First thoughts on nomination day

1. In Aljunied there is a PAP "B" team, and the WP has packed the decks with their best ppl. So it's a signal to the Singapore ppl: that's your opposition ward. Everybody else, pls vote PAP.

2. Surprised that WP hasn't really stacked any other GRC with a A-list team. But you know, the PAP can always put at least 1 big name into every other GRC. Like what we saw with DPM Heng. Maybe WP's attitude in this elections is "Aljunied or bust".

3. Another interesting matchup is West Coast GRC. PSP stacking it up there.

4. Also Paul Tambyah running in Bukit Panjang. He will be a (no pun intended) dark horse with a big rep.

5. There are an astounding 11 opposition parties. Even when you consider that Tan Jee Say has given up running his own party. "Opposition unity" is dead. It only existed under the premise that the PAP might eventually concede more ground to the opposition. That didn't happen. The opposition parties have defaulted into a mode of "we're just here to chip against total PAP dominance". They may be activists, or advocates, but they're not yet here to run the show. Even the opposition parties who win constituencies have to spend all their time and energy watching their backs so that they don't get sued over town council issues.

Arsenal the mirage and Liverpool the champions

You could look at this highlight reel and think that Arsenal are a great team. The list of great attacking players is staggering. Van Persie. Lacazette, Jack Wilshire, Andrey Arsharvin, Aaron Ramsay, Santi Cazorla, Samir Nasri, Alexis Sanchez, Granit Xhaka, Mesut Ozil, Tomas Rosicky, Pierre Emerick Aubameyang, Hector Bellarin, Mikel Arteta, Fabregas, Gabriel Martinelli. Nicolas Pépé. And further down the line there was Danny Welbeck. Alex Song, Lukas Podolski, Olivier Giroud, Theo Walcott, and Iwobi.

The malaise of the late Arsene Wenger reign was painful to watch. I started following them in the 2007-08 season, thinking that they were on their way back. They had an axis of Cesc Fabregas, Aleksander Hleb and Mathieu Flamini, who raced to the top of the premiership. But unfortunately, there was an infamous match where Eduardo had his leg broken, and William Gallas threw a fit when a penalty was awarded against him. From then on, it was painful to watch. To be fair to Man United, they had Alex Ferguson's last great team, and deserved to win the league and champion's league that year. But it probably made clear that Arsenal was not going to win the league anytime soon.

From that year onwards, it was a string of many seasons of barely qualifying for the champion's league, and then getting themselves knocked out of the second round. It was an unbearable groundhog day to be an Arsenal fan. 3rd or 4th, then exiting the champion's league second round. There were the three FA cup wins in a row to sweeten the deal, but that was probably the rot. They would be standing still, and other teams would overtake them.

When Arsene Wenger came in, he was a breath of fresh air. For the first 7-8 seasons, he managed to defy gravity. He got some great players in at great prices. He always seemed to buy astutely, and he had an unparalleled knowledge of the best players from the continent. He saw that a few players, like Patrick Vieira, Thierry Henry were played out of position, and got them performing at their best for Arsenal.

Then, following the Invincibles season, he somehow contrived to allow the team to be broken up. Truth be told, the Invincibles were a little old. He gambled on kids, believing that he could simply groom youngsters into being Bergkamp and Pires. And even if that didn't work, he seemed content to be doing the same job, hitting the same lowered targets year in year out.

During Wenger's early years, he seemed to have a real competitive advantage over his opponents. His players were fitter, more technical, better able to improvise and think on their feet. Slowly, and little by little, the advantages were eroded away. First, he wasn't able to take advantage of his superior knowledge of the European market to get better players. Then, his players were not the most mentally strong bunch of all. And one of the reasons, I suspect, is how much he allowed them to improvise in a match. The highly improvisional approach could be wonderful to watch when it paid dividends, but it relied too much on all the players to be totally sharp, mentally. It's always easier to be mentally strong when you don't have to think so much, when you're just doing what you were drilled to do, day in day out.

You could see the mental weakness even during Wenger's heyday. The classic example was when they lost the league to Man U during the 1999 treble season, after chasing them so closely for the entire season. And the next two seasons, they made feeble attempts to get back the league title. Finally, Arsenal won the 01-02 season, with half of the invincibles already in shape. It should have been a period of staggering dominance for Arsenal, because Man U were weakened by a few seasons of substandard recruitment. Instead, they contrived to lose the 02-03 league title to Man U, and that was during Man U's relatively barren period of 2001-2006, when they “only” won 3 pieces of silverware.

The move away from Highbury to Emirates stadium seemed to signify the transition from stylish champions to foppish weaklings.

One possible clue is that Arsenal started getting beaten in the transfer market. Arsene Wenger was infamous for stating that he was "close to signing" this or that player. The whole list was pretty shocking, although it also has to be said that very few of these players were up for transfer before 2003. In other words, up until the time when he built his invincibles side, Wenger managed to get who he wanted. Perhaps it's because Chelsea started inflating the market for good players, and Wenger was no longer willing to pay top dollar for top players. Of that list, the only one which could have taken place during the early years when Wenger could seemingly do no wrong was Claude Makalele. Maybe it was the financing of the stadium that cost them, and maybe it was a bad decision to spend so much on a larger stadium when that stadium wasn't going to get you ahead in the revenue stakes. Perhaps things got even worse when David Dein left in 2007 because of his role in Arsenal's recruiting during the time he was there.

Anyway, here's the list. Read it and gawk: Cristiano Ronaldo, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Didier Drogba, N'golo Kante, Paul Pogba, Gareth Bale, Luis Suarez, Yaya Toure, Claude Makalele, Lionel Messi, Gerard Pique.

Other teams caught up in different ways. Sam Allardyce pioneered a more scientific approach towards football, one that was based on analytics, and more well rehearsed moves. Jose Mourinho played a more cynical form of football. One that could be attacking, but just as likely could be super defensive. Chelsea got funded to the tune of billions of dollars. Chelsea and Man City ended up becoming the wealthy aristocrats of the English Premier League. In the 15 years between 2004 and 2019, they won a combined total of 9 titles. It's only because of the astonishing ability of Alex Ferguson's Man U winning 5 titles, and a freakish fluke of Leicester winning in 2016, which broke the dominance of those two clubs. (Plus Manchester United, being one of the best supported clubs in the world, are also quite rich, without the need for cash injections.)

Perhaps if Arsene Wenger had ceded his position to a hungrier, and more innovative coach, it would have put Arsenal in better stead for the future. As of right now, they may have gotten their man in Mikel Arteta, it's too soon to tell. Mikel Arteta is a disciple of Pep Guardiola, but it's hard to really know how good he is.

Now, the styles of the best teams in the EPL are dominated by very heavily planned and highly technical game plans. There's a lot of pressing here and there. A lot of positional discipline. A lot of defending from the front and carefully rehearsed attacking. There are approaches dominated by the coaches Guardiola, Pochettino and Klopp, and not surprisingly they are the three most admired coaches in the EPL. Nowadays even Mourinho can't keep up, because his tactics, a lot of which revolved around trying to stifle the opponent's game plan, seemed helpless against the new ethos of attacking with overwhelming force.

It used to be a group of four teams which always took the champion's league places. (Man U, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool). Now it became a group of 6 which rotated the 4 places amongst themselves (those 4 plus Tottenham and Man City). And it could well be possible that Arsenal drops out of this elite group. At least when Liverpool and Man U drop out of this group, they find their way back. I don't know about Arsenal.

And that leaves up with Liverpool. Inexplicably, they managed to buy good players and transform all of them into world class players. Jurgen Klopp just seemed to have a great and innovative idea for what to do with those guys. “ In this Liverpool team full-backs are attackers, midfielders are defenders, wingers are goalscorers, centre-forwards chase and counterpress.” As an attacking force, they are irresistable. I think that Liverpool as irresistable attacking force was given a preview during that 2014 season where Luis Suarez was their best player. Nobody from that team is around anymore, but the approach is similar, and this time around, more solid.

The question, then, is whether they could get Liverpool to carry on and turn into a dynasty. Alex Ferguson was one of the first to recognise that Jurgen Klopp could be a great manager, possibly as good as himself. At Dortmund, he was able to win the Bundesliga twice, and remains the only team other than Bayern Munich to have won the league since 2009. He got Borussia Dortmund to the finals of the Champion's League, only to leave 2 years later because he felt that he had pushed them far enough.

Liverpool will almost certainly be able to win yet another title in the near future. But how long can Klopp hang around, and can he build Liverpool into another dynasty in the manner of the boot room? Liverpool has won their first league title in 30 years. It's hard to overlook the enormity of this achievement. This is the first breaking of a league title drought in a long time that was achieved without a wealthy benefactor. There was Man U winning after 20+ years, there was Leeds winning the last pre-premier league league, in around 20 years. And of course there was the Leicester fluke, taking advantage of the time when all the other teams were lying fallow or screwing up. Chelsea, Blackburn and Man City broke long droughts, but they were bankrolled. Liverpool are hardly a poor club, but this has to be some monumental achievement.

Why American Democracy is dysfunctional

I'm thinking about what went wrong with American democracy. I'm going to list down all the flaws in the system. This is not an endorsement of authoritarianism. So far, there are relatively few places where authoritarianism has been made to work, and very frequently, the biggest use case of authoritarianism is if you have a country in the third world, and it has to pull itself together to make that leap forward. The only country that might be a somewhat developing country and is still an autocracy is China, and that's because it's a very different kind of autocracy from the other autocracies.

1. First Past the Post
This is also a problem with the Singapore system, which inherits many features from the British system. Essentially, this is a system that's designed to eradicate more than 2 parties. It works like this: the main statistic in a first past the post election is the difference between the best polled candidate and the second best polled candidate. Which means that casting a vote for the third party is tantamount to throwing away your vote. This is a system that on the whole would guarantee that a third party would not rise up and challenge the hegemony of the two major parties. That's why Democrats vs Republican has been a constant in America since the end of the Civil War, why one party may drop out of the ogilopoly but it will always go back to a two party democracy.

People have complained about Singapore being a one party democracy, and that is fair. Probably Japan is one too. But the US and the UK and the English speaking western countries are two party democracies, and that is a very limited form of democracy.

2. Low expectations of leaders
The US has always had a very dim view of politicians. That presents a few problems. One of them is that you don't really trust the political leaders to do the right thing. That hasn't always been a constant: the presidents from FDR to LBJ were trusted and popular. Maybe back then the system allowed the best to rise to the top?

But there has always been a libertarian streak about the US. They've always seen government as a necessary evil, that gets in the way of a good life, rather than the provider of a good life. There's no support for the leaders. This is bad because it allows a lot of people – especially the rich ones – to get away with not paying their taxes. It's also bad because it makes America want to sweep certain problems under the carpet – problems that can only be solved by a strong and trusted government. Like major construction projects, or bold policy initiatives. And finally it makes people not want to co-operate with their political leaders.

There's a lot about the rhetoric of the founding fathers in overthrowing tyranny. Of course there is such a thing as tyranny, but the end result of all this is that people favour a very light touch from the government, it has very little leeway to work and operate. In effect, freedom is an important value in the US precisely because people do not trust the government to solve their problems. A good government is an impotent government.

