The chapter answers the question ‘Why has the rule of law become so fragile?’ as set up by the 2023 Nine Dots Prize competition. It shows how the liberal narrative of the rule of law is built on repressing the political elements of the legal system. Using Jungian psychoanalysis to analyse the crises of the rule of law, the author shows that the more we repress democratic politics from the legal system, the more the politics will strike back as ‘shadow’ in a distorted, anti-democratic form. The chapter also deepens the analysis of how DWE works politically with anger, preventing it from turning into ‘free-floating rage’ that can be exploited by authoritarian populism. It introduces the notion of ‘critical feeling’ to complement ‘critical thinking’ in contemporary academia.

By the 2010s, the Solidarity Movement boasted over 300,000 members and claimed to represent, by extension, a million Afrikaners. In 2015, it overtly positioned itself as an ‘alternative government’ or ‘state’ for Afrikaners amid ANC-led majority ‘domination’. Drawing on media analysis, interviews with executive members, and ethnography, this chapter investigates the discursive and organisational strategies that underlie the Movement’s contemporary campaigns and assertions. Discursively, the Movement proffered a selective historicalnarratives that obscured class, effaced apartheid-era injustices, and naturalised racial differences to present itself as the post-apartheid defender of a marginalised minority. Organisationally, it sought to create institutional, community, and even virtual spaces for Afrikaner autonomy and to perform state-like functions. The analysis reveals how these strategies reflected and inflected opportunities offered by the global hegemony of neoliberal policies, rationalities, and discourse amid the local specificities of majority rule. Placing the Movement’s strategies in conversation with social movement scholarship and theorisation on race and neoliberalism, it argues that Solidarity’s discursive and organisational strategies offer new insight into the opportunities for extra-parliamentary political mobilisation in the context of constitutional democracy and late capitalism, and how race is refashioned in the neoliberal epoch.

The previous chapter showed how the Solidarity Movement sought to declass its trade union past in favour of a historical and ideological narrative emphasising Afrikaner cultural unity and the politics of race. Yet profoundly classist attitudes, stereotypes, and prejudice, which contradicted the Movement’s official framing, persisted among its leadership. This chapter uncovers these sub-narratives. It argues that they reveal the discursive labour and strategic contradictions deployed by the Movement’s executives to manage the working-class roots of their organisation and reformulate working-class identity in such a manner as to serve the new social alliance their Movement represents, and to use it as a vehicle for advancing ethnic and racial interests in the wake of the demise of the racial state. This included the leadership’s deployment of class distinctions in terms of education, respectability, political attitudes, and morality to legitimise their own position and agenda. These findings attest to the persistent presence of deep class-based prejudice and tensions within the white population, begging a revision of existing scholarship on post-apartheid Afrikaner identity construction and homogeneous white subjectivities.