Category: Politics

Tom Friedman recently wrote a column in the New York Times about democracy and political freedom in the Middle East.  Friedman is normally pretty good, in my (TP) opinion.  He writes about big topics, and he makes sometimes controversial arguments, and he, like any good op ed columnist, seems to thrive on making people angry.  Just what I like.  But the disagreements with readers should come from taking controversial stands that involve making a normative judgment about the social world, not from getting the facts wrong.  Like, arguing that protectionism is a good idea is fair game, but saying that protectionism doesn’t exist is not, because that’s not correct.  Which is why Friedman’s repetition of the conservative mantra that political correctness in American universities prevented the US from promoting democracy in the Middle East is so lamentable.

Admittedly, I’m a sensitive guy on this subject.  I find diatribes against liberalism in academia particularly infuriating in terms of attacking the quality of research.  This is not to say that I embrace all aspects of intellectualism–the "no confidence vote" against Larry Summers at Harvard was ridiculous, and I believe that it was an irrational response by Harvard faculty against broaching a taboo academic subject.  But people who whine about ivory-tower liberalism being some sort of intellectual closemindedness haven’t spent any time in an American university.  I guarantee you, the quickest way to get tenure or funding is to take a controversial stand and defend it with good evidence.  Arguing is all that faculty members do in universities.

I’ve heard Friedman’s claim a number of times.  In essence, the claim is that in Western universities, in places like political science and anthropology departments and Middle East studies work groups, liberals had so hijacked the debate that debate never existed, at least in the 1990s. No one questioned the perserverance of dictatorship in Arab states, because to do so would be to ignore the values that Arab citizens have, or to not respect their own cultures.  Doing that would be "Orientalist", a term coined by Edward Said to refer to the tendency of Western scholars and citizens, in good post-colonial tradition, to view the East as different, weak, exotic, infantile, and in need of Western guidance.

OK.  I spent quite a lot of time in the 1990s going to conferences, attending classes, sitting in at seminars, watching panel discussions, and the like, at a university.  You could make the argument that this university (Brown) was one of the most liberal and politically correct in the country–in a bad way.  You’d be right…when I was a senior, a group of students stole a whole issue of the daily newspaper in a protest action for it having run an ad by David Horowitz, who claims that slavery reparations are wrong "and racist too."  Pretty dumb, to my mind.  I am also quite liberal and politically correct myself.  I say "Native American," I don’t believe that we should have 10 Commandments in public places, and I someday will probably walk around in a tweed jacket and affect a fake pseudo-British accent. I was part of the problem.

But there was no problem.  Friedman and his ilk are either misremembering, lying, or they just don’t know, when they talk about the intellectual climate of the 1990s.  Hardly anyone took the stand that Friedman is talking about.  If they did, it was seriously questioned.  People vigorously debated the subject, but few–if any–people viewed the existence of dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia as a good thing for citizens of the Middle East.  Even then, democracy was propounded as a superior political arrangement.  The problem–and this continues the problem–is that invading a country to make it democratic is a coarse tool, and it has costs.  The problem was how to make democracy happen given that American politicians, neoconservative, conservative, and liberal, had little interest in invading any countries, and most were content to keep the petrodollars flowing and contain Islamic radicalism.  Indeed, the suggestion that current neoconservatives were the ones who "thought up" democracy as a tool for reducing Islamic radicalism is laughable, and wrong.

So when we talk about the reluctance of American policy makers to truly promote democracy in the Third World before 9/11, let’s get it right.  Let’s not blame it on Volvo-driving, wine-drinking, politically correct intellectuals.  Let’s put the blame where it truly lies–squarely on the heads of the politicians since the 1960s who thought that they had better things to worry about.

The other day we were coming home from the gym in a taxi, which we do every day.  We hopped in, and the driver seemed nice enough, a nice Indian chap.  He asked what we were doing in Malaysia, a couple things like that.  He seemed particularly interested in my (TP) study of Malaysian politics.  Pretty soon I mentioned that I was studying Mahathir’s policies during the Asian Financial Crisis.  Well, he immediately exploded in a twenty-minute rant about his utter hatred for Mahathir.  We ended up driving slowly down the side of the highway while he screamed about how "that a-hole ruined this country!" and "don’t you dare say anything nice about him!"  (He didn’t say "a-hole," of course, but this is a family blog.)

At one point he picked up a newspaper on the side of his car (this is while driving slowly down the busy highway, answering his phone, and keeping an eye on us in the backseat so we got his point) and showed us that he had taken the time to scribble out Mahathir’s face from an article about him meeting with Nelson Mandela.  Every once in awhile he would turn around and say "I’m sorry lady, but that mutualfunder made the Malays stupid."

What’s his complaint, really?  Just another democrat upset that he lives in a dictatorship?  Probably a bit more complicated than that.  Malaysia’s complex ethnic makeup is no joke, of course.  What makes this ethnic mix so important is the fact that politics is tightly tied to ethnicity and redistribution.  Under the New Economic Policy, from 1970 to 1990, the government enacted a number of stringent policies aimed at eliminating the identfication of race with economic status and eliminating poverty.  What this meant was restructuring society to give ethnic Malays a greater share of the economic pie.  Under the British and in the first years of independence, Malaysia had a fragile agreement that the Malays got to control politics while the Chinese got to run the economy.  This is of course a simplification, but not that far from the truth.  We’ll expand on this more later, but politics since 1969, when racial riots between Chinese and Malays led to a suspension of the fake parliament and introduction of even more heavy-handed anti-democratic measures, has been a struggle to balance the demands of Malays for greater economic participation with the need to protect economic growth, largely determined by the investments of non-Malays.

So where does this Indian taxi driver fit in?  In many ways, Indians have gotten the worst of the deal.  The worst educated and poorest group in Malaysia is Indian women.  Many Indians, imported to work the rubber plantations in Malaya under British, remain in poor rural areas.  However, as they are not Malay or bumiputra (meaning "sons of the soil," a term for all so-called indigenous Malaysians), they experienced the same discrimination that Chinese experienced.  While the NEP has created a new Malay middle class and a number of new superrich Malay tycoons, Indians–in many ways occupying the same socio-economic niche as the Malays after independence–have received little attention.  Our driver, for example, was fired from his job in the 1970s as a doorman because Mahathir wanted all doormen in Malaysian hotels to be Malay (or so our driver claims). 

The term in Malaysia for affirmative action, meaning the promotion of Malay interests through special government programs that hold bumiputra equity in companies and give favorable treatment to Malays in education, politics, business, etc., is positive discrimination.  Talk about a loaded term.