Tom Pepinsky

Category: Current Affairs

  • Are Indonesian Elections “The Only Game in Town?”

    Jamie Davidson‘s new book* Indonesia: Twenty Years of Democracy contains a prescient caveat about Indonesia’s democratic consolidation:

    I do not mean to imply that Indonesia’s democracy is consolidated, or “the only game in town” (a popular saying among political scientists). Fixating on consolidation closes debate, foregrounds static outcomes, and ignores the dynamic processes of and challenges to democracy in current Indonesia.

    This criticism of the consolidation framework is particularly relevant given the events of the past twenty-four hours in Indonesia. Yesterday, the Indonesian Election Commission released the official results of the April 2019 election, declaring that incumbent president Joko Widodo has defeated challenger Prabowo Subianto by a substantial margin of 55-45. Since then events have unfolded rapidly (for a good summary in English follow Febriana Firdaus). Prabowo has refused to concede, repeating his claim of massive electoral fraud. After some rumblings of a challenge in the streets, he has now announced that he will appeal the results to Indonesia’s constitutional court.

    Jokowi, for his part, has now appeared in public to receive congratulations from former president and PDI-P head Megawati Sukarnoputri. It is meaningful that he appeared alongside Try Sutrisno, former head of the armed forces and vice president under former dictator Soeharto. Jokowi’s head security minister Wiranto (also a retired general) has been vocal in instructing Indonesians to respect the outcome.

    Meanwhile, events “in the streets” continue. There have been calls for an Indonesian “people power” movement of mass protests tomorrow in Jakarta. As I write this, the hardline Islamic Defenders’ Front, allied with Prabowo, is issuing instructions on how to mobilize. Most worryingly, Soenarko, former head of Indonesia’s special forces, has been arrest on charges of smuggling weapons to Jakarta for use in anti-Jokowi protests. Wiranto and others have warned that Jakarta faces a heightened risk of terrorism as a result of these and other developments.

    Circling back—so are elections the only game in town in Indonesia? And as Davidson argues, is this even a useful question to ask? The answer to both is a resounding “it depends.”

    Although street politics and threats of violence are clearly non-electoral modes of political participation, it is important to stress that these are protests about the election outcome. They allege not that elections are illegitimate or should be scrapped, but rather that the elections were conducted unfairly (somehow). Prabowo would not have challenged the results had he won, and the argument will be that he actually should have. It remains the case that both incumbent and opposition act as if the proper way to allocate political authority is to win an election.*** This is not up for public debate, consistent with the idea that elections really are the only game in town for deciding who the president is.

    In my read, the more worrying observation for Indonesian democracy is actually that Jokowi appears to rely on his visible connections to ex-military elites like Try and Wiranto to convey that a non-electoral challenge to the election results will be met with a decisive military response. This suggests that there might be “another game in town” for allocating political authority—mobilization and violence—but it observable manifestations are off the equilibrium path. We don’t observe anti-regime violence because the incumbent has has so internalized the threat of anti-regime violence that he has created a credible deterrent. Watch this space.

    More broadly, these events suggest to me that the democratic consolidation framework is still relevant to analyzing Indonesian politics. Davidson is right that there are plenty of other ways to conceptualize the challenges facing Indonesian politics, and these warrant attention. But even if we cannot know whether or not elections really are the only game in town, posing the question this way is clarifying for understanding what is at stake in Prabowo’s response to the election results. For better or for worse, this “static outcome” (the 2019 presidential election) is important, because elections quite plainly lie at the heart of democracy. At Davidson’s urging, though, we might think more about how this single outcome interacts with other political processes that unfold over time, such as opposition consolidation, military reform, money politics, oligarchic capture, and others.

    NOTE

    * Ahem. “Element.”
    ** “Soenarko” 🤭
    *** I do not think it matters whether Jokowi or Prabowo really “believes in” elections or democracy.

  • The True Nature of Trump’s Presidential Power

    Just over two years ago, I described the problem of inferring how strong or weak a leader is from the political outcomes that we observe. What prompted that discussion was the hullabaloo surrounding the first couple weeks of the Trump administration—the Muslim ban, the reorganization of the White House, Bannon and Kushner, and so forth. It is easy to recall the panicked reactions by many in the commentariat.

