There are politicians who act, politicians who react, and politicians who pause — long enough to narrate the pause, reflect on the pause, and then build an entire leadership philosophy around the pause.
John Steenhuisen, standing at the top of the Union Buildings steps and “thinking about the steps”, belongs firmly in the third category.
The moment is presented to us as profound. A man stops. A skyline glows. History whispers. The steps, we are told, carry meaning. They once barred him. Now they receive him. And so, we are invited to believe, this is depth. This is leadership. This is statesmanship.
A politician in power stops walking, looks around, and feels something about the Union Buildings steps. He then decides, right there, that he is no longer contesting for party leadership.
Message in the pause
The problem is not that Steenhuisen paused on the steps. The problem is that the pause is doing all the work. In a country where politics is measured in electricity hours, food prices, police violence, land anxiety, and municipal collapse, “thinking about the steps” is a dangerously thin substitute for thinking about power.
The steps become a mirror, not a tool. They reflect the man back to himself. He sees struggles overcome, odds defied, and history bent. What he does not see — because liberalism rarely trains its leaders to see it — is the machinery underneath the Union Buildings steps. The economic order that never moved. The property relations that never shifted. And the class structure that remained perfectly intact while the faces at the top changed.
This is where the metaphor collapses.
Steenhuisen reads his ascension to the Union Buildings steps as destiny fulfilled. But for millions of South Africans, the steps are not a symbol of arrival. They are a permanent no-entry sign. The steps are climbed by elites, guarded by protocol, and cleaned by workers who will never pause to “think” on them. Because pausing costs time, and time costs money.
Politically cheap ideology
Liberal ideology loves these moments because they are emotionally rich and politically cheap. They require no confrontation with structure, only with memory. They replace redistribution with reflection. And they turn history into a personal journey rather than a collective wound.
And this tells us something crucial about Steenhuisen’s leadership skills — not that he lacks intelligence or work ethic. But that his political imagination is intensely vertical. He thinks in ascents up the Union Buildings steps, not in rearrangements. He believes progress is about who gets to climb the steps, not about whether the building itself should be redesigned.
This is classic plastic liberalism: endlessly shapeable, rhetorically adaptive, morally flexible, and structurally conservative.
The speech wants us to applaud the fact that the DA has finally entered national government. But entry is not transformation. Occupying space beyond the Union Buildings steps is not the same as altering its function. Liberalism has always been excellent at crossing thresholds and terrible at changing what happens inside the room.
And so the steps become a kind of liberal altar. Look how far we’ve come. Look how improbable this was. And look how history bends — quietly, politely, without anyone having to give anything up.
Altar for liberals
What is striking is not that Steenhuisen sees the Union Buildings steps as meaningful, but that he sees them as sufficient. The emotional climax of his leadership story is not a policy rupture, not a redistribution fight, not a moral confrontation with inherited injustice — it is a pause on the Union Buildings steps.
This reveals a deeper truth: Steenhuisen’s leadership was managerial, not historical. He is a custodian of process, not a challenger of order. His success lies in navigating institutions beyond the Union Buildings steps, not unsettling them. And liberalism rewards this. It confuses stability with virtue and access with justice.
The DA’s great boast — that it has “bent the arc of history” — rests on a remarkably low bar. The arc bends because growth ticks up, because ratings agencies smile again, and because international investors relax. But for the majority, the arc is still a ceiling. It bends away from collapse, yes — but never downward toward those crushed beneath it, far below the Union Buildings steps.
Yet Steenhuisne’s speech treats the DA’s arrival in government as the end of struggle.The culmination of history, symbolised by standing on the Union Buildings steps. In reality, it may be the end of oppositional clarity. Once you are inside, you inherit not just power but also an excuse. Complexity replaces conviction. Responsibility dilutes blame. And suddenly, “thinking about the steps” replaces thinking about inequality.
Self-congratulatory speech
That is why the speech feels self-congratulatory even when it warns of threats. The populists are dangerous, yes — but also convenient. They allow liberalism to define itself as the only sane adult in the room, without ever asking whether sanity has become another word for stasis.
Liberal ideology works like this: it stretches to include new partners, new language, and new faces. But it never stretches far enough to snap. It absorbs pressure instead of releasing it. And eventually, the pressure finds other outlets.
The Union Buildings steps, then, are not a symbol of victory. They are a warning.
They tell us that Steenhuisen’s leadership was at its strongest when history behaves. When institutions hold, when progress could be narrated as ascent up the Union Buildings steps rather than struggle.
They also tell us what happens when those conditions disappear: liberalism pauses, reflects, and waits for the Union Buildings steps to stop shaking.
In a country built on disrupted foundations, this may not be enough. Thinking about the Union Buildings steps is not the problem. Thinking that the Union Buildings steps are the story.
