David Smith on the similarities between South Africa and America:

In both America and South Africa, race remains a significant factor in social inequality, crime patterns or trying to predict how people will vote. On the surface, South Africa is the country that apparently flicked a switch to install a black governing elite for its majority black population. But America has had more time to heal the old wounds and create a black middle-class that South Africa can still only dream about.

In South Africa the problems feel familiar but more raw and more intense. At its worst, there is a culture of lawlessness and brutality at the point of a gun that must have been the way of the wild west. But just 15 years after apartheid, there is also the spirit of a new frontier and a sense of the possible.

Yet there is one thing that South Africans have not mastered, and that is the relentless optimism of Americans about their country. Whether they would be well advised to do so is a question that will take time to resolve.

It would be easy to pick holes in this thesis, pointing out some of the myriad ways in which South Africa is not like America. But I actually think Smith is right in the general sense: I haven’t spent much time in the United States, but when I was there I felt strangely comfortable and at home (though whether this says more about America’s specific similarities with South Africa than the worldwide ubiquity of American culture is a matter for debate).

However, there is one major aspect in which I think America and South Africa are wildly different: Americans are comfortable in the “public square” in a way that South Africans are not. They will argue vigorously over impolite topics like politics and religion; as a people, they tend to be opinionated and confident. When I’ve spoken to American academics and even government officials, they’ve usually criticised their own government with a severity that would be unthinkable from any South African in an equivalent position. South Africans can be opinionated in private, but in the face of authority we are usually deferential - probably because the public square has been poisoned by the sheer bitterness of our national struggles over race and identity.

These contrasting attitudes explain a lot of the more specific ways in which America and South Africa are different: why America has hundreds of investigative newspapers and we have two; why America has hundreds of thousands of political blogs and we have a small handful; why officials in US government departments are sometimes willing to challenge bad policy decisions rather than meekly implementing them; why American universities are so good; why America has a highly competitive political system where as South Africa (in both the post- and pre-1994 eras) has experienced extended periods of single-party domination. America’s public square is not always a good thing: the same forces that create a market for The Atlantic Monthly also give us the trashy populism of Fox News and Michael Moore, not to mention the paranoid fantasies of Alex Jones and Zeitgeist. Overall, however, I am certain that the United States’ public square culture has been a tremendous national asset. As a South African, it is one of the aspects of American society that I most admire and envy.