It is so refreshing to discover that Wan Hamidi Hamid embraces the idea of economic liberalism so passionately. For a person working so deeply in the DAP, I had expected him to stand on the other side of the divide. My expectation missed its target slightly less by a mile.
I learned of his philosophical position during a small discussion at the Middle Eastern Graduate Centre on Jalan Telawi on a Friday’s evening. It was an unscheduled attendance for me because I had not planned to visit Bangsar on that day. The discussion was about attacks on the idea of economic liberty by the left movement in Malaysia. Wan Hamidi wrote an essay a couple of pages long refuting the attack. A good part of the essay could be succinctly summarized by the very idiom he used in the final paragraph of his essay: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
In my mind, Madonna burst out to sing the song 4 Minutes. That probably helped digressing the discussion from focusing on the attack to describe economic liberty at large.
I wrote slightly less by a mile because he is a convert from socialism to liberalism. Pardon the pigoenhole but those labels are convenient to use. Regardless of convenience, as he admitted during he discussion, he used to sympathize with the left movement. As a young journalist, he did substantial reporting on the local labor movement.
How did he finally, as he said cheekily, “bertaubat” (repent) is unknown to me but he is undoubtedly a liberal in the classical sense now. Actually, he is down the road farther than me. If anybody out there was to describe me as an extremist, he would ran out of superlative to describe Wan Hamidi.
That conversion made me thinking. A person jumping off the left boat to board the liberal one is not an unusual news to hear. How about a person doing the reverse?
The latter is something I have yet to stumble upon.
This also made me thinking about how left the DAP is these days on the political spectrum. Increasingly, DAP may look like PKR in its political diversity, as far as the red-blue spectrum is concerned. Tony Pua seems like more like a liberal than a left sympathizer. Wan Hamidi Hamid is unambiguously a liberal. I also know several more individuals in their 20s within DAP holding liberal ideas.
It would be interesting to know how big the divide is in DAP.
Big or small, all this makes Wan Hamidi Hamid an amusing rare instance of stark contrast. Here is a Malay with economic liberal ideas in a political party dominated by the Chinese which traditionally sides itself with the left. He just stands out from the crowd.
nota bene —
a certain blog claims I followed “enlightenment” discussions organized by Middle Eastern Graduate Centre. In its exact words, “
Hafiz Noor Shams turut mendedahkan bahawa beliau pernah mengikuti perbincangan-perbincangan pencerahan di MEGC (Middle Eastern Graduate Centre), Jalan Telawi, iaitu anak syarikat kepada IKD.” The wordings are disingenuous. I attended only one discussion and that was unplanned. I did not attend any other event organized by that organization. Yet, with that chanced attendance, the website makes it as if I was a supporter or a follower of MEGC, which I am not. Furthermore, that website took a religious context in describing me, while that particular discussion that I attended was purely about the economy. I will not take this matter further other than to say the accusatory blog entry was written in bad faith.