GARETH VAN ONSELEN: Is the best thing for the DA to lose support in 2019?
Just as the country needs certainty and a strong opposition, the DA is falling apart, becoming bumbling, incoherent and directionless
Would the best thing for the DA in the long term be to lose some support in the short term? It is a question worth interrogating, not merely because it is helpful to understand the possible advantages and disadvantages inherent to the DA losing support next year, but because it is an idea starting to take root in the thinking of some liberals, angry with and alienated from the DA. Here is the DA’s problem: it is being systematically hollowed out as an organisation. It has a leader who is, essentially, conviction-less; unable to formulate or communicate a compelling vision; driven by compromise and capitulation; and who is generally held hostage to a party machinery that has taken on a life and authority of its own as a result of the leadership vacuum at the top of the party. As a consequence, the DA has seen its intellectual capital eroded, its liberal credentials weakened, and its policy bedrock slowly crack and break apart. In turn, it has been plagued by confusion, internal messi...
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