Page 154 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Chapter Eight

Media and Civil Society

To live in freedom one must grow used to a life full of agitation, change and
danger; to keep alert the whole time with a restless eye on everything around:
that is the price of freedom.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland

By 2014 Indonesia was coming to the end of a twenty-year period of politi-
cal change that off ers insights into the precarious process of democratization. The
country’s successful postauthoritarian transition raises a key question: How does
democracy—from the cultivation of norms to the maintenance of institutions—
become self-perpetuating, or at least resilient, over the longer term? Societies aspir-
ing to this stage of democratic consolidation face a near-universal challenge from
democratization’s inherent inclination toward reversal. As Indonesia’s experience
during the post- reformasi decade of 2004 to 2014 illustrates, a nation’s media can
play a significant role in breaking up the collusive intraelite pacts whose sum is

often reversion to authoritarianism or a slide into pseudodemocracy.
During this transitional period in Indonesia, contending forces were arrayed,
despite changes in composition over time, between two broad sectors. One was estab-
lished elites who had accrued assets or systemic advantage during the long Suharto
era and had much to gain from reversal. The other was a coalition of prodemocracy
forces who drew institutional strength from reform-oriented government agencies
and enjoyed periodic mass support, often mobilized by the still-independent actors
in the media.
If democracy is, as the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright argues,
“among the most fragile” forms of government, then this fragility is even more pro-
nounced in postauthoritarian nations where entrenched elites have ample resources
to push for a restoration of the old order. In Indonesia’s protracted transition, we
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see constant pressure by reactionary elements, first, to discredit, dismantle, or co-opt
the agencies promoting the integrity of the democratic process, and second, to enact
legislation that would privilege and protect colluding elites.
As an established economic bloc, Suharto’s family and cronies retained enormous
wealth in cash and corporations that could readily fund lawsuits, legislative initia-
tives, and electoral campaigns to accelerate this tendency toward reversal. By contrast,
prodemocracy forces were a mass movement taking crisis-driven action to defend
progress already achieved. The nation’s media played a mixed role, but overall fur-
thered democratic consolidation by serving as not only vehicles of reform-oriented
mobilization, but also purveyors of scandal and sites of heated, at times vituperative,
contestation.