    My point was that the worst interpretations of the Trump administration’s chaos are observationally equivalent with more innocuous ones. That is because, as I wrote,

    weak leaders often act like strong leaders, and strong leaders often act like they are indifferent. Weak leaders have every incentive to portray themselves as stronger than they are in order to get their way. They gamble on splashy policies. They escalate crises. This is just as true for democrats as for dictators…The consummate strong ruler is one who does not issue any command or instruction at all because she does not have to—her will is implemented already.

    In the ensuing two years, we have learned quite a bit about just how weak and ineffective the president is. The best commentary on Trump’s presidential weakness comes from Matt Glassman. See, for example, this magisterial thread, following Neustadt‘s analysis of presidential power.

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    Although what I wrote in 2017 is correct, and although I also endorse Glassman’s analysis, both are vulnerable to a radical critique that a conventional analysis of presidential power will miss. His power is not to convince, or to set the agenda, but to define for others what their interests are.

    This distinction between influence, coercion, and agenda-setting, on one hand, and domination and interest-making, on the other, follows the classic “faces of power” debate in political science as articulated by Bachrach and Baratz (PDF) and Lukes (PDF). Their analyses are rich and subtle, but the essence of the “third face” of power is that a A exerts power over B by defining for B what B‘s interests and desires actually are.

    This view of power as domination and interest-making has quotidian applications: I expose my children to certain types of music in order to ensure that they grow up liking that music, for example. In the political sphere, the third face of power encompasses the power to socialize others into believing in a particular order of things, to habituate individuals to an acceptable state of affairs, to shape desires in a way that may leave the subject unaware that this has ever occurred.

    This third face of power is challenging. It would be very hard to observe this kind of power in action, because it operates through structures, habits, practices, and impressions rather than through commands or rules. Moreover, you cannot query the subject about whether power has been exerted over her, because the essence of this view of power is that the subject is probably unaware that it exists.* It also has a tendency to remove agency from the subject, conceiving her as vulnerable to the whims of the powerful.

    Holding these caveats aside for now, what if it is power’s third face that defines the true nature of Trump’s presidential power? His is the power to dominate his co-partisans in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. This rationalizes the policy ineffectiveness of the Trump White House—just so long as we redefine President Trump’s core objectives as enriching himself and surviving in office. On that assumption, President Trump has been effective. He has made is copartisans believe that they wish to do the things that they do in defending his manifestly corrupt, morally bankrupt, and ineffective administration.

    There is abundant evidence that President Trump is a weak president when we conceptualize power as influence, coercion, or agenda-setting. Glassman’s analysis is spot-on in this regard. Even the Mueller report details instances of the President failing to do terrible things because he orders his subordinates to do them and they refuse.

    At the same time, President Trump has produced a Congress and an executive branch filled with conservative politicians who believe that this president may violate the Emoluments Clause, challenge the independence of the press and the Fed, apologize for literal Nazis, abandon free trade, conspire with the Russian government to interfere with U.S. elections, all without any threat of being held to account because Congress does not have the authority to check the executive branch. The word that I have used throughout to describe this phenomenon is domination, understood either in theoretical sense of Scott** or in the ethological sense of evolutionary psychology.

    Of course, the third face of power is the most contested face of power. Maybe President Trump’s co-partisans are just making a rational calculation about what serves their short term interests. They don’t really believe these things, they just say them because doing so is politically expedient, or they demur and ignore his ogrelike and venal behavior because they do get some policy goodies here and there. If so, then what I have written above is incorrect, and the observational equivalence problem that I described in 2017 applies here too. But the most radical view of power would suggest that we must take seriously the possibility that President Trump’s power is the power to dominate. *ahem*

    NOTE

    * Why, for instance, do I think that this is the best song of the 1960s?
    ** Scott, in fact, is useful as a critique of the third face of power, because he sees resistance as ever-present in the face of domination, and he clarifies that we may not observe resistance for the same reason that we may not observe domination.