running water. Last year, the average South African citizen spent almost five hours a day without power.

What went wrong?

Hussein Solomon is a senior professor of political studies and governance at the University of the Free State, in Bloemfontein, South Africa. As Solomon sees it, the ANC of 2024 is now far from Mandela’s party or the organization that spent decades fighting apartheid. Once known for its educated, professional leaders, the party has transformed into a cadre of lifelong partisans. Public impressions of the party have changed, too, with younger generations having little or no memory of black South Africans’ battle for freedom. The elections in May, Solomon says, revealed that voters are increasingly split along tribal and geographic lines—with long-ranging consequences for the country’s still-young democracy …

“Organized crime is widespread …. Business owners are extorted by criminals who say, You have to give me a 20 percent stake in the business for free, or else I will cause problems, like community protests. Farmers can’t ship their crops to the port because their trucks are torched on the highways. Private transportation companies physically attack each other’s vehicles.”

“Education is [a] key driver of inequality. The public education system has failed. Its outcomes are among the worst on the African continent and the developing world. Many students in sixth grade can’t read or understand basic texts. In an advanced economy like South Africa’s, those people will typically wind up unemployed. And it’s going to be difficult to fix the problem because the teachers union is one of the most powerful in the country, and it resists any changes to the system.”

“During the campaign, the ANC tried to resuscitate itself as the party of Mandela—the party that brought an end to apartheid. But today, they’re speaking to millions of voters often called the “Born Frees”—those who came into the world after 1994. These people don’t have any experience with the abuse and discrimination of apartheid, but they have experienced the failures of the ANC government. With them, the ANC’s We delivered you from apartheid rhetoric just hasn’t worked.”

Histories of Violence

Is this true?

America has a long record of political violence, at times deadly, going back to the country’s founding. In 1804, Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. secretary of the treasury, was killed in a duel with Aaron Burr, then Thomas Jefferson’s vice president. Between 1830 and 1860, historians have documented some 70 physical fights—including a caning—among members of Congress.

Four U.S. presidents have since been assassinated, and 13 others survived attempts—including Ronald Reagan in 1981. More recently, Gabby Giffords and Steve Scalise—a Democrat and a Republican, respectively—were shot while serving in Congress; and in 2022, Paul Pelosi, the husband of the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, was badly wounded in their home by an attacker wielding a hammer. In 2020, Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer was the target of a kidnapping plot, ultimately foiled by law enforcement.

From the 1960s through the ‘90s, much of the developed world went through an era of regular political violence. Between 1970 and 1998, the Red Army Faction—also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang—carried out a series of bombings, assassinations, and kidnappings in West Germany. In 1978, the Red Brigades killed Italy’s former prime minister Aldo Moro. And beginning in the late 1960s, groups like the Weather Underground undertook a program of political violence in the United States. Even in Canada, globally renowned as easygoing, the Front de Libération du Québec—a militant Québécois separatist group—kidnapped and killed a government minister in 1970. Over these same decades, thousands of British and Irish died in the conflict over the political status of Northern Ireland.

As recently as 2022, the former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was shot and killed, while Pakistan’s PM survived a shooting the same year—as Slovakia’s did this May. Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, was stabbed while campaigning for office in 2018.

So no, there’s no reason at the moment to think a terrible new era of political violence is upon America or the democratic world. We’ve been living through one for a generation.

What may be changing, however, isn’t the quantity of political violence but its quality. The leftist bombings of the 1960s and ‘70s, along with the jihadi operations of more recent decades, have receded. But it appears they’re being replaced by attacks rooted in domestic political polarization and ethnic identity. During the recent election campaign for the European Parliament, German police recorded at least half a dozen assaults, almost all involving supporters of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland. Across Europe, meanwhile, recent years have seen more and more Jews and immigrants—mostly Muslims—subject to brutality, neofascist and otherwise.

—Michael Bluhm

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