Post-truth democracies

ANTHONY BUTLER: Popular instinct rises against elite judgment in post-truth world

First published in Business Day

January 23, 2026

US President Donald Trump speaks during the 56th annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 21 2026. (Picture: DENIS BALIBOUSE/Reuters)

When Donald Trump addressed world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday it felt like the much-heralded “post-truth” world had truly arrived.

The US president strung together a litany of demonstrably false claims, such as that the US “gave Greenland back” to Denmark after World War 2 (it had never become US territory) and that there are no wind farms in China (it generates more wind energy than any other country).

But none of this is entirely new. As the historian Sophia Rosenfeld has observed, democracy has always been about who decides what is true. Representative democracy embodies the promise that citizens, drawing on their lived experience and common sense, can collectively judge what is right and good.

Governing complex societies requires specialised knowledge, such as a mastery of statistics, law and economics, which must be generated and interpreted by experts. Citizens bring values and practical insight to democracy; elites filter information, weigh evidence and transform competing ideas and claims into feasible policies. Democracy does not capitulate to expertise, but it cannot dispense with it either.

For much of the history of Western democracy popular participation grew while states created professional public services, universities trained experts and ostensibly objective methods for justifying policy, such as statistical analysis, acquired the appearance of neutrality.

This settlement always carried the seeds of its own destruction. Whenever knowledge becomes purely technical and self-referential the ability to participate in debate narrows and decisions are taken without popular engagement.

In populist counterreactions, citizens reject the monopolisation of truth by elites and reclaim a place for common sense and ordinary judgment. This can widen participation and break the spell of elite and expert complacency, but it can easily slide into contempt for knowledge, the treatment of evidence as manipulation and the castigation of experts and expertise.

The contemporary “post-truth” moment in the West is therefore not an unprecedented collapse of reason but rather the breakdown of a long-standing and unstable balance. Today’s struggle over what Rosenfeld calls “epistemic authority” — who decides what counts as fact — is worsened by social media’s circulation of information, stripped of context, while algorithms reward novelty, outrage and tribal loyalty.

All democracies, not just Western ones, are vulnerable to “epistemic breakdown”: distrust of institutions, populist suspicion of experts and competing truth claims. Even in the Thembu tribal meetings of Nelson Mandela’s youth, where “all men were to be heard and a decision was taken together as a people”, there was an elite side to the epistemic bargain. The regent would sum up what had been said and form a “consensus” among the diverse opinions. Democracy survives only if truth is filtered, stabilised and institutionalised.

Elites and experts have to accept that knowledge without legitimacy will cause a backlash. Citizens must recognise that popular common sense without evidence and expertise invites manipulation. Democracy fails when either becomes predominant; it survives only when a precarious balance between them is maintained.

The greatest challenge for all democracies — and perhaps especially for newer democracies in middle-income countries such as South Africa — is that the factors that disrupt the uneasy balance between elite judgment and popular instinct are not easy to control or change.

We can in principle regulate social media and contain the potential threats posed by fresh technological developments such as AI. But declining trust in institutions, resentment of elites and the circulation of conspiracies all feed on deeper social divisions, including economic inequality and exclusion from meaningful citizenship.

When material divides widen, institutions lose credibility and become deeply detached from expert knowledge. When citizens inhabit dramatically different material worlds, it becomes impossible to sustain a shared account of reality and expertise starts to look like privilege hiding behind a different name.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

November 21, 2025

Ramaphosa is likely to see out his second full term as state president

ANTHONY BUTLER: Enemies dream, but Ramaphosa is enjoying his presidential role

Few believe his deputy, Paul Mashatile, would improve the ANC’s dire electoral prospects

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

November 21, 2025

Cyril Ramaphosa is unlikely to be forced from office because neither the ANC nor parliament has the will or unity to remove him, and he has multiple avenues to stay in power even if party dynamics shift, says the writer. (Thapelo Morebudi)

Recent weeks have brought another outbreak of wishful thinking among President Cyril Ramaphosa’s enemies. Symptoms include a recurrent and feverish dream in which he is on the verge of resigning, perhaps to spend more time with his cattle. There is also a delirious fantasy that the ANC’s national executive committee will summon the collective will to oust him from office.

