Threat of Democracy

KOMPAS/HENDRA A SETYAWAN

Komaruddin Hidayat

A constitution does not guarantee the establishment of a democracy if the leader of a country does not have a strong commitment to safeguarding democratic norms, traditions and ethics, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write in How Democracies Die (2018).

Levitsky and Ziblatt are worried about seeing the democratic ethics of the United States being destroyed by US President Donald Trump, even though America has been known as a "democracy laboratory".

They write: "Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders, presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power." Based on their research, some countries whose quality of democracy was destroyed were not due to military forces seizing power with weapons, but by national leaders – both the presidents and the prime ministers – who destroyed the democratic process, standards and ethics to win the fight for the power.

For example, democracy in Peru was destroyed in the hands of President Alberto Fujimori, who had previously only been known as a rector of Japanese descent. He was challenged to propose his presidential candidacy with the promise of saving Peru\'s economy, which at the time was hit by corruption, terrorism and smuggling of illegal drugs. He managed to win the hearts of the people and occupied the presidency on July 18, 1990. However, ironically, on April 5, 1992, less than two years, he dissolved the parliament and changed the constitution, then made himself a tyrant, digging his own grave. Similar to the fate of other tyrants, in 2009 Fujimori was sentenced to 25 years in prison for being involved in corruption, kidnapping and murder.

Hugo Chavez was also a controversial figure as Venezuelan president, whom observers considered a demagogue. He was an anticritic and happy to give unethical labels to his political opponents, more violent than the label of "tadpole" and "micro bat". Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who are still in power today, are leaders of countries who struggled through their careers to promote a democratic process but after grabbing power tend to become tyrants and demagogues.

This list can be extended by including various cases in the Asian region, such as President Marcos in the Philippines and Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Gaddafi in Libya. The experience of changing national leaders in Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia is also not always smooth; there are those who become politically victimized and sent to jail, lives have been lost and blood has been spilled. Being derived from Greek, demos means “people”, agogos means “leader”, in its development demagog means leaders who like to incite and deceive the people through astonishing rhetoric to achieve and perpetuate their power.

The decay of democracy

It is not enough to take the formal form of the superiority and substance of democracy by implementing regional and general election rituals in which multipolitical parties take part. Besides being loyal to the constitution, the political elite must have high moral standards and the soul of democrats who always defends civil rights to freely convey their right to criticism, even though it is in opposition to their political aspirations. Moreover, political parties should be educational institutions for cadres of politicians with great integrity and technocratic capacity. Political parties should not only sell "boarding passes" for those who have money so they can compete in the legislative or regional elections.

The decay of democracy occurs when a political victory to become a legislative member or the president is merely supported by the number of votes, but there is a long and dark distance between the mass of voters and the selected figures. They may make choices because of the influence of money, persuasion and threats of political brokers, or victims of hoaxes and brainwashing. Under the pretext of reform and implementation of democracy, the state and political parties spend trillions of rupiah and social costs in the form of community polarization as the excesses of regional elections, legislative elections and presidential elections. But the process taken is fully rotten so that the results are also disappointing. Instead of educating the people, the elite of the political parties even fool the people.

Since the Reform Era was launched, the atmosphere ahead of the 2019 election was the worst: emotional, full of hoaxes and verbal abuses by involving religious phrases that gave birth to a paradoxical portrait. A sacred lie and a sacred expression about lies.

Epistocracy

The practice of democracy in Western society and other parts of the world is now beginning to reap criticism, including in Indonesia, even though the democratic system is still considered the best compared to other systems. Jason Brennan in his work Against Democracy (2016) considers the practice of elections – one man, one vote – to be irrational. The people likely do not know exactly who is chosen and what are the consequences of their choice.

Therefore, Brennan offers a concept called epistocracy or the rule of the knowledgeable. The consequence of the idea is to be unfair if people who are highly educated and understand the state of the issue have the same voting weight as uneducated people, in determining the course of government, as in elections. This idea is reminiscent of Plato\'s concept of the Philosopher King, that the government must be held and controlled by wise and knowledgeable people, even though it is unfortunate in its journey that this idea leads in the emergence of a monarchy, a head of government who feels himself most correct and is anticriticism.

The concept of epistocracy has truth, but it is difficult to apply. For the level of mass organizations, this idea has been implemented by the Muhammadiyah in choosing its general chairman. The representatives to a national congress select 39 cadres who are considered good, then out of 39 people the number is downsized to 13 members. It is the 13 people who later convene to elect one of them as Muhammadiyah\'s general chairman.

Regardless of the controversy surrounding epistocracies, this idea is actually relevant to analyzing the practice of liberal democracy that is taking place in Indonesia. Imagine, the population of Indonesia at 240 million, spreading to hundreds of islands, with unequal levels of education and economics, then they have the same weight in choosing nation leaders they do not know.

Where is the rational position? Therefore, it is not surprising that there is a democratic recession as well as silencing and decaying of democracy, because there is a long and dark distance between the people as voters and the presidential candidates to be elected. In the dark room, hoax workers and provocateurs pit the people against ideological doctrines they do not understand. This fact is also found in legislative and regional elections. Election and election costs have increased substantially, both financially and morally, but the results have not been better.

Due to this reality, there are at least two types of responses. First, we return to the fourth principle of Pancasila, the president and regional heads are elected in a representative deliberative forum as practiced in the New Order, with the condition that the people\'s representatives have the principle of competence, namely integrity and broad knowledge of a good government, so that it does not arbitrarily select the president and regional heads.

The second response: Let the democratic learning and maturation process, which takes place at present, continue, while increasing political education for the people and making political parties healthy.

Therefore, one of the challenges of the upcoming presidential and legislative elections is not who will be the winner, but the victory must return to the Indonesian people, so that they have the right to live in prosperity, progress, safety and peace.

Komaruddin Hidayat,

Lecturer at School of Psychology, UIN Jakarta