An edited version of this opinion piece first appeared in the 14 July 2022 issue of The Jakarta Post.

How preoccupied is America with its own domestic problems? To the point of impairing the ability of President Biden’s administration to give Indonesia and Southeast Asia the foreign-policy attention they deserve?

The Group of Twenty’s meetings are now at or near the top of the Indonesian foreign ministry’s list of things to do. Foreign minister Retno Marsudi has worried, amid talk of boycotts, that Moscow-Washington animosity over Ukraine could ruin the G20 summit in Bali this November, to the embarrassment of its Indonesian host and chair. Presumably to her relief, Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to Indonesia to attend in person the preparatory G20 foreign ministers meeting that she hosted and chaired in Bali on 7-8 July 2022, and he did so despite the participation of his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov.  In addition to holding a one-on-one session with Marsudi, Blinken also met with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi for a discussion of US-China relations that reportedly lasted five hours. Indonesia can take pride in having made that lengthy interaction possible. 

The foreign ministers’ meeting was not without drama. Twice, in response to criticism of Russia, Lavrov walked out of the room, and he left the conference altogether before it ended. Perhaps he forgot that in democracies, praise is not required.  But things in Bali could have gotten much worse, and in that sense America’s presence throughout the event helped save Indonesia’s face.

Biden’s administration has not neglected Indonesia or Southeast Asia, as recent diplomacy shows. In May he accommodated the priority on economic development favored by Indonesia and other Asian states by traveling to Japan to announce the formation of an Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF). Its 14 founding partners, including Indonesia and six other ASEAN members, account for 40 percent of global GDP. Earlier in May, in Washington, DC, Biden hosted a special summit with Indonesia and other ASEAN states. Their Joint Vision Statement with the US, as in IPEF, emphasized economic cooperation.

None of this diplomacy, however, could temper the strident political polarization that continues to disrupt America. Understandably, that frenzy of distrust and dissension has led some Indonesians to wonder how reliable a partner the US will turn out to be in years to come.    

The splitting of many Americans into rival partisan camps is in part structural. For example, compared with better-educated urban and suburban dwellers, less well-educated rural and small-town Americans are more likely to hold right-wing Republican views. The reasons why those views have become more extreme include the popularity of Donald Trump and his anti-democratic if not proto-fascistic campaign to re-install himself in the White House after losing the free and fair election of 2020.  His effort, Republican complicity in it, and the backlash against it have widened the separation of often coastal or near-coastal Democratic states from Republican ones more or less clustered in middle and southern America. Political scientist and statistician Simon Jackman goes so far as to argue that the US has not been this divided politically since the Great Depression of the 1930s—or possibly even since the 1860s Civil War.

The Vanderbilt University Project on Unity and American Democracy chooses the longer timeline. “Not since the Civil War,” it concludes, “have so many Americans held such radically opposed views not just of politics but of reality itself.” The project’s own findings, however, undermine the caricature of a country fatally hobbled by national schizophrenia and group delusions. 

The Vanderbilt Unity Index combines quarterly data from 1981 to 2021 on five variables—presidential disapproval, congressional polarization, ideological extremism, social mistrust, and civil unrest—to calculate changes in American national unity across those four decades on a 0-to-100 scale, from least to most unified. Over that period of time, the index has fluctuated in a close to middling zone between 50 and 70 on that 100-point scale. 

The index shows deep plunges in unity only twice since 1981, and both of those dives were linked to the uniquely calamitous presidency of President Trump. In contrast, the average score during the first five quarters of the Biden administration has been 58, a sharp improvement from the average of 51 under Trump. Heartened by that betterment, two of the Vanderbilt scholars surmise that America’s “disharmony may be dissipating.”

That could be an overoptimistic guess. Unity is one thing, victory another. Legislative elections will be held on 8 November this year. As of the end of June, prominent forecaster Nate Silver gave the still largely Trump-beholden Republican Party an 87 percent chance — a near-certainty — of replacing Biden’s Democrats as the majority party in the House of Representatives. The race for a majority in the Senate was too close to call. But even if Republicans control only the House, they will likely use that platform to undermine Biden’s administration during his final two years in office.      

