ABOUT two months ago, Professor David Runciman, Head of the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge, gave a seminar entitled “How Democracy Ends”.

The message beneath the provocative title is actually subtler, yet scarier at the same time. The professor argues that democracy in the Western world may not end with a bang, as those having flashbacks of the 1930s today is wont to believe. I won’t go into the details but basically, his point is there are just too many structural differences between societies now and then (i.e. the age demographics, level of wealth, the atomised nature of society) for history to act as a precedent.

Dr Runciman’s fear is that when everyone is looking for signs of a systemic collapse (with what comes after being some form of an Orwellian, fascistic government), they may miss the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is democracy is ending even as people keep on believing in it.

To make his point, he observes how even populist, reactionary groups in the West keep on insisting that they are wrestling back control of democracy. Social revolutionaries these people are not.

Everyone is keen to keep the bathwater; the fight is primarily about who gets to define which ‘baby’ to throw out. Engrossing as the show may be, there is only a very remote possibility of what we see in The Handmaid’s Tale being a foreshadow of the future of current western democracies. Our part of the world is more vulnerable to that, truth be told.

Therefore, his version of democracy ending is that even if the norms and procedurals of democracy continue, democracy in its present form might not be able to deliver the goods promised by Democracy.

The great problems of the contemporary world, namely environmental degradation, climate change, widening inequality, polarisation of societies, lingers as democracy lingers. Then, democracy would have ended before its proper funeral.

The state of our ‘Democracy’

The Professor’s points were only addressed at nations with strong Western-type liberal democratic foundations, and considering how many people like to refer Malaysia as a failed state (it is not, actually), some might view my essay as being a non-starter as they don’t buy the idea that democracy has ever started in Malaysia.

Those are fair arguments. After all, many people would associate democracy with elections and if the integrity of the electoral system comes into contention, so would the legitimacy of democracy itself.

Even if Malaysia’s democracy cannot be taken for granted (and we have many good men and women fighting to preserve it), there are still points we can take from the seminar. I, for one, am quite optimistic about Malaysians’ general belief in democracy, as our high turnout rates in the previous two elections (even higher than most matured democracies) would suggest.

The fact that having one of the longest ruling government in the world only suspending democracy for two years in a 60-year rule is quite a feat itself (just look at counter-examples in neighbouring Thailand or the Philippines).

It signals that the state recognises the need of the electoral process as a mechanism of legitimisation and society gladly reciprocates such an interest. Even the party that constantly raised the eyebrows of many for potentially being “one man, one vote, one time” has so far committed itself to democracy (with a paper suggesting it would).

While the notion of democracy is certainly not as strongly ingrained as in the West, I think there is still the risk of our democracy ending in Dr Runciman’s terms. That even as we kept going with our guarantee of universal suffrage (not to be taken for granted considering the many theo-fascist or communitarian exclusivist ideologies abound); democracy, as it is currently taken, would have just stopped serving our interests.

Granted, us being Malaysians tend to take interest in communitarian terms: basically, Bumi versus non-Bumi rights, or Muslim versus non-Muslim rights, or Malay versus non-Malay rights, with our voting geared at preserving or slightly renegotiating that delicate balance. But there is more to the pursuit of happiness than grossly defined, stereotype-laden, emotively charged, and needs-bereft group-based imaginaries.

In a globalised world, what define challenges in the Western societies are increasingly similar to ours. As our society ages just like our Western counterparts, challenges such as elderly care, elderly poverty, labour shortages, and loneliness will come to define our challenges too.

Everybody knows a younger society tend to be inflammatory (as the Arab spring demonstrates), but nobody knows how an older, unequal society will respond to desperation. Getting old without getting rich (enough) is new.

So far, have we addressed those challenges by our votes? Have politicians tried to capture our votes by speaking about those challenges? And do we vote for a better future or for transactional outcomes? Or maybe we do it just to hurt those who don’t agree with us, which I like to call politik sakit hati?

I am not making things up. My trawling on social media reveals that there is an entire troll industry (in America, as do ours) that is entirely based on schadenfreude of the other side.

The fact that we are still facing massive deforestation at a time when the greater good is literally saving the planet puts me on the pessimistic side of things.

And as ‘democracy-powered’ landscape-transforming social (re)engineering projects such as the New Economic Policy (NEP) ran out of steam with some goals achieved and some trauma sewn into the fabric of our society, the issue of social class stagnation, which also happens elsewhere, might arise again as one of our greatest challenges.

A top-down, expansionist-state strategy would not work this time, not with a larger middle-class, and certainly not when maintaining the public sector has become as costly as it is today.

But the present discourse about economics, race, and equality is no different than what we had in the 60s, so does our ‘democracy’ I guess.

Strong and stable till the end?

I understand a high-stakes election is coming and many may not be in the mood to ponder such perceivably ‘lofty’ question. And I am not asking you to opt out of democracy. I certainly don’t have any faith in any alternatives out there that is non-democratic.

But change is constant. And as we live through a time of massive disruption (you can call it the ‘from Gutenberg to Zuckerberg’ transition), it is not change per se that we fear. What is scary is when our political system is the slowest to respond to such changes and the decay happens even as democracy looks more alive with our three- and perhaps four-cornered fights.

Who isn’t thrilled by the arithmetic of horse races? But that isn’t what democracy is supposed to serve.

Some of us like to subscribe to the cynical idea that the more things change, the more they stay the same in Malaysia. On one hand, that may be good as it speaks of stability and resilience. We are an astoundingly peaceful country, considering how our form of contentious politics would have ended up as civil wars elsewhere (see South Africa, Nigeria, or former Yugoslavia).

But on the other hand, it may also be how our democracy ends. – January 24, 2017.

* 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.