Democracy works best with populism curtailed

By OOI KEE BENG, in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on June 26, 2023 – July 2, 2023: “Picking on the Present” column.

THERE ARE MANY ways one can attempt to fathom what it is that ails Malaysian democracy.

Is it democracy itself that, when applied in a country newly emerged from colonial control, has allowed for low-level political discourse to triumph and flourish? Is it the immediate geopolitical context within which independence was gained in the 1950s that decided how Malaysians would play politics and understand power?

Is it the feudal understanding of power prevalent on the peninsula that dictated how nation-building should take place? Is it the multicultural essence of Malaysian society being straitjacketed into the essentially ethnocentric format of “the nation state” that is at fault?

Was it the defensive attitudes prevalent in independence movements and the preaching of victimhood as the definition of Malaysianness that dug the deep hole from which the country now needs saving? Or is a country that had to be structured as a double federation doomed to endless internal struggles over its diversities?

One could ask many more such questions, and all of them would be equally in need of an answer. In this article, however, let me seriously insert the notion of populism into the discussion, in the hope that it will help lift us out of the conceptual deadlock that political culture in Malaysia continues to find itself in today.

This is all the more important now that a nominally reformist government is governing the country. Diagnosing what is wrong with the DNA of the Malaysian body politic should give us a good way to judge what reforms will work, what is mere window dressing and what will definitely not work.

A democracy wave

Apparently, the term “populism” began to be widely used in the West only in the 1950s, to describe a fearful tendency in the democracies they lived in. In the US, the rise of McCarthyism needed to be explained, and the American Edward A Shils, in his book The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies proposed that populism was a “widespread phenomenon … [existing] wherever there is an ideology of popular resentment against the order imposed on society by a long-established, differentiated ruling class which is believed to have a monopoly of power, property, breeding and culture”.

The use of the term “populism” continued to grow, most likely because democracy was becoming popular in the world as a characteristic of the many countries, like Malaysia, gaining independence in the 1950s and 1960s, and this was true even of communist countries emerging in the post-World War II period. If communist party states did not call themselves democracies, they would still be nominally run in the name of “the people”.

Indeed, populism, popular and people are first cousins in meaning, and thus, democracy, by seeking “government of the people, for the people and by the people” is prone to populism.

Therefore, for democracy to deliver on its promise of good and fair governance in the real world, where ethnicities intermingle more and more, and not in the nation-state ideal world of states eternally representing an ethnicity, its propensity for populism has to be understood and curtailed.

In 1969, when democracy in Malaysia was declared “dead” following racial riots, a landmark book on populism was published in the West. This was Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner’s compilation called Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics. Something relevant to our understanding of populism as a global phenomenon was stated in Benjamin Moffitt’s chapter in that book, “The Concept of Populism”. Populism, he ventured, is best understood as an “emphasis, a dimension of political culture in general, not simply a particular kind of overall ideological system or type of organisation”.

If populism is considered a fateful “emphasis, then it is best understood and managed in the specific context in which it occurs and thrives. To curtail it, one needs to dive into the foundations of a society’s political culture”.

The nature of Malaysian populism

Malaysia was largely well governed enough to begin life as a democracy — despite the Emergency, the Cold War and Konfrontasi. However, the birth pangs of the country in the 1950s and 1960s caused institutional pillars to be raised which conditioned the fragmented nature of its nationhood, and the populist bent of its democracy.

To be sure, the country was sown together as a cultural hotchpotch to start with, and therefore it had to emerge as a federation rather than a union. Therein already lies a key problem. The conceptual guidebook for building a modern state or a modern nation strongly advocates administrative and legislative centralisation, and to do that to a diverse federalised population pits these centripetal ambitions against the centrifugal forces inherent in Malaysian society.

Second, there is the matter of race, the matter of majoritisation. While this process is often fought out in the political sphere over time, in the Malaysian case, this was essentialised and incorporated into the constitution itself — in the definition of the majority race, in the possession of a special position, and in their religion being raised above all others.

Coupled with the formation of ethnically based and faith-based parties, and their success — boosted by the strong opportunistic support given them by a colonial power that was most concerned with a strategically beneficial retreat from the region — political discourses in the new democracy became inevitably focused on race and religion.

As a point of special interest, the fact that these organisations did not call themselves “parties” hints strongly at their founders’ unease over the intellectual coherence and legitimacy of political parties being based on ethnicity — Umno remains an “organisation”, MCA an “association”, and the MIC a “congress”. The Islamic party we know as Parti Islam SeMalaysia was founded as Persatuan Islam Sa-Malaya — the Pan-Malayan Islamic Union.

Third, the ideological struggle between the left and the right also played a fateful role in how the country’s political discourse developed, as it did throughout the world. But in the case of Malaysia, where communism’s defeat was violent and dragged on for several decades, class-based analy­ses of the country’s development were discouraged and often punished.

This allowed for highly emotional disputes over language, power and identity to supersede more ideological and technical concerns stemming from class tensions, almost to the point of discursive erasure. Today, in 2023, class matters have been reduced to crude notions for policymaking based on the brain-numbing bureaucracy-serving nomenclature of Bottom 40, Middle 40 and Top 20.

And so, as the analyses became stunted, populism thrived even more. The majoritarian process expanded the concept of “Malay” to “bumiputera” following the incorporation of Sabah and Sarawak, and Islam over time became codified into a narrow set of teachings that proscribed alternate practices. Populism in the country grew ever more defensive and exclusive, and relied on propagating common victimhood rather than nationwide progress.

To be sure, this path towards ethnic and religious populism — which minorities naturally also grew to be participatory in — was not a given path. It was not the only possible route. The much-maligned New Economic Policy (NEP), expressed in the Second Malaysia Plan that was implemented in 1971, was a conceptual and a policymaking balancing act commendable for attempting to mainstream class concerns in policymaking. But it asked too much of human nature, especially in politicians.

The NEP sought to eradicate poverty and to disentangle race from profession. Having people of a certain ethnicity being in a certain profession, and given that professions are unequally rewarded in pay, merely led to class and race being sociologically associated. Breaking that reality is commendable, but to an extent, ill-advised. The cart was put before the horse.

In practice, the NEP — meant to be a 20-year experiment — never really ended, its institutional creations having become champions of race and religion rather than proponents of equality and common progress.

The voting patterns of the country became community-based, both the result and the reason for ethnic and religious populism.

By a twist of fate and of political man­­o­­euvres, Malaysia ended up in 2023 with a so-called unity government led by a nominal bumiputera-led multiracial party supported by a withdrawn multiracial party led by non-Malays, by coalitions from Sarawak and Sabah, and the humbled Umno.

How far this coalitional government thinks it can go in reforming Malaysia will depend on how they understand the problem. If they fall into the trap of being populist for their own short-term gains, which means compromise in areas that can doom their proffered ambitions to make Malaysia an inclusive and progressive democracy, then they may turn out to be followers of populism rather than reformists.

Curtailing populism requires more than just guile and courage. It requires knowing not only who your enemies are but also what processes are arrayed against reforms.

The goals of reforms are clear, as I started out saying. They are to facilitate the curtailment of populism in our practice of democracy, and to free Malaysians from their own populist heritage is what reforms are about.

Dato’ Dr Ooi Kee Beng is executive director of the Penang Institute. His influential books include Catharsis: A Second Chance for Democracy in Malaysia (2018) and The Reluctant Politician: Tun Dr Ismail and His Time (2006). Homepage: wikibeng.com.