A decade or so after apartheid was introduced in 1948, the American author Allen Drury wrote a book about South Africa called A Very Strange Society. If Drury were alive today (he died in 1998), he would not want to change the title.
Politicsweb has just published an article (by its liberally-minded editor, James Myburgh), "Has the DA just put a bullet through its brain?" The article was supported by chapter and verse. Yet no one heard the bullet. Icy silence.
No public reaction whatever - not from the DA, its leader Helen Zille, or its supporters; nor from the media; nor from the African National Congress. One from the small parliamentary party Freedom Front Plus.
What is the commotion about? Why the silence? It is the extraordinary decision taken by the DA to bend its liberal principles sufficiently to win over black voters. Only by edging closer to the ANC, it believes, can it recruit those black voters, and without them it will forever remain in opposition.
It knows (with its record of 70 years of progressivism-liberalism) that it cannot brazenly support race-based ANC policies, so it tells sceptics it will improve the more positive sides of those policies. In this way it can have its cake and eat it - signalling to black voters that it is sympathetic to the black cause, and yet not actually supporting ANC policies.
Several liberal analysts have pointed out that this is a schlenter. Major parts cannot be detached from the whole. The home base of those "improved" parts is the policy itself.