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Ringisei has done a succinct analysis of the ideological conditions that grip our national consciousness and psyche, and his 'uncomfortable' pessimistic conclusion follows logically. Let me introduce a brief class analysis of the political flow of Singaporean history to see whether ringisei's conclusion may be shaken and the mountains moved.
The Source of the River
Yes, the PAP is organized around a particular personality cult replete with aging charismatic authority. But the PAP also has a class basis. The English-educated elites who dominated the leadership in the initial years were British-schooled elites trained to take their place in a colonial system that gave the middling and lower sectors of the governing bureaucracy and adjunct professional services (especially the legal profession) to the native middle class. I shall refer to them as 'the technocrats'. After the purge and schism of the Chinese-speaking leftists with their organic mass support, the class contradictions in the party were resolved in the favor of the technocrats.
With Separation and Independence, the technocrats had in possession a well-oiled bureaucracy (with well-established coercive powers inherited from the colonials) and pursued an export-oriented industrialization policy. At this point, industrial capital was solely missing in what was a colonial trading port turned nation. Merchant and finance capital did not have the expertise for industrialization. Thus, the technocrats entered into business alliances with foreign capital (the Multi-National Corporations from the US, Japan and Europe) to industrialize. The success of this program meant that the technocrats through government-linked companies and holding companies were in control of a large part of the domestic economy.
Social discipline and control accompanied the industrialization, as a disciplined workforce to feed the industries was necessary for its success. Society was remade by the technocrats. Public housing rationalized land use, provided sanitary housing and facilitated the discipline of the population into nuclear labor units. Meritocratic mass schooling not only streamed trained individuals into particular skilled occupations, but also provided renewal for the bureaucracy. The best students were inducted into the bureaucracy and thus the technocrats could renew themselves as a class. It is no coincidence that the best bureaucrats would be brought into the PAP technocracy (and the GRC is one way to circumvent the risk of the 'irrational' electorate thwarting this process, think Mah Bow Tan's defeat in Potong Pasir in 1984).
A River Runs Through It
The ideological consciousness of the technocrats is one that is grounded in instrumental rationality - the pursuit of the most efficient means to ends that are determined by a developmentalist calculus common to all Third World countries in the post-colonial period. Of course, the problem with a dominant party of technocrats is that substantive rationalities that are political, social and cultural in character are considered irrational. The call of the technocrats is the formal ideology of Pragmatism. Chua Beng Huat is right on his analysis of the PAP's project of non-liberal communitarian democracy. But this project is a derivative of Pragmatism, a pragmatic response to changes in the electorate and the external environment of the world-wide wave of democratization in the 1980s. It is significant that many of the 'innovative' political changes like the GRC system and the codification of the National Ideology were accomplished in the aftermath of the 'Marxist conspiracy' crackdowns on political and social activists in 1987-88. The concentration of the mass media in government-linked companies also took place in this decade.
Two points follow. What ringisei refers to as 'ideological stasis' is one that is maintained with coercive and ideological force. The stasis is therefore not one that has set into a pervasive and passive mode, but one that has to be actively maintained by the technocrats. Spaces continue to open up that encourage the dissemination and deepening of substantive rationalities - the arts and civil society organizations in the 1990s, the Internet in the 2000s. A mix of co-optation, restriction and marginalization tactics is used to control and discipline these spaces to maintain ideological stasis. The continuation of the ideological stasis therefore depends on whether the technocrats can discipline these spaces. This is where the instrumental rationality of the technocrats eats into itself. It has to balance the maintenance tactics with the cost to its ultimate developmentalist ends. If the technocrats over-maintain a particular space, for example over-regulating the Internet, they damage the economic functions of the sector. If they under-maintain, the substantive rationalities emerging from the space may undermine its instrumental rationality. Nevertheless, over time, as more spaces that need to be maintain emerge and synergistically converge, the growth of substantive rationalities may be too great to be disciplined.
