The writer of this article examines how Singapore and most Singaporeans have traded democracy for a policy of wealth.
Markets may have made their peace with activism, rebellion, radicalism, revolution, change-agenting, hierarchy-questioning, sacred-cow-killing, power-seizing, apple-cart-overturning and everything else on the exciting menu of New Economy upheaval, but markets still have trouble reconciling themselves to democracy proper.
Markets romp joyfully when word arrives that the vote-counting has been halted. Markets punish the bond prices of countries where left parties still attract a substantial vote. Markets reward countries where left parties have been induced to wind up their operations. To you Bill Clinton's rightward triangulations may have seemed like rank hypocrisy or worse, since they deprived Americans of meaningful political choice, but in the view of markets the man who managed to kill off the New Deal is a statesman for the ages.
Above all markets love the country of Singapore. There was a time a few years ago when one heard this repeated so frequently that it became one of the great media clichés of the age. Singapore was an economic miracle, a land arisen from Third World to First in a handful of decades. Singapore was showing the world the way forward. Singapore had resolved it all: ethnic hatred, crime, social decay, good government. Singapore was the country with the most economic freedom in the world. Singapore was the best place to do business in all the earth. Singapore was more comprehensively wired than anywhere else. "Asian values," as described by Lee Kuan Yew, the man who has effectively ruled Singapore ever since 1959, would inevitably prevail. And as proof you needed look no farther than a postcard of Singapore's glittering downtown, at all the spanking new skyscrapers erupting from the earth in stern testimony to the market's approval. And what the market loved best about Singapore was what was absent: Politics.
The country has quite literally traded politics for wealth, with its most prominent political thinkers endlessly reminding the world that "Asian values" prioritise economic achievement over civil liberties. But the trade-off between a lively political life and the blessings of the market is hardly a uniquely Asian phenomenon. Americans know the logic quite well. For ten years now we have labored mightily to convince ourselves that once we had hobbled unions and rolled back regulation and dropped antitrust enforcement and "reformed" welfare and stopped worrying generally, we would break free into a world beyond ideology and dread partisanship, a place of civility and simple pleasures, a utopia where watching the NASDAQ shower us with its blessings far outranked electioneering as an expression of our democratic ways. So acute was the desire in some circles to nail a final lid on politics that Thomas Friedman, the highly respected New York Times foreign affairs columnist, actually came up with a term for the glorious trade-off in his ecstatic 1999 book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: "the golden straitjacket."
Since all alternatives to laissez-faire are now historically discredited, Friedman maintained, all countries must now adopt the same rigidly pro-business stance. When they do, "your economy grows and your politics shrinks." The pseudo-democracy of markets replaces the real democracy of democracy, the great multinational corporations nod their approval, and (some) people get fantastically rich. I have no idea whether Friedman had Singapore specifically in mind when he came up with this formulation, but there can be little doubt that Singapore has come close indeed to realizing the "post-partisan" dream of New Economy ideologues everywhere.
Many facts can be cited to illustrate Singapore's exchange of democracy for wealth, but few are more poignant than the bankruptcy into which the country's opposition MPs (at present there are three in a parliament of 84), are perennially thrown by ruling party lawsuits. Dissenting publicly can quite literally mean losing it all. As a result opposition politicians have learned, as X'ho, the ultra-arch Singapore punk rocker puts it, "Speak not, bankrupt not." Unfortunately, aggressive "depoliticization," as Singaporean journalists refer to it, has pitfalls of its own. As the allure of public life recedes, the country may get rich, but who is to manage the public sector? So effectively has the ruling party punished the opposition and discredited politics generally that it now faces, ironically, a crisis unique among advanced nations: It has trouble recruiting gung ho young candidates to stand for parliament. Nor do countries simply evolve into "golden straitjacket" post-partisanship by some natural process of popular enlightenment. Depoliticization is an achievement that requires effort. And building a depoliticized state in Southeast Asia was an accomplishment that took decades.
The arduous story is told in precise, clinical detail by Francis Seow, one of the country's best known dissidents, in his 1998 book The Media Enthralled. Running down the long, long list of Lee Kuan Yew's battles with a once-feisty press, Seow tells us exactly what arguments and legal strategems Lee used from the 60s to the 90s to get his way in every single case, to force the more tractable publications to see things as he did and the recalcitrant sheets simply to disappear. Only rarely did the country have to resort to outright censorship. Warring with the Economist, Far Eastern Economic Review, the International Herald Tribune, and the Asian Wall Street Journal, Lee used a combination of lawsuits, anti-Western bluster, intimidation, and circulation restriction to ensure that these publications would practice "self-censorship" when describing events in his country.
Turning to the local media, Lee came up with a plan whereby market forces did the work for him. Using the language of marketplace democracy that we all know so well from brokerage commercials and "New Democrat" reform efforts, Lee's government simply required that all newspaper publishing operations be publicly traded rather than owned by families or private investors--and that crucial voting shares be held by politically reliable individuals.
"Lee Kuan Yew has understood perfectly that the media business is, first and foremost, a business," the canny Singaporean journalist Cherian George has written: "that a press allowed to make money out of a system will support that system; and that publishers value their bottom-line more highly than they do their editorial freedom."
Described that way Lee Kuan Yew sounds like the kind of guy a traditional American press lord, thundering on behalf of the interests of the owning class, could do business with. But Lee tolerates very little thunder. He and his successors seem to regard the press as fundamentally illegitimate, an unelected interloper in the nation's politics. In 1994 a writer named Catherine Lim made the mistake of violating an unwritten prohibition against criticism of government officials; in the official declaration that slapped her down it was announced that neither journalists nor anyone else could be allowed "to set the political agenda from outside the political arena. . . . People who seek to change the nature of Singapore politics and society cannot be allowed to do so from political sanctuaries."
No one could be permitted to comment on political issues except duly declared politicians--and everyone knows how the government deals with them. The results may be draconian, but the terms of the debate must seem very familiar to American readers, living as they have through thirty years of assaults on the "elite" media, always said to be foisting their "arrogant" concerns and their big city ways on the rest of us. And Lee Kuan Yew has achieved in Singapore what the American Right can only dream about: Freedom from the press--and along with it freedom from criticism and freedom from critical thought generally.
