Most voting Malaysians prefer autocracy to democracy

Most voting Malaysians prefer autocracy to democracy

S Thayaparan

“Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.”

- HL Mencken

COMMENT | I was really hoping that the always-interesting political scientist Wong Chin Huat was going to lob a figurative Molotov cocktail into the discourse explaining why some Malaysians prefer autocracy to democracy. Sadly it was not so.

The problem with democracy in Malaysia, like most two-party democracies the world over, is that both parties are offering more of the same. Malaysia’s democracy – if you could call it that – suffers from, in no particular order:

An opposition attempting to replicate the failed racial and religious formula of the Umno/BN hegemon.

Gerrymandering that gives disproportionate weightage to rural polities.

Racial and religious indoctrination funded by tax ringgit, which sustains mainstream racial and religious narratives.

The propagation of “Asian values'' – supported by most polities – which cripples so-called “Western democratic norms'' – which means ideas like freedom of expression, freedom of religion and a host of other “individual” rights are subsumed beneath ideas like community and group rights which have turned toxic over the decades. Not to mention political operatives who ape Western political rhetoric but have no real intention of making such rhetoric policy.

A state security apparatus and a judiciary seeking to maintain the status quo for the political elite with moments of outlier actions, which give a fig leaf of independence.

The connective tissues between all these issues are the racial and religious agendas of successive Malaysian governments that desire a narcotised majority and a disenchanted aggrieved minority. This plays into the Manichean political narrative that communal agendas need to safeguard political interests.

Not to mention, no one has ever really wanted to confront the racist nature of the Malaysian beast because it goes beyond the New Economic Policy (NEP) and other entitlement programmes and would entail a certain level of introspection which does not suit ethnocentric narratives that mainstream political parties rely on to win votes.

Instead, what we get is the Bangsa Malaysia horse manure, which is the negation of non-Malay culture for the benefit of Malay proxies who never subscribed to it in the first place.

This is why the dissonance in the voting demographic of the non-Malay community when Malay political operatives are allowed to use and indeed encouraged to play the race card to secure votes, while the non-Malay have to talk about "inclusivity" when the reality is the people they vote for will maintain racial and religious policies which are supposed to be anathema to Bangsa Malaysia.

Opposition not offering alternatives

Beyond the opposition not offering a secular alternative, what they have done is collude, collaborate and sustain the vast religious bureaucracy that has sunk its claws into generations of Malaysians – Malay and non-Malay.

This has made it nearly impossible to have any kind of discourse in our public spaces, with the political elites using the instruments of the state to clamp down on dissenting voices.

And yes, the Malaysian political landscapes used to be littered with the rotting remains of the Malaysian left but all that has been cleared away now, with centre-right-leaning coalitions paying lip service to leftist ideals.

PSM, meanwhile, has been sidelined by the very party – guess who – that used to champion the policy positions of PSM but has since become a centre-right political party that is scrambling to find the next Malay hegemon in which to hitch their wagon to.

When I disagreed with Malaysiakini's Zikri Kamarulzaman here, I argued that “Nobody wants to give up their special privileges, especially when those privileges sustain families and communities through the vagaries of a changing economic and geopolitical landscape.”

Well, the same could be said for the non-Malay who voted BN in for decades while kicking the DAP to the curb.

Sure, the fear of political violence could have been a factor but maybe the values that political stability brought was more important than all these fancy ideas of democracy that certain political operatives in Pakatan Harapan yap about today.

And we have not even come to the sacred cows of Malaysian politics that both Malay and non-Malay polities have to subscribe to. Any deviation is met with oftentimes harsh rebuke and, of course, unequal treatment.

A good example is when lawyer Fadiah Nadwa Fikri questioned the role of the monarchy and the Harapan regime used instruments of the state to sanction her, while the old maverick did the same and nothing happened to him beyond his critics going ape manure.

By the way, Fadiah was strident and eloquent while the old maverick was just whining about the situation he helped create.

So yeah, we are in trouble when the base of one side is openly autocratic for racial and religious reasons and the base on the other side supports a coalition that thinks the formula their political opponents use will herald a dawn of a new Malaysia.

All evidence from partisan fervour to policy decisions carried out by BN, Harapan and Perikatan Nasional point to the reality that their voting bases are more comfortable supporting autocratic ideas most often cloaked in pragmatism rather than democratic ones.

S THAYAPARAN is Commander (Rtd) of the Royal Malaysian Navy. Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum - “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”