Excerpt:
"It’s all about changing the climate of opinion to fit your vision because politicians and political parties win or lose based on how popular their ideas are.
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"It’s all about changing the climate of opinion to fit your vision because politicians and political parties win or lose based on how popular their ideas are.
JOSEPH Schumpeter, in his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, defines democracy as “that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote”.
This definition implies that in a democracy there must be competition for votes. This says a lot about the nature of democracy. To win, you must make what you are selling popular. Not necessarily right. But popular.
To see the story of democracy in our country, we need to look back. Since before independence, our society has been divided along communal lines. This was reflected when our political parties were formed. Almost all were communal.
The first president of Umno, Datuk Onn Jaafar, tried to change this. He wanted Umno to open its membership to non-Malays. He embodied the spirit of 1Malaysia before the term was coined.
But he failed and he eventually left Umno. He formed the Independence of Malaya Party and later Parti Negara to pursue his vision for inclusive politics. But, again, he failed.
Onn’s vision was ahead of its time. The public wanted something else, not the good vision that he offered. That is the reality of democracy. Good visions can and do lose the democratic battle if you are unable to change the climate of opinion to support your vision.
When Tunku Abdul Rahman took over from Onn, he tried to address the communalism by creating the Alliance which eventually became the Barisan Nasional coalition that we have today. Together, they are inclusive but most of the members are still individually communal.
Here we see the Tunku as a sharp politician. He knew that in order to win the democratic contest he must offer voters what they want. They wanted to protect and sustain their ethnic identities through ethnic-based political parties. That was what he gave them.
In this context I would not blame anyone for suggesting that even the Tunku was unable to shift public opinion towards one that upholds equality and one that moves away from narrow ethnic-based communalism. Communal parties continue to grow in our society. Voters seem to want it, and continuously voted for it.
Some parties did try to change the situation. Gerakan and DAP did not set up their parties to be communal.
Nevertheless, when deciding electoral strategies, they too have to think along communal lines. They cannot ignore ethnic distributions when deciding whom to field where."
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