As if likely losses of legislative power were not enough for Biden to worry about, maneuvers by Republicans to stack the Supreme Court with right-wing partisans have tilted that juridical balance steeply in their favor. The court’s new reactionary 6-to-3 majority has already made two shocking decisions. They have, in effect, denied women their long-standing right to abortion and made it easier to carry a concealed gun in public. Republicans claim to support individual rights. But they and their court appointees have deleted the long-standing constitutional right of a pregnant woman to decide whether to give birth or not, thereby depriving her of assured responsibility over her physical body and personal future. 

Regarding gun violence, in barely five months from 1 January through 5 June of this year, America has experienced 246 mass shootings — incidents that kill or wound four or more people. That puts the US on track in 2022 to match or exceed its record of 692 mass shootings in 2021, more than in any year since the Gun Violence Archive began counting them. The Republican-majority court’s unconscionable impulses seem to be to make women make more babies, wanted or not, and to make murders more likely as well.

There is good news. First, a massive popular backlash against these Republican decisions has either begun or is likely. Second, a nationally televised Congressional investigation of the violent attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 has displayed the complicity of Trump, and by association the Trump-infected Republican Party, in an insurrection that killed at least seven people and injured roughly 150 more. Third, although Trump may not end up where he belongs, namely, in jail, at least he faces Republican rivals for the party’s nomination to run for president in 2024. Conceivably those rivals could come to include a candidate who is politically more moderate and personally less criminal, corrupt, and narcissistic than he. 

President Joko Widodo will host the G20 leaders in Indonesia merely one week after the 8 November 2022 midterm legislative election takes place in the US. Will Biden go again to Bali? Not if at that time right-wing fanatics claiming election fraud are destabilizing America. For long-term interactions between Jakarta and Washington relations, however, what will matter is not who will attend the 2022 G20 summit in Bali. It will be the names and plans of the Indonesians and Americans who will run and win in the national elections to be held in their respective countries in 2024.

Donald K. Emmerson heads the Southeast Asia Program at Stanford University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. His recent publications include an edited volume, The Deer and the Dragon: Southeast Asia and China in the 21^st Century.

The American Institute for Indonesian Studies and Michigan State University Asian Studies Center are holding the inaugural Conference on Indonesian Studies this week, June 23-26, 2021. The conference's theme is "Indonesian Studies — Paradigms and New Frontiers." On June 24, APARC's Southeast Asia Program Director Donald K. Emmerson delivered a keynote address, "Scholarship, Autonomy, and Purpose: Issues in Indonesian Studies." Watch the session below:

The Conference on Indonesian Studies seeks to expand research dissemination, activities, and collaboration on the academic study of Indonesia to better understand the archipelago's historical, cultural, linguistic, literary, artistic, economic, environmental, and political dimensions, as well as its role in the Indo-Pacific and the world. The conference connects scholars and academic communities from multiple disciplines based in Indonesia, the United States, the Asia-Pacific, and other global contexts.

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Emmerson draws from his recent book, The Deer and the Dragon: Southeast Asia and China in the 21st Century, to frame the struggle Indonesia faces. Internally, Indonesia faces challenges to its democracy and in managing political and cultural diversity. Externally, there is the challenge of trying to simultaneously work within the often-fractured and disunified structure of ASEAN while still rebutting pressures from China.

In this sense, Indonesia must behave as the mousedeer in local folklore and nimbly navigate around its larger rivals with clever politics and policies. But the realities of the situation are much more complicated. Emmerson and Wirjawan take a deep dive into Indonesia's history, culture, politics, and position in the region and how those factors may affect the country's trajectory towards an endgame. Below is the video version of their conversation.

This op-ed by Donald K. Emmerson first appeared in The Jakarta Post.

Above all, Trump wanted to be a winner. History granted his wish. He is the first president in the 245-year life of his country to have been impeached twice. By that standard, he won the title of America’s Worst President (AWP)—worse than any of the 44 presidents who preceded him.

AWP rhymes with 'gawp,' and that’s what he also wanted: to be stared at, talked about, catered to, the center of fawning attention, unforgettably present, dominating the news, astride the world in which the news is made. He wanted applause. His ravenous insecurity—narcissism—inflated his ego to continental size. In effect, in his authoritarian imagination, the “extremely stable genius” that he called himself deserved to be the indispensable “me” in “America,” without which the country’s name and the country itself would crumble.

