The moral centre of gravity

General elections are such intense events with so much written about the issues, the campaigns and the results during the last month that I feel quite intimidated about saying anything about it.

However, there is one little thing nagging at me that I must write about. It is that throughout the campaign period and in the week after the polling day, just about everyone around me with an opinion to offer about Singapore politics has been anti-People's Action Party to some degree or other. This was true in the office, at dinner parties, on the internet, at home, even at business lunches! The views were similar whether coming from radicalised undergraduates, or golf-club directors whom one would have thought should be pillars of the establishment. They came from secretaries and stockbrokers, lab technicians and lawyers.

Yet, when the results came in, 65% of the electorate voted for PAP candidates. True, the electorate was not the entire voting population of Singapore; more the half the constituencies had walk-overs and never got to vote. Mine, for example, was a walk-over too. Perhaps, most of my friends came from the non-voting constituencies; perhaps my circle of friends, colleagues and family was completely untypical of Singapore, drawn from a pool of armchair critics. Maybe, maybe, but I doubt it. My circle of friends stretch across a wide spectrum of age groups; at work, they cover diverse social strata and ethnic groups. And business contacts are not even people I choose, they come by force of circumstances. As for the views posted on the internet, most of the time I didn't even know who they were. I really do not think that the views I was getting were unrepresentative of the opinions circulating in Singapore.

Consider also, the moods at the rallies held by the parties. While I did not attend any, I heard first-hand reports from many who did. Almost unanimously, they described the opposition parties' rallies as enthusiastically attended -- sometimes the sports stadiums were full to overflowing -- with spontaneous cheering and chanting. The PAP rallies were reported to have had relatively smaller crowds, and none of the same spirit in the audience. Two unconnected persons told me that people were marshalled and bussed in to make up the numbers at the PAP rallies.

Of course, anyone with some idea of Singapore's history will be able to tell you that opposition parties' rallies are traditionally better attended than the ruling party's. They are more entertaining, more earthy, and they cathartically vocalise the frustrations that the average Singaporean feels. Also, people happily travel well out of their own constituencies to attend opposition rallies, and so the size of the crowds do not correlate well with the voting numbers in any given locality. Still it must have been very emboldening to go to one and see 30,000 people (and bear in mind that in Singapore the ratio of voters to a Member of Parliament is around 20,000:1) jampacked in a stadium, not just on the bleaches, but solid over the centre field too, with thousands more outside trying to park their cars or lining the balconies of the nearby flats. Imagine the mood of such an event!

Yet the opposition received only a shade more than a third of the votes cast.

This gap between the 'sound and fury' and the actual votes is what nags me. Its seems to me that the opposing voices are speaking up like never before, while the majority who continued to vote for the PAP kept quiet through the campaign. On the public level, the debate was between the Opposition and the PAP. On the private level, the debate, if you can call it that, was amazingly one-sided. Lots of people voiced opposition sentiments, none argued for the PAP.

There is no easy way of knowing what the PAP voters felt. Certainly there are commentators who claim that the voters' hearts were with the opposition, but in the light of the threats that their neighbourhoods would be allowed to degenerate into slums, and in fear of losing out on an MRT station or precinct improvement schemes, they quietly voted PAP in the ballot booths. Maybe so, but unless someone carries out a survey, we don't know.

In any case, that is rather beside my point. Focus on the fact that at the people level, the pro-Opposition proudly wore their views on their sleeves and cheered them at their rallies, while hardly anyone (certainly none that I came across) spoke up for the PAP, and we have an interesting phenomenon. It looks like a situation where for the layman the PAP position has become publicly indefensible; the best one could do was to lie low and cast one's vote, almost furtively, on polling day. Whether people voted for them out of conviction or expedience is not important. Even if many voted out of conviction, none spoke up!

A parallel to this that I can think of is the question of cruelty to animals. The arguments are almost all one-sided. Cruelty to animals is bad. It is just not done to argue the reverse. It doesn't mean that there is no cruelty to animals anymore. Far from it; people continue to do abominable things. But nobody will willingly own up to it, and no one can publicly defend it. The moral centre of gravity is entirely on one side.

My Singapore readers can list a thousand reasons why the moral centre of gravity may have shifted from the PAP government. I shan't pre-empt the fun and satisfaction they will have in doing so.

But I wanted to point this out because it is a very worrying trend. There is only a very fine line between loss of moral authority and loss of legitimacy. It would be a disaster should things move on to the latter, a really big mess to fix.

But 65% of the vote is a solid win, one may point out. Yes, for now. But if looking beyond the numbers, you see what I see, then there are grounds for worry. The vocal opinion leaders in Singapore society now appear to be predominantly on the anti-PAP side. Over time, this may lead to a hollowing out of PAP support. Already in this election, we are seeing it. It seems that a significant section are voting for the PAP not so much out of conviction for what it stands for, but because they cannot afford not to. The support is soft. The heart is not in it. And they don't seem to be proud of their choice.

© Yawning Bread 

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