Quo Vadis Democracy?

My mind was perplexed reading about Hillary Clinton’s 20 million USD of personal debt. Now there’s this call from Obama asking his party member to donate their hard earned cash for the already wealthy Clinton family.

Further reading about election, I found out that around 200 trillion IDR from the national budget would be used for 33 Governors and 473 Mayors and Regents Election.

That is an astronomical amount of money by any standard! We can build a lot of schools and hospitals in the entire archipelago for that bewitching sum.

Moreover, the number merely represents the formal cost of election. We can be sure there’s a lot more invisible outlay during the campaign process.

One easy example is; for any candidate to step forward, he or she would have to pocket endorsement from the local parliament and party. These are not free. One article mentions that the going rate is around 75 million IDR per endorsement. That means the candidate would have to provide capital in the range of 1 to 3 billion IDR.

There is no guarantee that after spending that money they would end up victorious. Consequently, they would do 'anything' to maximize their chance of winning.

It’s obvious that as soon as they win, first thing they would do is to make sure the capital they’ve spent will return some handsome profit. That’s not a good news for their constituent.

Usually people who benefit from this scheme are their inner circle. Now that’s why there are plenty of middlemen circling around government projects. Like any good vulture they are.

During our process to learn democracy, we also harbor potential conflict. Any sort of differences will be nurtured and escalated into a weapon for the candidates to win these gullible people’s support.

Almost no parties are able to lose gracefully. Maluku, West Java, and South Sulawesi are some of the cases proving this.

More often than not, the candidates are a collection of sleazy politicians and dodgy religious characters. Hence, for us it feels a lot like choosing the lesser evil.

I wonder what happens in other country. Is there any true democracy around?

From my understanding of American brand of democracy, their policies mostly influenced by lobbyists and wealthy industrialists (weapons and oil). People who back up the politicians financially in the first place.

The difference is most of its citizens are educated enough not too fight in the street during a campaign.

I understand that democracy in Indonesia is only young. I’m not suggesting that we should scrap the system altogether. However, any discourse about an alternative civil society in the end would prove whether democracy is the one and only proper way of nationhood.

After doing some research, we can divide the alternatives into two categories:

Anarchism; this includes Anarchist-communism, Anarcho-capitalism, Anarcho-primitivism, Libertarian socialism, etc.

Authoritarianism; are Autocracy, Aristocracy, Communist state, Corporatism, Despotism, Dictatorship, Monarchy, Theocracy, etc.

None of the above sounds too promising.

How about Pancasila’s type of Democracy, is there such a thing? This is the task for our bureaucrats and technocrats to ponder. When they have finished pondering, I’d hope they enlighten us little people. As, in my observation, very few of us live by the way of Pancasila these days.

Maybe democracy is indeed expensive and we all have to pay for it, at least for now.

In the mean time, we can always muse and blog.