The roars and chants of Trump’s crowds slaked his thirst for veneration. But they imprisoned him in his “base.” By satisfying his craving to be idolized, they gave him no reason to convince the unimpressed. How much more gratifying it must have been for him to bask in mass flattery at rallies than to engage in the difficult business of persuading the uncommitted. That would have taken assets he lacked: empathy, knowledge, intelligence, and a willingness not to lie.

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So how could Americans have elected such a demagogue? Trump was corrupt but charismatic. He broke the rules. He said whatever was on his mind. He appealed to the streak of individualism in American culture. He ran his campaign and his presidency as a mass entertainment featuring a lone patriot fighting a “deep state” controlled by globalist elites. Especially in rural areas between Silicon Valley and the Boston-to-Washington corridor, millions of white Americans felt threatened by the transfer of jobs from physical toward mental labor in a computerized society whose racial make-up was increasingly non-white. Globalization fed those anxieties. Trump stoked them. He promised to end them and “make America great again.”

Joe Biden defeated Trump in both the popular vote and the Electoral College—respectively by 4.4 and 13.7 percent. Biden’s margins were narrower than one might have wished, given the blatant flaws in Trump’s character, including the 30,573 false or misleading claims that he made during his presidency as tracked and noted by The Washington Post . The egregiousness of his behavior is, however, a double testament to America’s democratic system: to its failure to select a less despicable leader, yes, but also to its success in providing the lawful framework within which his desperate effort to stage what in Latin America would be called an autogolpe or “self-coup” could be and was overcome.

On 1 February 2021, watching television at his 126-room estate in Palm Beach, Florida, ex-president Trump would have learned of the coup in Myanmar and might have envied Senior General Min Aung Hlaing. Both men had been banned by Facebook for inciting violence in their respective countries—Trump in 2021, the general in 2018. Both had suffered defeats in elections held just five days apart in 2020—3 November in the US, 8 November in Myanmar. Both had rejected the voters’ verdict, claiming fraud. But whereas Trump’s frantic and deadly effort to subvert the US election and retain power failed, Min Aung Hlaing’s self-coup has succeeded, at least for now. The general quickly seized full power despite his party’s massive embarrassment at the polls in November, Aung San Suu Kyi’s party having won 83 percent of the available seats. In contrast, Trump could not reverse his exit from power despite a far slimmer margin of electoral defeat. To the extent that the ex-president was even aware of the difference, it could have fanned what angry envy of the general he may have felt.

Trump failed mainly due to the checks and balances that generally call government to account in America. Min Aung Hlaing succeeded in no small part thanks to the checks and balances in the bank accounts of the generals who have compromised Myanmar’s transition to democracy and helped make it the second most corrupted country in Southeast Asia (after Cambodia) as measured by the Corruption Perceptions Index.

Among the many reactions to the Burmese coup, several stand out for their courage and creativity. UN Secretary General António Guterres was unequivocal. "It's absolutely unacceptable,” he said, “to reverse the result of the elections and the will of the people.” Presumably speaking on behalf of the UN, its secretariat, or himself, or all three, he went further: "We'll do everything we can to mobilize all the key actors of the international community to put enough pressure on Myanmar to make sure that this coup fails." 

This notable response came from Indonesia’s former foreign minister Marty Natalegawa: “Deafening silence in the face of assaults against democratic principles [has] increasingly become the norm,” he said. He urged ASEAN to “demonstrate its relevance: It must speak urgently for the respect of constitutional process and rule of law in Myanmar, and call for the immediate release of those unlawfully detained.”

In the days immediately following the coup, ASEAN’s Bruneian secretary general said nothing about it, preferring to remain, in the Indonesian expression, “silent in a thousand tongues.” Speaking for ASEAN as its current chair, however, Brunei’s government did at least encourage a “return to normalcy in accordance with the will and interests of the people of Myanmar,” noting that the group charter’s called for adherence to “democracy, the rule of law” and “human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

As for ASEAN’s next chair, Cambodia, its strongman Hun Sen did speak, but only to say that "Cambodia does not comment on the internal affairs of any country at all.” Hun Sen’s restraint made historical sense. Had Cambodia’s old despot chosen to criticize Myanmar’s new despot, observers could have noted that Min Aung Hlaing had only done what Hun Sen himself had bloodily accomplished in 1997 by seizing full control over Cambodia in a self-coup of his own that had enabled him to become the longest-serving prime minister in the world.