The president will survive until the December 2027 elective conference of the ANC, the dreamers usually concede. But they insist he will be ejected from office soon afterwards, perhaps as part of a millenarian frenzy that propels deputy president Paul Mashatile into the Union Buildings.

The sad end to the terms of Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma is typically brought forward as evidence. Both were forced to resign under the threat of a vote of no confidence in the National Assembly.

Is Ramaphosa really destined for a similar exit? There is no indication that he is willing to step down and he seems to be rather enjoying himself. Mbeki and Zuma have taught us that politicians with the drive to reach the highest office will not easily relinquish power.

Few ANC leaders are convinced that Mashatile would be an effective state president. Fewer still believe he would improve the party’s dire electoral prospects. If he becomes ANC president it will be due to his mastery of internal ANC machinations alone.

The former liberation movement no longer has a majority in the National Assembly and this is the only body that can remove a president through a vote of no confidence. Such a vote would almost certainly be held by secret ballot.

In a landmark 2017 case the Constitutional Court held that the speaker has discretion. The present speaker — for a variety of reasons — will not concede to pressure for an open vote. Who can be confident that a majority of MPs would vote for Ramaphosa’s defenestration in a secret ballot, given that so few have undergone a genuine Pauline conversion?

The ANC would be threatened with a fresh and possibly existential crisis, and Ramaphosa could exercise other options. Mbeki and his cronies created the Congress of the People to pressure the faction that ousted him. Zuma formed the MK party in the same spirit.

While Ramaphosa is unlikely to create a new party, it is quite common for presidents to switch parties — or abandon party affiliation altogether — to protect the “broader national interest” (in other words, their own continuation in office).

Take Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president in 2019-22. He ditched the social democrats, with whom he was long associated, and was elected with the Social Liberal Party. After clashes with the party leadership he left while still president and governed without a party for more than two years, only later joining the Liberal Party.

Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, from whom Ramaphosa may have acquired his fondness for Ankole cattle and associated sofa beds, originally came to office through the National Resistance Movement, which was not a party at all until it suited Museveni for it to become one.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s leader, was part of the Islamist Welfare Party and then the Virtue Party, both later banned, before co-founding the Justice & Development Party in 2001, only to remain in power for two decades as prime minister and then president.

The fact that presidents can remain in office by switching parties, creating new parties to retain or consolidate power, or rising above all party affiliations does not mean they will do so. However, such a possibility introduces further uncertainty into the calculations of those who might want to oust them.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

October 24, 2025

Elections no longer secure democracy

ANTHONY BUTLER: Trivial elections and decline of electoral democracy

First published in Business Day

October 24, 2025

A voter holds a ballot paper during the country's general election at Thyolo District, south of Blantyre, Malawi, September 16, 2025. REUTERS/Stringer — A voter holds a ballot paper during the country’s general election at Thyolo District, south of Blantyre, Malawi, September 16, 2025. REUTERS/Stringer

The daily news from Donald Trump’s America has alerted people worldwide to the fragility of democratic regimes. The truth is that global democracy was already in sharp retreat.

The democratic ideal, celebrated in 1994 as SA transitioned to freedom, assumed a simple equation: prosperity begets democracy, and elections define democracy.

Yet as we survey the political landscape of 2025 the pillars that supported such optimism are crumbling. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project reveals a dire trend: 72% of the world’s population now live in autocracies, the highest number since 1978.

Countries such as China have become prosperous while remaining steadfastly autocratic, destroying the old confidence that development causes democratisation.

Elections occur more than before, but fewer of them are meaningful. Countries with huge populations such Indonesia and India have slipped into “electoral authoritarianism”: they hold elections, but incumbents rig the outcomes not by simple ballot box stuffing but rather by media capture and censorship, undermining election management bodies, weaponising tax and prosecuting authorities, repressing or banning civil society organisations and using social media to amplify manufactured polarisation.

Elections are historically recent devices that are increasingly unable to deliver government in the interests of the governed.

Ancient Athens, credited in the West as the birthplace of “rule by the people”, deliberately avoided elections for almost all roles, relying instead on random selection, which embodied equality and averted domination by entrenched elites.

Similarly, former president Nelson Mandela described the Thembu tribal meetings of his youth as “democracy in its purest form”, characterised by deliberation and consensus, where “majority rule was a foreign notion” and all men (if not women) were heard. These earlier systems focused on direct participation in the interest of the governed, not the selection of rulers through the ballot box.

