By Pranoto Iskandar*
The Jakarta Post-Mar 28
Democracy is to be earned, rather than given. For Indonesia, this statement is self-evident. The transition from the chaotic Old Order to the militaristic New Order and, then to the period of Reformasi (Reformation) required a great amount of sacrifice in “blood, toil, tears and sweat”. Unfortunately, Indonesia has forgotten the high price that it has had to pay to get to where it is now. Today’s political strategy of infusing more conservative values into the Criminal Code (KUHP) is just another case in point. The emblematic case is the successful bid of Anies Baswedan, a former Muslim intellectual, to be elected Jakarta’s number-one politician by turning into a gung-ho populist.
In this mold, the fact that secular nationalist politician Ichsan Soelistio of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) recently confirmed that the controversial KUHP bill will be drafted in a consensus, is unequivocally alarming. Meaning, the nationalists, the only available antidote to the holier-than-thou politics of certain Muslim clerics, have “voluntarily” waived their political badge. The take-home message of this: Taking a stance against intolerance in today’s Indonesia is politically costly. It goes against the grain to contravene the conservatism that is currently gaining ground. So, what does the future hold for Indonesian democracy?
First, the institutional building of the Reformasi era was clearly problematic in every sense of the word. Presidentialism, like many other human inventions, is not flawless. The unnecessary mythologizing of the 1945 Constitution and its presidential system has unwittingly incapacitated the reform enterprise from going into full swing. Worse, Indonesian pundits’ unabashed admiration of the United States’ system has aggravated further the already strained limits of public debate with regards to what direction institutional reform should take.
At its heart, presidentialism is another form of populist democracy where the ultimate (popular) will is culminated in the institution of the presidency. Thus, it is logical to present a fixed and stable term for the presidency.
No wonder the presidential office is directly elected and accountable to the people. Hence. any political notion must be tied to the “popular sovereignty”, “power to the people” and “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. Here, everything revolves around the “people”.
Unfortunately, having people at the helm of any decision-making process is perilous to a healthy, sustainable democracy. Take the rise of the demagogue Hugo Chavez, who capitalized on antiestablishment sentiments. His enabler was ironically a waning figure of the establishment who desperately wanted to make a political comeback. Similarly in Malaysia, the ruling power is cunningly exploiting the anti-Malay xenophobic rhetoric.
The most dramatic of all is naturally the rise of Adolf Hitler as a result of the “people’s rebellion” against liberal democracy. Evidently democracy is vulnerable as “people” are easily browbeaten under the sway of demagogues. Given daily complexities, people become irrational voters.
Moreover, the conventional distinction between Western versus non-Western societies is untenable. Even the US as the traditional high priest of democracy itself is in a backslide as a result of democratic populism. It’s no surprise that the Western populists are ardent proponents of the referendum; take Brexit and Ireland’s referendum. Democratically speaking, it is rational and legitimate, therefore, to exclude the referendum as a decision-making method. Plato recognized the perils of democracy all along. As a system of governance, democracy requires continual inspection that enables it to incrementally progress to elusive perfection.
To our dismay, however, while we must ensure everything can deliver its promise, we must also accept that the perfection itself will never be ours. In the process, we must be open to any available alternative as part of the improvement processes. Thus, any insistence on preserving empty national grandeur should be seen as nothing more than vacuous romanticism.
But rather than providing a definitive answer to each problem, democracy requires “free space” for full public deliberation. Consequently, it is a nonnegotiable condition for a genuine democracy to necessitate a robust exchange of ideas.
However, it legitimizes demagogues of all stripes to capitalize on this condition — ironically the primary strength of democracy. As John Stuart Mills rightly identified, unorthodox voices are indispensable to wrench us out of the “slumber of a decided opinion”. Hence, preserving uninhabited space for public debate to reach the elusive ultimate truth is critical.
Rigorous application of “unwritten” rules, such as public decency and rational discourse, without recourse to anti-democratic measures, serves to weed out some excesses from democracy. One way to do so is to revamp the important role of the political party as a political institution in charge of the gatekeeping processes. No less important, the state should show strong commitment to the rule of law by fair and swift enforcement of any legal violations of both civil and criminal wrongs, including against popular figures. Impartial legal enforcement against extremist demagogues cannot be likened with those of the repressive regime. A liberal democracy is not equivalent to anything goes.
Returning to the above surprising new-found stance of the PDI-P, evidently one cannot factor in the ideological leanings of the political actors into the real-world equation. Therefore, in a populist driven and highly competitive political system, what matters most is the prevailing popular sentiment at a particular point in time. That said, extreme populist democracies — where the ethnicity serves as predominant marker in social relationships, such as in Indonesia and Malaysia — are more vulnerable to rabble-rousing demagogues. The key here is solely about how to get to the unsuspecting voters. This is a rough-and-tumble political competition!
To decently safeguard a political democratic system, again, a healthy dose of gatekeeping is urgent; political parties must conduct “extreme vetting” of their candidates — as the party’s constitutional obligation to balance maintaining quality and the need for populism.
Democratic survival can only be achieved when its proponents meticulously and untiringly fix the imperfect system whenever necessary. Heaven on Earth can only be achieved when a sizeable number of the population wholeheartedly works to create it. We are doomed to repeat our errors should we ignore the lessons of history. It is the system that matters most. The human factor should be part of the equation that nudges it into a well-oiled machine.
*The writer is the founding editor of The Indonesian Journal of International & Comparative Law, the Institute for Migrant Rights’ flagship journal. One of his latest scholarly articles examines the Asian populist strand in theories of constitutionalism, published in Oxford University Comparative Law Forum in December 2017.
(first published in The Jakarta Post – http://www.thejakartapost.com/academia/2018/03/28/dealing-with-antidemocratic-voices.html)