Critical Southeast Asian voices, unconstrained by look-the-other-way diplomacy, have been heard. The chairman of the ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights, Charles Santiago, has urged ASEAN to send a high-level delegation to Myanmar to tell Min Aung Hlaing that his coup “violates ASEAN principles and the ASEAN charter” and is “not acceptable.” “If Myanmar does not turn around,” he added, “there should be proceedings to expel Myanmar out of ASEAN.”

Who is better positioned to deal with this crisis than ASEAN’s largest and debatably least authoritarian member country? It was Indonesia’s Natalegawa who patched up ASEAN’s consensus after Hun Sen damaged it on China’s behalf in 2012. And it is Natalagewa who believes, with the Myanmar coup in mind, that “at this critical juncture for the region, Indonesia must demonstrate its leadership within ASEAN.”

Indonesia’s president Jokowi, rather than trying to rally the region against the coup, will likely continue to focus on domestic economic growth. Not to mention the existential priority that COVID-19 also warrants on his agenda.

So why not task Natalegawa with a damage-control trip around the region comparable the one he took with some success in 2012? He could start with fact-finding in Myanmar. He could then explore an intra-ASEAN understanding that would reassert the core democratic values in the ASEAN Charter while lessening, if possible, the chance that Myanmar will revert to entrenched and fully authoritarian rule. That may be a lost cause. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Although Donald Trump is no longer in office, America is still not safe from Trumpism. But America’s system—democracy—is working as it should. Is ASEAN really a dictators’ club? Or does it, too, when threatened from within, have a system that can at least manage and minimize the damage that is, in Myanmar as I write this, being done?

The 2018 blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians is many people’s first and only experience seeing Southeast Asia portrayed onscreen. Kevin Kwan’s enthralling, uber-rich characters jet-set across glittering scenes of cosmopolitan Singapore and paradisiacal beaches in Malaysia. But for Gerald Sim, APARC’s 2016-17 Lee Kong Chian Fellow at the Southeast Asia Program, the scope of cinema in Southeast Asia is much broader than the occasional Hollywood breakout success.

In a new book, Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema, Sim examines how countries in Southeast Asia navigate the legacies of their unique colonial histories through film media. His writing focuses on Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia and how their cultural identities and postcolonial experiences are stylistically portrayed across commercial films, art cinema, and experimental works.

Sim explores the nuance of these works beyond the typical tropes of hybridity and syncretism in postcolonial identity. His analysis unpacks themes such as Singapore’s preoccupation with space, the importance of sound in Malay culture, and the ongoing investment Indonesia has made into genre and storytelling. Taken together, the book helps situate the regional cinematic traditions and local ideologies in the broader narrative of globalization.

The book builds on research Sim undertook as a fellow at APARC with support from the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellowship on Southeast Asia. He is currently an associate professor of Film and Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University, where he continues to teach about and research the thriving but understudied contributions of Southeast Asian film to world cinema.

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinemas will be available for purchase from Amsterdam University Press on September 1.

Read Amsterdam University Press' interview with Sims about the book.

Indonesia’s latest and current experiment with democracy is twenty years old. The fifth national election to be held during that period is set to occur on 17 April 2019. More than 190 million Indonesians are eligible to vote. Those who do will elect the country’s president and vice-president and legislators at four different levels—national, provincial, district, and municipal. Since the collapse of General Suharto’s authoritarian regime in 1998, there have been no coups, and the process of campaigning and balloting every five years has proven to be peaceful with remarkably few and small exceptions.  So far so good. 

Regarding the top slot, this fifth election is a re-run of the fourth.  In 2014, Joko Widodo (“Jokowi”) ran for president against Prabowo Subianto and won.  The two men face each other again.  For the 2019 race, Jokowi picked Mar’uf Amin to be his vice-president; Prabowo picked Sandiaga Uno to be his.  All four men are Muslims.

Compared with Prabowo, Jokowi is a man of the people.  Jokowi is the first-ever Indonesian president with a non-elite background.  His first career was not in politics, and not in Indonesia’s megalopolis and capital, Jakarta, but in small business in Central Java.  He made and sold wood furniture in Surakarta, a city a fraction of Jakarta’s size.  He benefited from having begun his political career as Surakarta’s first directly elected mayor.  That post afforded him face-to-face contact with his constituents and gained him popularity based on his success in reforming governance, reducing corruption, and improving public services. 

