Ishaan Tharoor at the Washington Post takes issue with the kudos rained down upon Lee Kuan Yew at his passing:
But there will always be one shadow hanging over Lee’s incredible legacy: that of his views on democracy, and the draconian methods his government sometimes deployed to stifle it. Under Lee, Singapore was governed as a virtual one-party state. Freedom of speech, despite slow reforms, was strictly curtailed. Intense libel laws led to the bankrupting and marginalization of opposition politicians.
Lee, erudite and articulate, was outspoken in his ambivalence toward democracy as a political system. “The exuberance of democracy leads to undisciplined and disorderly conditions which are inimical to development,” he is quoted as saying, with trademark pragmatism. “The ultimate test of the value of a political system is whether it helps that society to establish conditions which improve the standard of living for the majority of its people.”
Ishaan goes on to dispute the concept that Eastern values require a different form of government, predicated on the lack of individuality present in Western culture and values. I’m more focused on the weakness of the model used by Yew, which Ishaan characterizes as fairly authoritarian. From Wikipedia:
The Government of Singapore is defined by the Constitution of the Republic of Singapore to mean the Executive branch of government, which is made up of the President and the Cabinet of Singapore. Although the President acts in his personal discretion in the exercise of certain functions as a check on the Cabinet and Parliament of Singapore, his role is largely ceremonial. It is the Cabinet, composed of the Prime Minister and other Ministers appointed on his advice by the President, that generally directs and controls the Government. The Cabinet is formed by the political party that gains a simple majority in each general election.
I regard this as a weak model in that it is too dependent on the leader. If the leader is competent and disinterested, then the model works and will work quite well, assuming a compliant population; if the leader is incompetent or corrupt / self-aggrandizing, then the model is, to be quite emotionless about it, inefficient; in fact, it may result in bloody revolution.
The democratic model used by the USA, South Korea, Japan, and many others emphasizes more participation, more decentralization, and if it’s less efficient than Yew’s at its peak, it is also self-correcting. Today is may seem as if our democracy is broken due to the inability of one side or the other to accept reality, but at some point reality will trump ideology, and those promoting ideology will fall by the wayside and become historical curiosities; we’ll revamp or dump the conflicting ideas and then carry on, buoyed up by our democracy – not weighed down.
