Anthony Trollope, democracy, and Southeast Asia

I’ve done lots of long bus, train, and plane journeys this year. Bad for blogging, but good for reading.

One of my mainstays has been Anthony Trollope’s “political novels”, and I’m now half-way through the fourth of six.

Written in Britain in the 1860s and 1870s, these books strikingly depict how the path to parliamentary and democratic reform is not always strewn with roses.

Here we find a cast of very real MPs, whose array of virtues and vices clearly reminds us that the quality of democracy ultimately always depends on the quality of the human beings who translate its ideals into practice.

Here, too, is a relentless portrayal of the inseparability of money from democratic politics. Over the course of the series, the law is changed so that MPs are no longer able to enter Parliament by way of seats gifted by the nobility, and the rules for elections are gradually tightened. Nevertheless, able but poverty-stricken politicians clearly still need backing from rich people to get anywhere. Public campaigns are managed by agents whose last thought is the health of democracy. And the attempt to stamp out vote-buying runs up against an old-boys’-club mentality that may claim to hate the sin, but certainly cannot bring itself to condemn the sinner.

Here, as well, are depictions of the difficulties of running a party system. What does an MP do when his party and his ideals start to diverge? (And, yes, it was all “his” in those days – political women had to pull strings from the sidelines.) What does a party do, when one of its progressive ideas is unexpectedly championed by its conservative opponents?

At a time when SEA’s democracies face a host of challenges, and when the world’s older democracies hardly offer an inspiring model to emulate, it’s good to sometimes pause and remember that participatory politics involves much more than stirring slogans. Just desiring “freedom and democracy” is not going to be enough.

Creating and safeguarding participatory politics is a hard, uphill battle. There will certainly be reversals and compromises. There will always be much to condemn.

As Myanmar takes its next lurching steps into what we all sincerely hope will be a more democratic future, it will be good to keep remembering that democracy does not emerge anywhere like some beautiful foal from the womb of a thoroughbred – perfectly formed, admirable, and ready to run from day one.

Rather, this elusive but indispensable phenomenon is a much-stained, much-deformed piece of work, that has to be slowly knit together in the course of a sometimes sordid, often uninspiring, and certainly never-ending struggle. None of us – whether in old democracies, new democracies, or not-yet-democracies – can ever afford to rest on our laurels, and assume we’ve arrived.

Nor can we bleakly conclude that democracy’s stains and deformities mean it can never work, so we might as well give up and shout from the sidelines.

We can still travel hopefully, even while acknowledging that, on this particular journey, we are never likely to arrive exactly where we would like to be.