Jokowi burnished that reputation as the elected governor of Jakarta.  Among his accomplishments on that larger scale were socioeconomic betterment and attention to public transportation.  Construction of Indonesia’s very first subway system began in Jakarta on Jokowi’s watch.  To his political advantage, the project’s first phase—ten miles of underground and elevated track—was completed and opened to the public in March 2019 mere weeks before the national election in April.

Prabowo’s father was a leading figure in Indonesia’s economy, diplomacy, and politics.  Prabowo was schooled in Europe before returning to Indonesia to embark upon a 24-year career in the army.  He rose to the rank of a lieutenant general, but his record was marred by association with violence and insubordination.  Especially brutal were his roles in crushing movements for independence from coercive Indonesian rule in East Timor and Papua and in the abusive repression of democracy activists during riots in Jakarta in 1998. When Indonesia transitioned to democratic rule later that year, he was, in effect, dishonorably discharged.  In 2000 he was denied an American visa, apparently on human rights grounds.  Upon leaving the military, Prabowo began a lucrative career in business. He lost the 2014 presidential election to Jokowi, 47-to-53 percent.

Indonesian Presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto addresses to his supporters at the Kridosono stadium during election campaign rally on April 8, 2019 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images

Muslims account for an estimated 87 percent of the 269 million people who live in Indonesia, the world’s fourth largest country and the third largest democracy after India and America.  It is mathematically understandable that majoritarian Muslim faith and sentiment might drive the country’s politics.  But Indonesia is not an Islamic state.  Its leaders have, more or less effectively, curated an ethno-religiously plural national identity that legitimates not only Islam but, in theory, Buddhist, Catholic, Confucian, Hindu, and Protestant beliefs as well. 

When Jokowi ran for governor of Jakarta in 2012, his running mate was Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, an ethnic-Chinese Christian Indonesian better known by his nickname “Ahok.”  When the ticket won, Ahok became vice-governor.  A man of probity and candor with a background in business and science, Ahok quickly earned kudos for his efforts to curb poverty, corruption, and traffic congestion, among other ills of the metropolis.  In 2014, when Jokowi took a leave of absence to run for president, Ahok replaced him as the acting governor of Jakarta. When Jokowi defeated Pabowo to become president later that year, Ahok became governor in his own right—the first-ever ethnic Chinese and the first non-Muslim in half a century to fill that position. Sinophobia has a long history in Indonesia. In the context of the economic and political crises that obliged Suharto to resign in 1998, for example, anti-Chinese mobs ran riot in Jakarta.  Prabowo, Suharto’s son-in-law at the time, may have been at least indirectly involved in that outbreak of racial violence.

In a speech in September 2016, Ahok made an unscripted reference to the possibility that, were he to run again, some Muslims might not vote for him.  But all he said was that voters should not believe those who intentionally lie about—misinterpret—verse 51 in Al-Ma’idah, a chapter in the Qur’an that seems to advise Muslims against becoming allies of Jews and Christians.  Some Islamists had indeed glossed that verse as an obligation for Muslims not to vote for a non-Muslim to occupy public office.  An edited version of the video made it sound as though Ahok were not accusing some people of lying about what the verse meant, but was instead blaming the falsehood on the Qur’an itself—Allah’s own words.

The altered video went viral. Extreme Islamist organizations pressed for Ahok’s arrest and imprisonment for having violated Indonesia’s law on the Misuse and Insult of Religion.  He was tried, sentenced, and incarcerated in May 2017.

A man is draped with a flag showing the images of Indonesian President Joao Widodo and his Vice Presidential running mate Ma'ruf Amin at a concert and political rally for President Joko Widodo. Photo by Ed Wray/Getty Images

Ahok regained his freedom in January 2019. When he was released, Jokowi’s and Prabowo’s presidential campaigns had already begun. Six months before, Jokowi’s partisan allies, knowing how closely associated with Ahok their candidate had been, had persuaded him to strengthen his Islamic appeal by choosing Mar’uf Amin to fill the vice-presidential slot on his ticket.  At the time, Amin chaired Indonesia’s if not the world’s largest independent Islamic organization, Nahdlatul Ulama. Amin also headed a state-supported Indonesian Ulama Council that issues rulings ( fatwa ) on Islamic matters.  Under Amin’s leadership in November 2016, the Council had gone so far as to insist, in a statement he signed on the Council’s behalf, that verse 51 in Al-Ma’idah really does forbid Jews and Christians from becoming leaders and does obligate Muslims to choose to be led only by Muslims—and that to deny this is to insult the Qur’an, the ulama, and the Muslim community.  Yet there is nothing in Indonesia’s constitution or its laws that endorses, let alone requires, prejudicial voting—ballot-box communalism—of this kind.