When modern electoral systems did emerge they were driven by the impossibility of direct democracy in large societies. As the franchise expanded from wealthy males to the poor, political elites created safeguards to protect their property from redistribution: indirect elections, judicial review by conservative constitutional courts, independent central banks, and other instruments to frustrate popular agency.

We are seeing the rise of “democracy with Chinese characteristics” as a substitute for today’s shambolic but autonomous collective action. Under this model the state uses pervasive surveillance and data analytics to identify social grievances in real time, responding to them to maintain legitimacy without the cost and noise of democratic protest and campaigning.

While emerging AI technologies initially promised better governance, they are better still at spreading disinformation, manufacturing deepfakes and undermining trust in institutions. These technologies move faster than our capacity to regulate them. AI-powered anticipatory governance could soon harness big data and predictive analytics to prevent crises before they emerge, which risks bypassing public debate entirely.

A fightback for electoral democracy may be a long shot, but it is conceivable. Recent U-turns in countries such as Brazil and Poland demonstrate that autocratisation can be reversed. Key to these successes has been countering orchestrated disinformation, exposing corruption linked to strongman leaders and restoring the institutional infrastructure for meaningful elections.

The African continent faces unprecedented demographic growth alongside an unfolding climate change-induced collapse of livelihoods, which together will bring widespread, poorly planned urbanisation and politically destabilising population movements across borders.

SA is meanwhile seeing a sharp drop in electoral participation, with just four out of every 10 of the eligible voting age population participating in last year’s national elections.

It is a cruel fact that democracy is not an institution granted, but rather requires a constant state of defence and active participation if it is not to be lost just a few decades after it has been found.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

August 29, 2025

Trump may just be the beginning

ANTHONY BUTLER: Maintaining US democracy amid threat of strongman rule

Rise of populism will induce other presidential candidates to embrace authoritarian aims

29 August 2025

First published in Business Day

South Africans like to complain about the feebleness of their president and his seeming inability to get anything done. Yet citizens of the world’s most advanced banana republic have a far worse problem: a leader running roughshod over democratic institutions.

It is tempting to attribute this crisis to the personality of Donald Trump, to sinister corporate interests linked to the Republican Party, or to the vagaries of the historical moment. But a new book by William Howell and Terry Moe, Trajectory of Power, shows that the underlying drivers of strongman rule in the US will not abate at the end of Trump’s presidential term.

The US constitution envisages a separation of powers between three branches of government, and a federal system that disperses agency. For much of the 20th century Republican and Democratic presidents alike pursued greater unilateral power. They shared a common motivation to establish legacies as great leaders and to achieve significant accomplishments, which led all presidents to embrace unilateral options to circumvent the normal policy process.

A factor enabling this expansion was the rise of the “administrative state”, which has provided presidents with vast resources, expertise and personnel to deploy. When public support for presidential activism increased, the Congress and courts delegated substantial discretion, leaving presidents opportunities for unilateral action — executive orders, memoranda and national security directives, but also discretion embedded in legal statutes and the appointment of activist agency leaders to enact change through rule making.

Leaders of both parties, meanwhile, expanded the “institutional presidency”, creating a centralised and politicised White House whose reach was extended by the Office of Management & Budget and the Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs.

Where Republicans and Democrats have differed has been over fundamental objectives. Democrats have sought to regulate business, expand rights and mitigate inequality, poverty and discrimination, generally supporting the administrative state and viewing its agencies as partners in these “liberal” missions.

In contrast, Republican presidents have staunchly opposed much of the administrative state, seeing it as “progressive overreach”. From Ronald Reagan onward they have tried to control, retrench and generally sabotage federal agencies. This approach has been influenced by the unitary executive theory, a Republican legal framework that claims exclusive presidential authority over the entire executive branch, allowing presidents to ignore statutory constraints and aggressively reshape or cut administrative and regulatory interventions.

To maintain democracy, Howell and Moe argue, four steps need to be taken. First, the existential threat posed by the strongman presidency must no longer be denied. A demagogue with authoritarian aspirations really can use the vast unilateral powers vested in the presidency to subvert the basic features of democratic governance. The rise of populism and its support for strongman leadership is a continuing force that will induce other presidential candidates to embrace authoritarian aims.