What ringisei refers to as the PAP's 'resistance to external environmental pressures' is less guaranteed to be successful in my view. This is because external environmental pressures are linked to internal class changes. The threat to the technocrats in the 1980s was an emerging Singaporean middle class, especially those fractions that were not co-opted into the bureaucracy, which was open to the globalizing ideas of liberal democracy crashing into East Asia. The technocrats coped with this pressure through a myriad of tactics, from ideological innovations such as 'Asian values', to coercive deployment against dissidents deemed as national threats, to political and constitutional changes such as the GRC system. They continued to cope well in the 1990s with this external-internal pressure and the 2000 General Elections were a culmination of their successful coping. But the class structure is shifting again and the 2000s is a pivotal decade.
A Sea of Change?
Since the early 1990s, the technocrats reacted to economic globalization by restructuring the industrial sector towards high-tech sectors, liberalizing the economy, regionalizing state investments and promoting the development of local capital (the small and medium enterprises). As a result, the upper reaches of the middle class are now more cosmopolitan and independent of state largesse, the working class is sliding into structural unemployment and the local bourgeoisie is expanding in size and influence. The technocracy has attempted to draw from the independent middle classes and local bourgeoisie to renew itself. Thus, the increasing recruitment of high-ranking managers from the private sector and rising businessmen/women into the PAP ranks.
But the interests and ideological leanings of the independent middle classes and the emergent local bourgeoisie are not a 'natural' match with the those of the technocrats. The degree of freedom of these two classes from the technocratic state and the state-linked economy leads to a diverse spectrum of interests and ideological leanings. Thus, we also see that the mainstream opposition parties, the SDA and the WP, are beginning to recruit 'credible' candidates from these two classes. Linked to the working and middle classes affected by economic restructuring and structural unemployment, these opposition leaders from the independent middle classes and local bourgeoisie are articulating views that echo New Left and Democratic Socialist attempts to deal with globalization in Western, Latin American and East Asian countries.
The PAP's success in dealing with middle-class democratization pressures in the 1980s and 1990s is due to the fact that there is a certain detachment of the political substantive rationality of democracy from the developmentalist-grounded instrumental rationality of the technocrats. The middle class could be convinced to compromise their democratic substantive rationality for the instrumental rationality of the technocrats through various coercive and ideological means that appeal to their interest in seeing technocratic economic success benefit them.
But with globalization, things have gotten complicated. The lower middle and working classes are more adversely affected by globalization and are therefore less able to be convinced of the wisdom of continuing their support for technocratic policy. The technocrats respond to this by enacting welfare policies, dubbed 'workfare', but because welfare fundamentally threatens their instrumental rationality and the technocrats are thus hesitant in their approach, I predict welfare will not reduce the increasing disenchantment of the lower middle and working classes with PAP policies.
The independent middle class and local bourgeoisie are split between those who see their interests as entwined with the technocrats' continuing hold on the state and the economy and those who see the continuing hold as threatening their economic interests. The latter faction will be providing the political leadership for the disenchanted lower middle and working classes through the opposition parties in the next decade. The former faction is a wildcard in the PAP because its induction into the technocratic party introduces a faction that has different interests and views, and it may challenge technocratic dominance of the PAP if it feels that its interests are not served by technocratic policies and instrumental rationality. Talks of liberal versus conservative factions in the PAP in the past were mistaken because it was a technocratic monolith. Now, we may see true factional fighting taking place in the party.
A Hedged Conclusion
Therefore, in light of this class analysis, I modify ringisei's conclusion that 'the PAP will not truly liberalize itself and the country while it remains in power' to the PAP may liberalize itself and the country for my own conclusion. It is likely that the PAP will liberalize if it remains in power if (1) the technocrats fail to maintain ideological stasis and cope with the internal-external pressure from globalization for Democratic Socialism, (2) the independent middle class and bourgeoisie faction in the PAP successfully challenges technocratic dominance in the party. If (1) is true and (2) is false, then it is likely that an alternative party led by independent middle class and bourgeoisie leaders would take the reins of government riding on the electoral power of the lower middle and working classes. In either case, whether mountains be moved or rivers be redirected is an open question.
