Navigating political divisiveness

Overly polarised masses are easy to exploit, as seen in the recent US midterm and Brazilian presidential elections.

HAVE you ever noticed how much elections divide us?

In social media feeds, WhatsApp groups and so on – I’m certain I’m not the only one who sees how heated arguments can get, and how complete strangers seem almost eager to jump at each other’s throats and rip each other apart over political arguments during election season.

Of course, nothing about this is remotely unique to Malaysia.

All around the world, the Internet has become the bloodiest battleground of people spewing hate at one another, or congregating in cliques to instigate hate against others.

I was watching the US midterm elections recently, and before that the Brazilian presidential elections.

American news networks would have tickers at the bottom of the screen, showing results from hundreds of elections held throughout the country.

I noticed something that has come to be very much normalised in democracies today: a very size-able chunk of races came pretty close to the 50-50 mark between Democrats and Republicans.

Brazil is the world’s seventh most populous country, with over 217 million people, and 50.9% voted for left wing Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, while 49.1% voted for right wing Jair Bolsonaro – a difference of 1.8%

Back in May, in South Korea, 47.83% of voters voted for the more liberal presidential candidate Lee Jae-myung, while 48.56% voted for the more conservative candidate and eventual winner, Yoon Suk-yeol – a difference of 0.73%.

I don’t follow South Korean politics closely, but I’m fairly sure that in the United States and Brazil, these were pretty heated elections, with millions of people feeling very, very strongly about the outcome.

Opponents were demonised, tempers flew, and the tone of anger and hate was everywhere. This level of anger usually only occurs when an individual feels something integral to his or her identity is at stake.

In the end, in all three cases (and in countless more around the world) just about half of all the voters got to gloat, and the other half got to feel like they would have to suffer what they perceived was the exact opposite of what they wanted politically.

Nobody talks about what unites two opposing political parties during an election; they only talk about how different they are. If you listen to some political speeches, you’d think that the two opposing parties want to take the country in two completely different directions.

In many cases, this would mean that no matter the elections result, half the country will end up feeling like they’re going west, when they should be going east. That’s a lot of people, feeling extremely frustrated. And that’s an extremely divided, polarised country.

The situation in Malaysia today is, of course, not exactly like that. In fact, the 15th General Election (GE15) seems to be quite a new experience for us. We’ve had three- cornered fights before, obviously, but this is the first time (in recent memory at least) that Malaysia has three major coalitions contesting most seats around the country.

That said, there are many similarities when it comes to divisiveness, tribalism and reductivism.

One of the most obvious things you notice in public discourse during election season is that right and wrong suddenly become more about “who” than it is about “what”.

Put another way: When person A does action X, all of his supporters will cheer or defend the action. However, if A’s opponent, person B, does the exact same action X, all those same supporters will suddenly say action X is bad. It’s thus no longer at all about whether action X is objectively good or bad; all that seems to matter is whether you support person A or person B.

Having watched how democracy plays out here for some years now, there are times I think that this kind of feudal, tribalist thinking is not necessarily some “natural” state of affairs that humans always revert to.

Even with my very marginal understanding of mathematics and such, I also find it strange that the near perfect 50-50 splits we so often see in politics (as explored above) seem to happen so often.

Can it really be the case that people all over the world so often seem to come down in equal halves on so many given issues?

Maybe it is in the interest of some to keep people politically divided. Maybe the more evenly divided we are, the easier we are to manipulate and control. Maybe, these political games which always seem to turn round and round without going anywhere is really just one big red herring.

One is reminded of the classic colonial form of control: divide and rule. After all, a truly divided populace can hardly ever unite to topple an elite ruling class bent on exploiting the masses.

Perhaps in the long run, the greatest democratic successes will belong to whichever group of people bother to sit down and think about how we’re being played against one another in ways that have very little benefit for the country as a whole.

Perhaps the future belongs to whichever movement that will be bold enough to leave behind old- fashioned, counterproductive politicking, and forge new ways for citizens to come together and find less mutually exclusive ways to solve our problems together.

Nathaniel Tan works with Projek #BangsaMalaysia. Twitter: @NatAsasi, email: [e-mail]. #BangsaMalaysia #NextGenDemocracy. The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.