Second, the unitary executive theory must be countered because it makes a mockery of the separation of powers, allows presidents to ignore statutory constraints, and encourages them to interpret the constitutionality of statutes themselves. Clear legal boundaries for executive authority must be established and upheld by the courts — a consideration that applies in other countries to “revolutionary” doctrines that purportedly place parties above the state.

Third, democracy dies when elites brazenly flout democratic norms, practices and rules. Such arrogance should never be accepted, even on the grounds that the leader is responding to crisis or making government more effective.

Finally, the administrative state is foundational for a healthy democracy, for delivering services, and for solving any society’s problems. Attacks on the rule of law and the impersonal exercise of power by the state are direct threats to democracy.

The grinding work of rebuilding and protecting impersonal state institutions remains a fundamental tenet of benevolent national leadership.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

April 25, 2025

Keep calm amid the dramas of coalition politics

Theatrics are par for the course in coalition politics

To maintain individual identities, coalition partners often stage public tiffs, even when compromises are being worked out behind the scenes

First published in BDLive

25 April 2025

To prevent future outbreaks of mass hysteria about the supposed demise of the government of national unity (GNU), citizens must embrace the inevitable theatricality of coalition politics.

Coalitions bring together parties with differing ideologies, constituencies and ambitions. To maintain their individual identities they often stage public disagreements, even when compromises are being worked out behind the scenes. It is a way of telling their base they haven’t sold out.

In coalitions, political actors often rely on symbolism and spectacle to assert leverage. Dramatic resignations, open letters or last-minute ultimatums are tactics meant to sway public opinion or pressure coalition partners. The news media spotlight moments of conflict, impassioned speechifying or bizarre alliances, while leadership rivalries, personal ambitions and factional dynamics get aired in public.

Ask the citizens of countries around the world who have lived for decades with coalition politics. In 1997, India’s United Front coalition government collapsed when the Congress Party withdrew support after an assassination scandal. Public attention focused on claims that a former coalition prime minister was obsessed with cows, spending more time at dairy events than in parliament. One Congress leader complained of government “run by cows, for cows, and only for cows”, while others described the coalition as the “bovine bloc”.

When Evo Morales became Bolivia’s president in 2006 he headed a broad coalition embracing leftist intellectuals, indigenous leaders, trade unionists and coca growers. Vice-president Álvaro García Linera, a former guerrilla and mathematician, described coalition meetings as “a zoo with llamas, jaguars and parrots all trying to direct traffic”. Internal disputes played out publicly on state television, sometimes ending in tears.

Meanwhile, after a disputed 2007 election violence had erupted across Kenya. A power-sharing deal was struck between president Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga to restore stability. Odinga accepted the nonexecutive post of prime minister, joking that “I have taken half a loaf instead of going hungry”. The cabinet ballooned to 94 ministers and assistant ministers, one of whom, according to local wags, ran the “ministry of watching the other ministers”. Constant public bickering between Kibaki and Odinga made every cabinet meeting feel like a deranged family reunion.

In the world’s second-most advanced banana republic, the UK, the Liberal Democrats entered into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010, after promising repeatedly not to raise university tuition fees. As Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg toured the country making this pledge, his coalition negotiating team — which included the DA’s current coalition guru, Ryan Coetzee — were making contingency plans to abandon it. By the end of the year, fees had tripled. Clegg later released an apology, quickly rehashed in a spoof autotuned remix entitled “I’m sorry”, that charted on iTunes.

In Romania, a famous “coalition of the commode” exploded in 2021. Led by the National Liberal Party, it promised stability and good governance. Amid fallout from an infrastructure scandal, however, the education minister was accused of spending €350,000 renovating his ministry’s bathrooms, importing custom-made Italian tiles and a jacuzzi. This resulted in parties accusing each other of “bathtub populism” and “toilet-seat corruption”.

Coalition partners prepare for the next election from the moment the last one ends. They cannot help using theatrics to distance themselves from unpopular decisions or to take credit for popular ones, even if both were agreed upon collectively.

Theatricality helps parties signal their values, bargain for influence and manage diverse constituencies, all the while navigating the fragile architecture of shared governance.