MICHAEL MORRIS: Trump, Malema and why a free society doesn’t need leadership - Business Day

Michael Morris
One of the least appreciated virtues of free societies is that they are, by their nature and their sense of what their freedom means, leaderless.

If there’s one thing a free society never needs it’s being led. Leadership — for all the sentimentality invested in the word itself (not unlike that other victim of illiteracy, “passionate”) — is a not-very-useful quality to open, liveable, dynamic societies in their unceasing march towards an always evolving modernity.

Leaders are really only exceptional when they appreciate the limits of their provisional custodianship, understanding that at best they must be something like a ventriloquist in whose voice society hears its free self speak.

Against this measure I often wonder about how we see ourselves in the world, and see others, and how we risk misjudging both.

Reflecting recently on what he called the “odd connection” between the revelations of an unnamed witness at the Madlanga commission and the disgrace of the former Prince Andrew, Currency columnist Tim Cohen observed trenchantly that “[p]art of what makes justice so ephemeral is that it’s relational, not absolute”.

Justice, he said, “unlike power or wealth, doesn’t accumulate. It has to be remade, constantly, painfully, by fallible people trying to stand upright in the storm of their own interests”.

Freedom is like that too, which is what makes it at once vital and tricky. It is not something anyone can be led to; it can only be exercised, and severally.

Which is partly why I was intrigued by the recent news reports on Washington’s latest effort to halt “new destructive ideologies [that] have given safe harbour to human rights violations”.

The state department is issuing new rules to all US embassies and consulates involved in compiling its annual report on global human rights abuses, according to which any countries enforcing race or gender diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, among other things, will now risk being deemed by the Trump administration to be infringing human rights.

An unnamed senior official was quoted as saying that the new rules were “a tool to change the behaviour of governments”. A state department spokesperson, Tommy Pigott, said: “The Trump administration will not allow these human rights violations, such as the mutilation of children, laws that infringe on free speech, and racially discriminatory employment practices, to go unchecked.”

Noticing that one of the indicators of Washington’s human rights disquiet was, meaningfully enough, arrests or “official investigations or warnings for speech”, I was immediately taken back to May and the seven freighted words uttered by the avowed leader of the free world: “But why wouldn’t you arrest that man?”

The question, of course, was Donald Trump’s. It was put to President Cyril Ramaphosa during their bizarre White House media briefing. And it concerned opposition party leader Julius Malema’s leading a chant of Dubul’ ibhunu, a video of which prompted Trump to say: “That man said, ‘kill the white farmers’, and then he danced, and he’s dancing, dancing.”

The burden of Trump’s global fantasies is for US voters to shoulder. For us, if Ramaphosa acquitted himself at the White House in May in standing up for a free — and properly risky — politics, there’s no doubt of the scale of the challenge that we alone must face.

The leap that’s wanted is a leap of faith — by the electors, not the elected: we must choose leaders who will follow us, and willingly abandon the delusion that we are counting on them to lead us anywhere, or make the world a better place.

Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2025-12-01-michael-morris-trump-malema-and-why-a-free-society-doesnt-need-leadership/