All politics is driven by the struggle for recognition – of needs, rights, dignity and identity. Liberal democracy is simply a set of political institutions designed to achieve that. Twenty-five years ago, it seemed unassailable.

In 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell and Soviet-bloc countries convulsed, the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “end of history”. Humanity, he wrote, had reached the peak of its ideological evolution. Liberal democracy had been universalised as the “final form of human government”.

Yet, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of liberalism’s immortality were greatly exaggerated.

Since the turn of twenty-first century, there has been a backlash against liberal democracy from both ends of the political spectrum. On the left, it drove Occupy Wall Street activists who protested against inequality in 2011. Their cause has now morphed into a worldwide Occupy movement, fronted by hashtagging millennials. On the right, it mobilised Donald Trump’s base. Followers were left high-and-dry by a subprime crisis in 2008, sparking the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The last time capitalism faltered on such a scale, fascism flourished.

In South Africa, our transition to non-racial democracy in the 1990s seemed to prove Fukuyama’s thesis. It was expedited by the collapse of communism. And it showed the triumph of liberal democracy over rival racial nationalisms. This was the historical context in which our constitutional settlement was forged.

Now, the Constitution has become the object of resentment and wrath. It is cast as an “elite pact”; the product of Nelson Mandela having sold out to “white monopoly capital” on the transfer of land and wealth. It is the foundation stone of (continued) post-apartheid white privilege and black pain. This anti-constitutional ire is stoked by racial demagogues promising economic freedom under a socialist banner and portending, as Julius Malema did this week, a future “slaughter” of whites.

These authoritarian populists don the robes of constitutionalism in order to style themselves as progressives. But they will shed (and shred) their shawls in time to come, tossing them on a pyre whose leaping flames have assumed an almost metaphysical significance in recent protests. At some point, if it has not happened already, the Constitution will join various “colonial” artworks and books on the bonfire in a ritualised revolutionary purge.

Yet, the poorest South Africans – trodden down by the ANC government’s job-stifling policies and its slothfulness in progressively realising the Constitution’s Bill of Rights – are not at the forefront of Fallism. As with many insurrectionary movements, the middle class is in the vanguard.

There is clearly a complex set of class (and psychological) dynamics at play in the student movement, some of which manifest themselves in a virulent strain of racial identity politics. Among comparatively advantaged black students who have attended institutions that they believe reproduce “whiteness” (Model C or private schools), there seems to be a consuming need and perfectionist quest to affirm an existentially pure brand of “blackness”. They must define blackness, embody blackness and police blackness on behalf of other blacks. In its pathological intensity, it as an impulse almost akin to survivors’ guilt.

Needless to say, “whiteness” functions as the inassimilable other in this process. In fact, whiteness – ostensibly a sociohistorical construct, but spoken about by student rhetoricians as if it were a contaminated essence –can neither be assimilated, nor, more importantly, can it be assimilated to.

Whiteness, on this reading, is liberal democracy. The Constitution – not in spite of, but because of, its universalist aspirations – is an artefact of whiteness. This is the kind of volkisch thinking that animated the Romantic nationalism of the nineteenth century and produced the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century.

There is nothing historically unusual about the deferred anger that gives rise to chauvinist politics. It took twenty to thirty years for a majority of Afrikaners to question the Treaty of Vereeniging, the Act of Union, and the postwar consensus around “conciliation” that they engendered. By the 1930s and ‘40s, the broad and inclusive Anglo-Afrikaner South Africanism championed by Louis Botha and Jan Smuts was steadily giving way to a narrower ethnic nationalism.

In all such epochal shifts lie the seeds of totalitarianism.

In her brilliant study, On Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt draws on Alexis de Tocqueville’s insights into the French Revolution of 1789 to explain the rise of anti-Semitism in the modern era.

According to Tocqueville, on the eve of the revolution, the French aristocracy was loathed more than it ever had been before, precisely because it had suffered a rapid loss of political power without any concomitant decline in its economic fortunes.

Similarly, Arendt deduced, “wealth without visible function” lay at the root of modern Jew-hatred. Anti-Semitism reached its climax in Nazi Germany when Jews had lost their public functions and were left with only their wealth.

It would be alarmist to suggest that we have reached the totalitarian tipping point in South Africa. But our eyes should be open. In the Fallist movement, we see a preoccupation with epistemic cleansing: the purification of systems of knowledge in the guise of “decolonisation”. This bears all the hallmarks of Maoism and the Cultural Revolution, with their focus on re-education and public disavowals of ideological thought-crimes.

Unlike most totalitarian ideologies, Fallism has no fixed doctrine (it is a movable feast of insourcing, free higher education, decolonisation and African socialism), no fixed leadership, and no clear utopian vision. If fact, Fallism is nothing if not nihilistic. In many ways, this combination of amorphousness and dystopianism makes Fallism potentially even more tyrannical.

In South Africa, the only real bulwark against tyranny is the Constitution. And so the time has come to breathe new life into our founding compact.

Michael Cardo is a Democratic Alliance Member of Parliament. This article first appeared in the Sunday Times.