AMONG the many commonly held assumptions regarding the Covid-19 pandemic, is the premise about governmental competence.

This is more so the case when so-called developed nations in Western Europe and the US seem to be taking the brunt of the pandemic’s casualties.

The US, the global superpower, alone accounts for one-fifth of all Covid-19 deaths, which passed the million mark about a month ago.

While there is no surprise that a form of politics of competence has emerged, it has taken different forms in different contexts.

The UK represents a classic case whereby the government is now accused incompetence for the many perceived unforced errors it made in its handling of the Covid crisis, from calling for restrictions and lockdowns too late to easing them too early.

Not to mention the A-level fiasco that was followed by an admission of record numbers of students (both domestic and international) in a pandemic year, which expectedly led to outbreaks and dilemmas of disease control for the winter.

Exacerbating the perception of incompetence was the conduct of government officials who went against the prescribed standard operating procedure (SOP), something with which we are all too familiar.

The UK represents a classic case because the accusation of incompetence was made based on the government’s alleged ignoring of scientific advice.

While I would caution against any blind-faith towards “scientific” advice (after all, even scientists disagree with each other), the fact remains that the Boris Johnson government cannot afford to be seen to alienate scientific opinion in its decision-making.

In fact, in the early days of the pandemic, the Johnson administration had always defended itself by saying it “was following the science”.

What this means is that the idea of competence in the UK is still measured around a common belief in scientific and factual objectivity.

Political rivalries were fought over which party could provide the necessary competency to harness scientific knowledge for problem-solving.

That is certainly not the case for the US. The politics of competence in the US renders the idea of competence itself political.

Political rivalry in the US does not revolve around fighting over which is the more competent party or candidate, but rather what is the definition of competence anyway?

To be sure, I am certain many US citizens see the pandemic like many of us, in that we must minimise cases and deaths.

Yet, Trump’s low, yet unflinching approval ratings suggest a different worldview for many others.

In fact, a recent poll has shown that, 56% of Americans think they are better off now compared to four years before. Yes, you read that correct, in a pandemic year and the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

This polemical environment over what constitutes competence also degrades the cognitive linkage between competence and science.

Without some objective indicators of governmental competence (to the extent even hundreds of thousands of deaths don’t even matter), the idea of scientific reasoning itself risks becoming delegitimised.

It is the only reason that masks remain a political issue in the US despite mounting scientific evidence, and that the president can mount an attack against Dr Anthony Fauci.

In Malaysia, that would be equivalent to attacking our much-revered director-general of health Noor Hisham Abdullah, which is unthinkable politically across the political spectrum.

In Malaysia, our politics of incompetence lies closer to the UK model. The rakyat has a common idea of what the public good is (ie, epidemic control) and how scientific expertise is crucial in achieving it.

Public trust towards our healthcare officials is so high that the ministry and Noor Hisham’s Facebook profiles have 3 million and 1 million followers respectively.

The US’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), by contrast, has only 3.6 million followers despite its status as a national health agency in a country with more than 10 times our population.

However, where the UK and Malaysia differ is that as this recent outbreak happened on the heels of an election and reports of politicians openly flaunting rules.

We see Malaysian politicians discredited on all sides, unlike in the UK where Boris Johnson’s loss is Labour’s leader Keir Starmer’s gain.

In other words, if in the UK the politics of competence revolves around the question of political leadership and in the US it is about politicising the very idea of competence, in Malaysia we are seeing political fatigue leading to a conceptual break between politics and competence whereby politics is perceived as the stumbling block to competence.

In other words, more politics, less competence.

This explains why parties from young to old have called for a détente. Politicians know they risk public anger if the jostling continues. Some know they could harness public anger in their favour too. A détente is never apolitical.

Putting aside the latest developments that are unfolding as I am writing this, you might ask, isn’t it a good idea to have politics bound with technocratic competence?

On the surface, yes. It means a commonly held belief in competence can be used to generate social consensus and extract accountability from the politicians.

But there’s a caveat to this.

Our ability to separate the political process from the operations of the state comes from us being blessed with a strong state capacity, as compared to Indonesia which flounders in its epidemic control because the infrastructure just isn’t strong enough. However, this doesn’t mean politics will ever stop, not in our plural yet polarised socio-political landscape.

If the competence of the state is taken for granted, then politics will naturally be directed towards more intractable yet (for many) existential matters such as culture, religion, or identity.

However, any distinction between politics and understandings of competence is artificial.

As the case of the US has shown, the more politics move into existential grounds (which can be seen in the rise of conspiracy theories, for example), the easier it is for political actors to erode institutional capacity through denouncing and delegitimising facts and expertise in the name of racial, cultural, or even a religion’s survival.

In these times of uncertainties, it is understandable to want more continuity and less experimentation.

It is also tempting to want to tame the raunchiness of politics in favour of a low-humming state machine that is ostensibly based on hard, cold facts and not emotive reasoning and divisive rhetoric.

Yet, it is also worth remembering that in surrendering our stakes in democratic politics, we are also surrendering our control over what amounts to fact and fiction.

Then we are at the risk of moving closer towards post-truth politics instead of away from it; and as some would say, post-truth is pre-fascism. – October 25, 2020.

* A Forensic Science-Asian Studies hybrid, Nicholas Chan is interested in how authority is shaped, exercised, and more importantly, resisted in Southeast Asia.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.