... a 'shove down the throat' democracy to bring Singapore to soaring heights.
Sometimes we wonder why these States Times journalists find it hard to keep their writings simple and easily understandable. Take a look at today's Think article by Elgin Toh. The title reads: "Let's strive to be a non-populist democracy". How many subtle messages does the statement suggests?
Striving to be .... means that we are pushing an objective. What might this objective be we ask. According to Elgin, it is to be "non-populist", as if to say we have been populist all this time. We shall get to this. The last word in the statement is "democracy". Now, how does democracy sit in with a non-populist type of governance?
The first half of his article presented the same old boring tune of how the PAP was able to introduce difficult policies without the fear of having to be popular, how these policies have brought us to where we are now, how in the process we became the envy of the world, both by our successful progress and our politics.
After playing that old tune from the broken record, he asked how did it all changed. His direct answer was "GE2011". As if to pin the blame on the people for having the gall to rock a steady boat, he argued that the aftermath of GE 2011 effectively ended the old way of doing things. Decisions over projects and policies were now being put through a second thought-process before they were implemented. This has resulted in the loss of project timeliness, which in turn aid in the adding up of time and resource wastages.
The subtlety continued when he shared that the outcome of GE 2011 had originally created in him a sense of welcoming the change with open arms. However, as he thought deeper about "the implications", he began to shudder. He didn't exactly say what had caused him to shudder except to say "the PAP made populist promises in its early years that it would have preferred not to, and that it was in the nature of democratic elections that they generated populists pressures to which parties had to respond to win votes".
Again, he did not cite any example to back up what he deemed as populist politics of that era. Older generation Singaporeans have known that the early politics of governance in the LKY-led PAP government were wrought with strong arm wranglings with various bodies which it needed to bring under control. Populism was the furthest from his mind. The press, the unions, the opposition are but a few of the enemies it needed to get a grip of. The manner in which they were eventually suppressed was in no measure popular. It was an era where many came to know as the era where "walls have ears". It was definitely not a time where populist politics reigned, as Elgin Toh has suggested. It was the politics of fear.
One wonders how he could have written it otherwise, when he said: ".. even with the conviction to get things done and to get things done right that we know Mr Lee (KY) to possess, he found it necessary, in the face of the pluralistic climate of the 1950s and 1960s, to be populist". Mr Lee Kuan Yew and populist politics? tsk, tsk, tsk.
The funny thing about this funny guy, or a guy trying to be funny, is that after he has taken the trouble to make us believe that the old PAP was a populist government, it is time for the new PAP to be less so. In fact, he encouraged this PM Lee Hsien Loong led government to be, what he deemed, a "non-populist" democracy. Of course, he didn't say what democracy means to him, thereby making him as foolish as a dead fish in the market.
No "forced-through" or "shove down the throat" politics can ever hope to stand side by side with democracy. Who is so dumb to even suggest it? Oh yes, a desperate press would do that. They print it as well.
The Alternative View
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