CONVICTION AND CONSENSUS POLITICIANS Not mutually exclusive
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Feb 15, 2011 - ST Forum
MS CATHERINE Lim has made what students of philosophy call a category mistake ("Conviction versus Consensus politicians"; last Saturday). Conviction and consensus are not mutually exclusive terms.
Conviction has to do with the reason for going into politics or, for want of a better term, the soul of politics, while consensus has to do with the strategy or even style.
Baron R.A. Butler, the late British Cabinet minister and politician, defined politics as the art of the possible. A conviction politician may have to seek consensus to achieve half his objective if the full is not achievable.
In a democracy, and maybe more so in a parliamentary-type democracy, compromises are a fact of life, whether it is United States President Barack Obama watering down his health-care proposals or former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher retreating on the Maastricht Treaty. Few would argue that all are conviction politicians.
There is no doubt that Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew's accomplishments and moral stature allow him more leeway to say things that another politician will find quite untenable.
For him, the art of the possible has a greater margin.
But that says nothing of the conviction of another politician, whose margin may be much narrower.
I would go so far as to suggest that the People's Action Party's system of candidate selection makes it extremely difficult for opportunists and old-style career politicians to be chosen.
To suggest that the current Cabinet, or indeed the current opposition members, consists of non-conviction politicians is to do them a great injustice.
Eugene Tan
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well, we have a "conviction" mini-star...
he was convicted of breaching the OSA laws
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oreali?
I thought there was always 2 sets of rules, for the elite and the commoner. such as white horse in SAF, civil law for commoner caught fighting and criminal law for "burning" the elite (burning as metaphorically spoken)