Beyond boosting Jokowi’s image in the eyes of illiberal Muslims, Amin was an attractive choice for two other reasons as well:  NU’s demographic strength, notably in the heavily populated provinces of East and Central Java; and the hoped-for gravitas of Amin’s age and wisdom that some voters might read into his being 76 years old on election day—seventeen more than Jokowi’s 58.

In choosing Sandiago (“Sandi”) Uno for the vice-presidential slot on his ticket, Prabowo may also have taken age into account, but in the reverse direction.  Sixty-seven years old on election day, Prabowo may have chosen his running mate hoping to benefit from the image of relatively youthful energy and savvy modernity that Sandi, eighteen years younger, might evoke in voters’ minds.  Not to mention Sandi’s money.  Forbes Magazine ranked him 27 ^th among the 40 richest Indonesians in 2010, although he has since fallen off that list.  Sandi’s proven ability to attract support, having been elected vice-governor of Jakarta in 2017, likely also favored his selection. 

Sandi has an MBA from George Washington University. Whatever he learned about good business practices while there, however, did not prevent his name from surfacing in the “Paradise Papers” and in research by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, sources that linked him to shell companies registered in Panama, the British Virgin Islands, and other tax-haven locations.

Sandiaga Uno, Vice-Presidential candidate and running mate of Indonesian Presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto Waves to supporters after giving a speech at the National Stadium on April 7, 2019 in Jakarta, Indonesia. Photo by Ed Wray/Getty Images.

Prabowo did not excel in his televised debates with Jokowi.  The many polls conducted again and again during the campaign showed Jokowi ahead of Prabowo in the public’s opinion by as much as twenty percent.  As election day neared, the gap between the two men may have narrowed.  But that evidence may have been tainted by unreliable polls that Prabowo’s camp may have incentivized to exaggerate his support. [1]

Prabowo has in the past cultivated relations with Islamist figures and groups. A question to be settled on 17 April is whether Jokowi’s supporters among softer-line, mainstream Muslims and their associations will outvote the harder-line Islamist and more Sinophobic voters to whom Prabowo has appealed.  Relevant, too, is the credulity of voters regarding fake news on social media, including hoaxes designed to stoke fears of Chinese immigration.  One viral claim blamed Jokowi for welcoming investments from China to the point of making Indonesians compete for jobs with an influx of as many as ten million China-born workers. If official Indonesian data are accurate, of 95,335 foreign workers in the country in 2018, only 32,000 were from China. [2]

In the past, Indonesia has been lauded for exemplifying the compatibility of Islam and democracy and for cultivating ethnic tolerance as well.  For democracy to survive and succeed, however, as Americans are learning, it must be continually safeguarded and reconfirmed.  One of the concepts that will crucially affect the further institutionalization of democracy in Indonesia is the extent to which its large and ethnically Malay Muslim majority will be accountable to the country as a whole and not be demagogued into violating minority rights and freedoms.  A populist who inflames his partisan base should not enjoy immunity from oversight. Crucial, too, is the notion of a loyal opposition whose leader is willing and able to reaffirm allegiance to a system in which it has just lost an election fairly.  Additionally essential to the implementation of these core ideas, as polarized Americans are being reminded, is the empathy necessary to bridge identity-based cleavages by imagining oneself in the shoes or sandals of “the other.” 

In any event, one can hope for the best: that the fifth electoral testing of Indonesia’s two-decades-long experiment with democratic rule in 2019, and the 59th American presidential election in 2020, including their respective aftermaths, will reinvigorate the purpose and power of democratic principles as inoculations against the risks, in both countries, of authoritarian division from within.

Donald K. Emmerson last visited Indonesia in December 2018 to speak at the 11th  Bali Democracy Forum.  Without implicating them in the above, he is grateful to Bill Liddle, Wayne Forrest, and Lisa Lee for helpful comments on its first draft.