COMMENT | Most voting Malaysians prefer autocracy to democracy

“Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.”

- HL Mencken

COMMENT | I was really hoping that the always-interesting political scientist Wong Chin Huat was going to lob a figurative Molotov cocktail into the discourse explaining why some Malaysians prefer autocracy to democracy. Sadly it was not so.

The problem with democracy in Malaysia, like most two-party democracies the world over, is that both parties are offering more of the same. Malaysia’s democracy – if you could call it that – suffers from, in no particular order:

1. An opposition attempting to replicate the failed racial and religious formula of the Umno/BN hegemon.

2. Gerrymandering that gives disproportionate weightage to rural polities.

3. Racial and religious indoctrination funded by tax ringgit, which sustains mainstream racial and religious narratives.

4. The propagation of “Asian values'' – supported by most polities – which cripples so-called “Western democratic norms'' – which means ideas like freedom of expression, freedom of religion and a host of other “individual” rights are subsumed beneath ideas like community and group rights which have turned toxic over the decades. Not to mention political operatives who ape Western political rhetoric but have no real intention of making such rhetoric policy.

5. A state security apparatus and a judiciary seeking to maintain the status quo for the political elite with moments of outlier actions, which give a fig leaf of independence.

The connective tissues between all these issues are...