Institutional resilience: A tale of America and Malaysia

“He is not king, but I will be very surprised if one of his family is not king again, in the fullness of time. What goes around comes around, as the Igors say.

“You have been labouring under a misapprehension, I reckon. You think that because Albrecht dislikes Ankh-Morpork and has ... old-fashioned ideas, he is a bad dwarf. But I have known him for two hundred years. He is honest and honourable ... more so than me, that I’m sure of. But now I am king and he accepts that with all his heart because if he did not, he’d think he wasn’t a dwarf, see? Of course he will now oppose me at every turn. Being Low King was never an easy job.

“But, to use one of your metaphors, we are all floating in the same boat. We may certainly try to push one another over the side, but only a maniac ... would make a hole in the bottom ... there are always hotheads. But while we argue who steers the boat, we don’t deny that it’s an important voyage ....” – Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant

THE first article in this series explored the theme of national ethos, and the quote “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”.

The second article was about how even in a post-truth world, the truth fights back – and like the sun and the moon, cannot long remain hidden.

In this final part of this series I thought I would discuss and compare some key institutional characteristics of American and Malaysian democracy.

The first opinion I would posit is: being at the tail end of his presidency, I believe we can just about safely say that the system as a whole has (probably) successfully prevented Donald Trump from doing any truly disastrous, irreparable damage.

By this I mean things like starting a nuclear war. Simply put, I think the very best thing about Trump’s presidency is that he did not blow up the world.

This may sound like hyperbole, but we should never ever forget just how many nuclear weapons there are in the world.

Trump has – and technically still can for two more months – wreck untold damage on the planet, on the fabric of American society, and in the world in general.

However, with the probably exception of climate change – the effects of which may not be fully clear for some time – most of the damage that he did is probably fixable. Some of the damage may take a painfully long time to undo, but there is a high chance it is indeed undoable (which is not to say that it would be an enviable task).

By and large however, it is likely accurate to say that both America and the world has successfully survived Trump.

This is not a fact that we should take for granted, nor one that we should assume is a result of happenstance.

I believe that a great many forces came into play together in order to prevent the worst excesses and possibilities from happening under a Trump presidency.

The idea of a robustly independent civil service can sometimes be a double-edged sword.

Trump was famous for talking about the “Deep State” – a term I regret to see used by some Malaysian politicians as well.

I dislike the term because of its Trumpian connotations, and attendant proclivities towards fantastical conspiracy theories.

That said, I cannot deny that the concept of entrenched power structures within civil services and bureaucracies – power structures that evade democratic accountability and grow to serve their own interests – is a real thing. Not just in America of course, but all around the world to various degrees.

I have a feeling however, that for the last four years, many elements and institutions within America’s bureaucracy may have “colluded” to keep the worst excesses of Trumpism from running truly amok.

From all that we can see of Trump even in public, it is one of the few explanations I have for the fact that we didn’t see something even crazier happen.

I think this speaks to what I would call institutional resilience. In essence, enough checks and balances over centuries have been baked deep into various structures and levels of the US government, such that no matter who was at the helm, US policy was unlikely to deviate past a certain range of possibilities (such as say, embarking on an unjustified nuclear war).

In some work I did earlier this year, I was exposed to the idea of governmental institutions being the “arbiters of democracy” – referees as it were, in the game of politics.

In America, these arbiters of democracy proved that they continued to hold the trust of the majority. When Trump dared to suggest even the possibility of electoral fraud without substantive evidence, America revolted.

Such was their faith in their democratic institutions.

Do Malaysians have the same faith in ours?

It is worth noting another interesting difference: America does not have a centralised federal Electoral Commission like ours. Elections are administered by individual states, thus diffusing control over processes like the counting of ballots, and arguably almost eliminating the possibility of system-wide corruption, fraud, or abuse of power.

The US political system is of course also vastly different from ours, which follows the Westminster model.

Its Electoral College is quite a unique system, and one that has been dissected at considerable length.

The primary reason that presidents are not chosen by nationwide popular vote is probably because that would render vast swathes of the American heartland politically irrelevant in favour of major urban and more populated areas.

