Congratulations, America! … Also, Condolences In Advance.
By: Sebastian Ng
Tags: Biden, Democrats, US Elections, Malaysia, 2020 Presidential Race

Dear Americans:

Congratulations are due, you did it! Enjoy this honeymoon period, because … yeah, it’s not gonna last very long.

Here’s why I say so, and I promise I’m not being facetious. (I also waited a few weeks before getting this published, didn’t want to spoil your post-election victory bliss.) You see, one of the uncanny things about your election, is the strange amount of parallels there have been with our sensational election in Malaysia in 2018 — with a two-year lag in how those parallels played out.

Former Prime Minister Najib Razak – our version of your Pres. Trump. He ruled during 2009–2018, and was the first PM to be tried in court for criminal charges.

You see, you had an insanely corrupt, thin-skinned, slogan-loving, and not-very-bright leader that was enabled and coddled by a coterie of yes-men that you were desperate to remove, and it caused former political enemies to band together in desperation to defeat the bigger existential evil — and you succeeded! So did we.

#pulangmengundi, a movement which emerged organically on social media where Malaysians volunteered to help each other get home to their constituencies to vote, through transportation or donations.

You had to fight against a party that was actively engaging in voter suppression, making it harder (or impossible) to send in your ballots in time, which drove your grassroots movement to help each other to get the ballots in. So did we. (To know more how Malaysians did this, see this short documentary.)

You Yanks had 77-year-old Joe Biden, who’s sometimes accused of senility. We had 92-year-old Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who’s still revered for his sharp wit. (He was recently embroiled in a social media faux pas, but that’s another story.)

You had to trust an old geezer — who happened to be an old hand in politics, who turned out to be less senile than everyone thought—to lead the Opposition to come together and defeat the corrupt leader. So did we.

Dr. Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, the reluctant politician, who became Malaysia’s first female Deputy Prime Minister.

You appointed a female deputy leader candidate, whose win is a historic first for the nation. So did we.

And after the election was over, it was fairly clear that the result was gravitating towards the Opposition party, but the corrupt leader couldn’t believe it, and employed delay tactics for as long as possible before having to concede. (I know Trump will never directly concede, but reports indicate he knows he lost.) So did ours.

But eventually victory is arrived, and celebrated. That relief and happiness that drove you into the streets to celebrate, that was us in May 2018. I remember the two days after our election, I was living on a non-drug-induced high. People around me remarked that it felt like a second Independence for the country.

Now, two years after that? We’re living in a bit of a hellhole here in Malaysia. And I see it in your future too.

The new Cabinet of the Pakatan Harapan government (2018–2020).

What had happened was the Malaysians who voted for the New Government demanded too much. (This is a gross simplification and generalisation, but bear with me, because to get into the murky analysis of what collapsed the Pakatan Harapan government would require five times more words to explain, without it being useful to you, the non-Malaysian reader.)

The purists were hopeful that the New Government would bring swift change to the political system and make everyone’s lives better — basically, the stuff that was promised in the election campaign manifesto. And well, the New Government was simply unable to enact all those promised changes, for all kinds of reasons, not always their fault. As a result, after a few months, there were complaints to high heaven about the New Government being useless, incompetent, and most jarring of all: “NO DIFFERENT FROM THE LAST GOVT”. At the same time, the New Opposition were naturally relentless in the way they attacked the New Government. (Like Mitch McConnell’s Republicans, it’s not really about policy, it’s purely about weakening their opponents.)

Besieged from both their enemies and their own supporters, after just 22 months, the New Government crumbled in a political coup, when some of its own politicians betrayed the coalition and joined the New Opposition, who then ganged up and formed the New Old Government. Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve been living with an essentially unelected, usurper New Old Government, run by a curious assortment of politicians from both the New Opposition and the New Government, and in these last ten months, their idiocy, insolence, and incompetence have been angering the supporters of the New Government, screwing up the lives of everyone to varying degrees, but yet still commanding the enthused backing of supporters of the Old Government (the way Trump supporters are still embracing Trump in cult-like style even now).

Now, in your American system, the President will be a Democrat for the next four years, no question, no matter what happens to Biden. However, you have the midterms coming up in 2022. So if things in America play out in parallel with what’s happened to us in Malaysia so far, here’s what I think will happen.

Progressive Democrats will complain to high heaven by early next year that Biden is betraying the will of the people, because he didn’t push Democratic policies far enough to their liking. Some will call him a Republican hiding in Democratic skin, because he’ll have to work with Republicans to pass some laws (which requires negotiation and compromise, which to some rabid Democrats will seem like excessive friendliness to Mitch McConnell’s Republicans).

Some will begin to say that Biden is not much different from Clinton (… or Trump).

Americans who really needed help (in terms of healthcare or jobs, say) are not going to get that help as quickly as they expected as a result of well-meaning members of Congress’s self-righteous purist stances, and Americans will then blame the Biden-Harris administration (not those members of Congress) for failing to live up to their promises — and there’s nothing you can do to explain to their ignorant minds that governments can’t make things happen with a snap of their fingers, or that responsible government requires them to attend to the needs of Trump supporters as much as those who voted for Biden.

Disillusionment will set in quickly, just a few months into 2021, if not weeks. By early 2022, as politicians gear up for the midterms, everyone’ll be fatigued by the infighting. Even the moderates and centrists will lose hope in the Democrats.

Republicans will manage their PR well enough that they will continue to appear heroic to their base, while seeming to some Biden voters that … actually, Republicans don’t seem to be as evil as they remembered back in 2020, huh. Mid-terms come, and voila, the Democrats will lose badly — no matter how much good they’ve accomplished in the two years leading up to it, no matter how much of Trump’s damage they’ve reversed. Republicans will get all the credit for it. Democrats will get no thanks for all their efforts.

The American people will possibly suffer even worse in their lives in 2023 and 2024 under a Republican House and Senate. But they will still think it’s all the Democrats’ fault.

What of Trump? Well, it’s been over two years, and our corrupt former PM, Najib, has been charged in court with dozens of criminal suits, but he’s barely been in court, because his lawyer has been deferring the case time after time for dubious-sounding but legally-permissible reasons. He’s still a Member of Parliament as of now, since he is yet to be convicted. He continues to tweet, making fun of the government all the time. His base is still strong, and they still think he did no wrong, often echoing his latest slogan #ApaMaluBossku (“what’s my leader got to be ashamed of?”). Trump will do similarly fine (with an added TV network, and probably monthly rallies to boost his ego).

So, don’t count on Trump to go to jail so soon.

Of course, none of these may happen, or, more likely, they won’t happen in exactly this fashion. But so far, everything that has happened in America in 2020 (including Trump losing) has followed a predictable trajectory based on our experiences here in Malaysia:

Essentially, well-meaning voices in your political system will fail to recognise the inherent asymmetry in politics where it is easier for evil to gain power than it is for good to rule by sincere principles (and the more pure that strive to act on principle, the easier it is for good to lose power to evil in the short term, which then shrinks the ability for good to return to power in the long term).

Your future is still bleak, America.

Don’t relax.