Like a reanimated corpse bursting from a crypt in a cheesy late-night horror movie, South Africa's wildly corrupt former president, Jacob Zuma, has returned.

To be fair to Zuma, he never really left. As pioneering president/jailbird, he has also launched the global zombie politics that now pertains across liberal democracies everywhere.

For those who have struggled to keep up with his bloodstained C-movie career arc, let's recap. Zuma served as deputy president from 1999 until he was dismissed in 2005, during an internecine battle for the ANC's soul. (It turned out that by the mid-zeroes, there was no soul left.) In his first return-from-the-dead party trick, he emerged to lead the party in 2007, becoming president of South Africa in 2009. A popular, if not entirely populist, figure whose base derives from KwaZulu-Natal, Zuma pitched left but swung right -- nothing he and his party did during his many years of leadership approached a fair deal for South Africa's struggling lower and middle classes.

Instead, Zuma repurposed state institutions to hose government funds into a mafia led in spirit by his family, and in fact by a small cabal of private and public associates who became very rich while the country grew very poor. A classic if clumsy kleptocrat, by the time he was defenestrated on Valentine's Day, 2018, he was a...