Prominent academic Dr Wong Chin Huat recently referred to how our Parliament itself has been reduced to an “electoral college” for selecting the prime minister.

I think this is a damningly accurate description of what our politics has devolved to, as a direct result of vast overconcentration of power into the office of the Prime Minister.

This imbalance and overcentralisation is so severe that it renders almost all of the “powers” of our MPs miniscule in comparison.

You know the saying: if all you’ve got is a hammer, then every problem starts to look like a nail?

This seems particularly true of many of our MPs. When the most powerful tool and leverage they have is the ability to change prime ministers, it incentivises the lot of them to keep trying to do that all the time.

Let us contrast that with America.

I can only imagine how progressive Americans felt when Trump was elected in 2016; how it felt to read tweet after unhinged tweet, being fed a constant litany of repugnant lies and bigotry.

It’s not something to be taken lightly.

Lo and behold though, four years later, America has survived, and it has self-corrected.

There was a serious, and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to impeach Trump. This was a long, drawn out process, with a very rigid set of complex but legally clear procedures.

In comparison, in 2020, Malaysian politicians seem to want to change prime ministers and mentris besar at the drop of a hat.

The US Democratic party knew what was at stake, and they came together, put aside differences, to reach their goal of recapturing the White House in 2020.

They hunkered down, had patience and faith in the fact that their opportunity would come, and (arguably) played the right cards at the right time. It appears to have paid off.

Of course, there is no smooth sailing to a fairy tale ending. Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who burst on the political scene to much aplomb, was described as ending the truce as she fired her first salvo at Biden and his allies in the Democratic party almost immediately after his victory.

It appears that Americans, like Malaysians, will not be spared the politicking, and that Ocasio-Cortez is going to be front and centre of the many, many layers of partisanship within the political process.

On this note, it will also certainly be interesting to see what will happen to the Republican party in the aftermath of 2020.

Malaysians got excited in 2008 at the prospect of a viable two-party system in Malaysia, seeing how effective such a competitive system was in many Western democracies.

Twelve years later, it seems that what we have is less a two-party system, and more a multi-something mess.

In any case, one of the qualities of a two-party system that is generally acknowledged to be a plus point in its favour is the tendency to bring both parties closer to the middle, in an effort to win over fence sitters. This tendency in theory moderates extremes on either side of the spectrum, and gives an advantage to those closer in the centre.

Beginning from George W. Bush however, if not earlier, a new strategy has emerged in America, even within the two-party system – one which employs the exact opposite strategy: going harder to the fringe extremes in an effort to galvanise citizens who do not typically vote.

This obviously causes polarisation. But Republican candidates especially – with Trump being by far the most notable example – have used polarisation to their advantage.

Trump’s far right positions of course in turn galvanised the far left, and this phenomenon may well explain why voter turnout in America this year was its highest in history.

With Occasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and their like-minded colleagues continuing to push further to the left, we will be watching closely to see whether Republicans come back to the centre, or double down on Trump’s strategy.

There is no doubt that almost every political system in the world is rife with imperfections, and that a massive overhaul and innovative redesign of our democracies has long, long been called for throughout the world.

For 2020 however, I think the lessons are that we need to invest more in democratic institutions that can survive catastrophes like the presidency of a Trump; and that we need to recognise the importance of coming together to aim for carefully negotiated targets, rather than stumble around in a never-ending and impatient fool’s quest to engineer, re-engineer, then re-re-engineer all sorts of awkward alignments of power in a bumbling attempt to seize power.

While checks and balances are an essential part of democracy, constant and endless bickering is not.

There is a remarkable tradition started by George HW Bush in 1993, where the outgoing president leaves the incoming president a handwritten note in the Oval Office.

I’ll leave you to read the words shared from president to president, and discover for yourself how moving they are, especially given that they were each written to incoming presidents from a different party.

For now, in the same spirit of those letters, I thought I would end this three-parter with simple good wishes to President-elect Joe Biden. It’s a long and difficult road ahead, but the whole world is rooting for you to succeed in putting America back on track.

NATHANIEL TAN works with Projek Wawasan Rakyat (POWR). He can be reached at [e-mail].