The Reactionary Mask

Reactionary politics the world over is hardly known for its robust intellectual foundation. Whether Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro, the core of this politics is built upon “the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back,” as Corey Robin has noted. This is not to suggest that reactionaries are thoughtless. Rather that many of their justifications are contrived because they are driven simply by the desire to strike back at the “the emancipation of the lower orders.” For example, Edmond Burke’s objection to the French Revolution has less to do with its gratuitous violence and more to do with the overhaul of established deference and command. Indeed, conservatism claims that unequal relationships need to be preserved, as they are necessary for the advancement of civilization. Burke plays up the violence to create an affective charge in service of that agenda. Which brings us to David Bullard.

Bullard is a minor figure in the small world of the South African press, but he is best known for his self-fashioned public persona that embodies, to borrow a phrase from Arno Mayer, ‘the persistence of the old regime.’ In the spirit of that persona, a few days ago he tweeted:

I realise this is risky (but when have I ever cared?) but maybe we need a new word to replace the K word to describe the people (not all) that we described as K's. Help me out here.....This ain't racial; it's K specific.

Bullard's remarks are rather transparent. He wants to be malicious, to work with others to craft and deploy the language of domination to racially fix ‘others in their place’ as it were. To call back to Robin, it is an impulse around “liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders.” Bullard wants the liberty to demean black South Africans at will, with licence, and without consequence. Functionally he wanted to remind his audience that racial slurs are valuable descriptions and can be usefully employed to do symbolic violence to people deemed to be beneath him.

Predictably Bullard was fired by South Africa’s Institute of Race Relations yesterday, itself a conservative think tank in South Africa. This is not the first time Bullard courted scandal or has been dismissed due to racist practices; a similar event occurred in 2008 when he was a columnist with The  Sunday Times. Yet really this event is not only about Bullard. (A bigot without institutional power is of little real consequence.) It is about the IRR. Despite traveling the same political road – Bullard was, notwithstanding his history, a known entity contracted by them after all – the IRR effectively had little choice but put him into the wilderness. Bullard’s transgression broke their own tacit discursive norms. One is not supposed to say the quiet part out loud because doing so hampers achieving reactionary political objectives. The ‘mask must stay on’ at all costs to ensure that the reactionary agenda maintains a degree of respectability.

It is imperative that this respectability be denied to them.