Trapped in an accelerating downward spiral of us/them polarization, it can feel as if there is no way out. In democracies, when things go badly, the prospect of an upcoming election ordinarily can be a source of hope. However, as we learn from country after country, when those who fuel polarization also control the levers of state power, the next election can become empty, trumped by an emerging competitive authoritarian reality.

But experience elsewhere shows that the descent into authoritarianism can be reversed—as in the example of South Africa. In 1948, many centuries of white minority rule culminated in the accession to power of an explicitly ethno-nationalist political party. By the mid-1980s, the country seemed to be hurtling towards a devastating race war. Yet, within a few years, the world witnessed its “miracle” transition to constitutional democracy. A quarter century later, the country became entwined in a very different doom loop—a predatory president increasingly was wielding an ethno-populist political discourse as a weapon for subverting checks and balances, and accelerating state capture. But, again, the country was able to step back from the brink.

While on the surface the two episodes are very different from each other, they share some similar underlying patterns. Leadership mattered in both—indeed South Africa’s transition from apartheid often is depicted as a near-unique leadership-driven miracle. But in both episodes, the ground for change was prepared less by leadership than by the interplay between civic activism on the one hand and, on the other, the willingness of a subset of social and economic elites to look unflinchingly at the abyss opening up ahead. Exploring this interplay offers useful insights into the urgent question of how to break the spell of polarization in the United States.

Resistance to apartheid set the first South African episode in motion. As of the late 1960s, the country’s black majority had been cowed into subservience. Nelson Mandela and others who had campaigned against apartheid in the 1950s and early 1960s were in jail. The African National Congress had been forced into a seemingly ineffectual exile. But a 1976 uprising in the township of Soweto, led by high school students in defiance of their parents’ caution, marked the beginning of a new phase.

By the early 1980s, civil society, trade unions, and religious organizations had coalesced around a mass movement, the United Democratic Front (UDF)—and international clamor against apartheid had evolved from scattered activist initiatives into a broad-based global campaign for corporate divestment from South Africa. Even so, it was not resistance alone but the way in which elites engaged in response that led to apartheid’s demise.

In polarizing environments, elites can respond in radically different ways. One response deepens polarization, hardens lines of opposition, and accelerates the downward spiral. The demise of Weimar Germany is a notorious ex…

为什么值得关注

能改变理解方式，而不只是重复常识；符合当前抓取需求；它提供了新的理解或解释，而不只是表面观点

来源：reddit，领域：news，保留分：0.65