Vivian Balakrishnan says politics is a contest for power. Where did he get that idea?
For him to define politics as such shows up the fundamental belief and principal of the PAP as a party whose fundamental raison d'etre is the aggrandizement of power over the people.
This is in contrast to democratic politics which is predicated on the return of power to the people and a check on the ever present potential of tyranny by the ruling class.
At the level of the polity, politics is as its Greek root implies, "for, of or relating to the people". It is about the how of organizing a community of people - an issue discussed extensively by Aristotle.
What Vivian Balakrishnan was probably referring to could be international politics, more specifically the realist (Hobbesian) or neo-realist (Kenneth Waltz) views. Both versions see international politics as essentially a contest for power where States are discrete persons striving for supremacy over each other.
But such a view is premised on the fact that State actors have no interpersonal relationships and treats each other with enmity with self-preservation as the sacrosanct objective.
So is this what Vivian Balakrishnan is thinking? That the Government, the people and the non-ruling political parties are inherently in distrust of and in a perennial contest for power with each other
Furthermore where politics is seen as a contest for power, there can arguably be no "clean" politics unlike what Vivian claims, because it will engender money and pork barrel politics as power takes precedence over people's welfare.
So we come back to the question on why Vivian defined politics as the contest for power:
1. Was he regurgitating from a poor script written by his inexperienced underling?
Or
2. Is it a case of him lacking an adequate understanding of politics?
Or perhaps...
3. Maybe he really believes that politics is essentially a contest for power which is consistent with the PAP's modus operandus and historical record...
The Alternative View
[Source: www.fb.com/photo.php?fbid=546545105406826&set=a.360220640705941.85354.35...