Two elections last week took nearly all long-term observers completely by surprise. In Singapore, the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) had been expected to lose seats and a further share of the vote, which had reached its lowest ever point – still 60 per cent – in the 2011 general election. Instead the PAP, led by prime minister Lee Hsien Loong, rebounded. It won 83 of the city-state’s 89 parliamentary seats, and nearly 70 per cent of the vote. Also last weekend, the British Labour party elected its most left-wing leader ever – a man who only became eligible to stand because colleagues who were not supporters agreed to nominate him in the interests of diversity.
Almost nobody would have predicted either result a couple of months ago, because there is still a widespread presumption that the trajectory of democracies is towards increasingly liberal societies. The PAP’s 2011 result was a shock. With opposition parties contesting every constituency for the first time, surely Singaporeans would indicate that they had grown tired of the government’s tight control over so many aspects of their lives?
Opposition rallies of up to 30,000 people only strengthened the view that the city-state’s citizens clearly wanted greater freedoms.
Instead, however, what the US academic Dan Slater calls the PAP’s “combination of open-handed spending and strong-armed social control” received its strongest mandate from the people in 14 years.
This is baffling to those who take it as an article of faith that, given a choice, people will always vote for greater liberty. Coincidentally, also over the weekend, The New York Times published an analysis titled “Are western values losing their sway?” It commented, somewhat poignantly, that given China’s resolve to stick to authoritarian government and Russia’s reversion to what it called “revanchism and dictatorship”, “the grand victory of western liberalism can seem hollow”.
It is questionable to what extent that “victory” ever existed, outside of the minds of the disciples of Francis Fukuyama, who wrote that “western liberal democracy” might be revealed as “the final form of human government” in his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many formerly communist states became democracies, for sure, but not necessarily liberal democracies. Indeed, Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban proudly declares that he is building an “illiberal democracy” on the Danube. Hungarians don’t seem to object – they re-elected him in 2014 and there is no shortage of others in Eastern Europe who share his outlook, Vladimir Putin most obviously.
What I think we are seeing across the continents – and the elections in Singapore and Britain are two instances of this – is a rejection of the primacy of market values. In country after country, voters have been showing that they prize other goods higher, whether they be stability, social solidarity, nationalism or religion; and all necessitate a more interventionist state.
Turkey’s ruling AKP, for instance, came to dominance by offering a mildly Islamist alternative to pro-western, market-friendly predecessors, and it was always obvious that parties with religious appeal would do better than liberal, market-driven ones in the Arab Spring countries. In South America, from the late Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to Evo Morales in Bolivia, unrepentantly old-fashioned leftists who believe their administrations know far better than the markets have been freely and fairly elected time and again.
And a good thing too. For there was always something rather distasteful about an ideology that appeared bereft of humanity – indeed, pretty much denied the possibility of free will by its insistence that men and women would behave in entirely predictable ways in reaction to financial stimuli.
Moreover, the market has no time for altruism, for the idea that public service might be noble and a reward in itself, for compassion, or that some things might be better done by the government rather than the private sector.
No. This truly godless system recognises only one motive, profit, and one measure, money. Gordon Gekko from the Wall Street films is often thought of as a caricature, but his famous phrase “greed is good” truly epitomises market values and their ascendancy in countries where other principles – decency, fairness and respect, for instance – previously held sway, have left many societies increasingly unequal, with brittle, hollowed out common cultures, and just plain unhappy.
This is not to rail against capitalism or to deny the obvious truth that countries need to pursue prosperity in order to maintain and raise standards of living.
But market values see no virtue in anything other than riches, and noisily argue for governments to do less and less and leave everything conceivably possible to the private sector – which of course must do things better, because surely no one could strive to their best for any reason other than money?
Singapore’s opposition parties may be weak, and the continuance in power of the only party to have ruled the country – and raised it to the top ranks of the first world – may have been attractive to many.
But the PAP is deeply paternalistic. It presides over, if not a “socialism that works” then certainly a “welfare state that works”. The huge swing to the party suggests that many Singaporeans continue to believe that Daddy knows best.
Could “big government” be making a return? If the alternative is a system under which, as the Scottish novelist Iain M Banks once put it: “All food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least” – then welcome back.
Sholto Byrnes is a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia