As someone who endorsed Mahathir and later very quickly learnt the error of my ways, what I wrote in my apology remains relevant today - “Worried about the far-right and agents of the fascist state coming into power? Well, this is what happens when a coalition breaks up because one man decides to screw everyone over in his coalition.

“This is the price we pay for compromising, enabling, and justifying behaviour anathema to democratic practices all because we wanted to remove Najib.”

Sycophantic DAP

Bersatu, PAS, and Umno - as Umno president Ahmad Zahid Hamidi rightly pointed out - have worked with DAP.

DAP was so sycophantic to the old maverick, but it wasn’t enough. DAP was so sycophantic to former prime minister and Perikatan Nasional chairperson Muhyiddin Yassin, but it too was not enough.

DAP was so sycophantic to PAS – even flirting with ‘PAS for all’ dogma – but it was not enough.  

At each turn, DAP partisans argued that the various permutations of these Malay uber alles parties were different - but the reality is, all that these Malay uber alles parties desired was dominance over Malay polity, as measured by electoral power, and used DAP to reverse their political fortunes.

You can bet on one thing, though. When these race-based charlatans want to be saved from the treachery of their comrades, they run to DAP. As a political party, DAP has a strong stable base that has always acted as a foundation for these Malay uber alles types to cling on to power.

DAP played by the rules – unfair though it may have been – and let down its base when it came to various hot-button issues, and yet, this was not enough for the gang from Sheraton and even Malay power structures in Harapan.

Frightening the base

And this is the problem right here. Someone like Lim Teck Ghee asks non-Malays to fight for their rights or lose them. But the people non-Malays elect to fight for their rights have no intention of fighting for those rights.

Instead, what these elected representatives do is frighten the base into believing that those rights would disrupt, and would cause instability, and year after year, with each successive reinvention of Malay power, those rights are slowly fading away.

The irony, of course, is that Anwar and his former Umno cohorts now enjoy the kind of support that the MCA gave Malay power brokers during the long Umno watch.

While Mahathir has openly admitted that he gave the Malay community more (when he and the DAP were in power) and could not say anything because the Chinese community would be offended these days, Anwar is engaging in the same policy agenda in an attempt to shore up Malay support and DAP is keeping as quiet as a church mouse and the base has no problem with this.

Mahathir’s sickening vision of power-sharing triumphs again.