3. Rural Urban divide
There was a book written around 10 years ago, the great sorting. Americans tend to, politically, obey the dictum that birds of a feather flock together. The number of towns which are politically heterogenous have gone down, and it's not unusual for neighbourhoods to be tilted 80 / 20 in favour of one of the main parties. More significantly, many rural communities are in a death spiral, whereby many of their best and the brightest move to the cities and join the liberals. Those left behind are the ones who are more likely to vote for somebody who appeals to their insularity, like Trump. And that's why during the 2016 elections, there was such a marked pattern that he won the vast majority of the lowly populated counties, and Hillary Clinton won the cities. Because of the way that these constituencies are divided up, Trump was able to gather the majority of the electoral college votes in spite of polling 3 million votes less. This is a pretty serious problem, that when it comes to electing a president, the rural population, the less well educated and the ones less exposed to the outside world, actually have more voting power than the cosmopolitans.

4. 50 50 split
This is a corollary to the two party system. If you know your history, you'd understand that the two parties are essentially big tents that have uneasy alliances. White liberals are allied with black people under the Democrats. Libertarians are allied with the religious right. The whites of the south were allied with the Democratic party until LBJ signed in the Civil Rights act. And after that they switched over to the Republicans. There were people who sided with Obama, and they switched over to siding with Trump.

5. Performative politics
A whole book has been written on the intersection between TV, entertainment and politics. Americans currently uphold the right to protest as an essential pillar in political freedom. Yet, as it goes in the popular song, “freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose”. And it's not more true than when it come to political protest. First, a political protest is what happens when something in the system has failed. Second, protest is a very blunt weapon. It sometimes doesn't reach its intended audience, or have its intended effect. And third, the very theatrical nature of political protest tends to detract from the seriousness of the message.

Soundbites that last for a few seconds is not an adequate substitute for the careful deliberation that policy making demands, and yet the man in the street seems to think that his soundbites are worth more than your days or years of deliberation.

On the plus side, a lot of positive social change over the decades are down to protests. Progressives earned women the right to vote, it enabled more humane working conditions. Then some of these things got adopted by other countries who didn't have to protest for it. But maybe they would not have been adopted without the protest.

6. Entertainment and politics
Again, almost the same point as previously. It makes it sound as though politics were some kind of a parlour game. Or it might make it sound as though it were about tribalism. I'm not going to expound more on this, but if you want, you could always read Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death".

7. Insularism
Here's something that Singaporeans will find surprising about Americans in general. A large proportion of Americans have never travelled out of America. They don't have to. Some of them have only ever been to Canada. And there's not much south of the border that will teach them anything about how the rest of the world works. For a world power, it is incredibly isolated from the rest of the world. Then what about the bunch of people who have ever seen Asia because they travelled with the military?

The relatively small number who do travel around will not find it easy to communicate to the rest what life on the Eurasian landmass is like.

8. Piecemeal politics / divided government.
The other thing about America is that the executive branch can change on a dime. The last two presidents were pretty unusual. In fact the second Bush may have strictly been presidential material. Every 8 years or so, the US president will change, and maybe the party will change, and there will be a change in foreign policy, and a whole lot of programs might be gutted. The federal government operates on a scale where there are a lot of long term projects and those projects may be gutted.

There are several results of all these dysfunctions. You end up having political gridlock. People might end up pushing hard against the system, against each other, on both sides. Americans might end up seeing each other not as fellow citizens, but enemy soldiers. There might be bad faith on all sides. Unprincipled politicians might prevail over the ones who act in good faith.

The problem is that a lot of western politics touches mainly on abstract ideas and not institutions, and even when they touch on institutions, they don't touch very much on the emotional side of politics. IT's just considered an awkward topic in some intellectual traditions. But the emotional intelligence aspect of politics should never be neglected, especially when it's something that can totally endanger the system.

China, South Korea, Taiwan, maybe a few more developed European cities, have built a society which is based not only on the rule of law, but also on emotional ties that people have with each other. Those emotional ties are also a form of infrastructure. The problem with democracy is that you also need that infrastructure because you need to be talking around with people who disagree with you. Democracy is hardy but it will not survive one faction of people having toxic relationships with the other.