By Iqra Anugrah
Indonesian conservative thinkers claimed to save their country from populist socialism of Sukarno and the Left. They dreamed of a democratic polity free from “extremism” and underdevelopment. Instead, what they built was an authoritarian, corporatist, and developmentalist regime. This essay (re)examines their ideological justification for it.
Introduction
Dictatorships rise and last through complex mechanisms of material reinforcement and ideological rationalization, even when their power grab occurs with a bang.
Such was the case with the New Order (1966-1998), a regime founded on the destruction of anticolonial populism and its left-wing supporters. It was a bureaucratic-authoritarian regime typical of the Cold War period: developmentalist, labor-repressive, and selectively-pluralist.
Structurally, it represented the triumph of capital over popular forces, as documented by scholars such as Richard Robison and Jeffrey Winters. But even a developmentalist dictatorship had to justify its existence.
Such a task fell onto, among others, three anti-Communist, conservative figures – the intelligence czar General Ali Moertopo and the Catholic intellectuals Jusuf Wanandi and Harry Tjan Silalahi – who were active in the anti-Sukarno opposition and later the political life in the New Order. Through their politics, think-tank, and covert operations, they successfully influenced and shaped the regime’s political architecture. They were “conceptive ideologists,” the thinkers of the ruling order, who concocted an ideational argument in support of the regime. Such middle-brow thinkers can be found in societies undergoing conservative backlash.
It is important not to dismiss or belittle the role of ideology here. Ideology is a tool of worldmaking with a particular class agenda. In New Order Indonesia, the conservative trio did the same thing, condensing their aspirations into a set of propositions and proposals.
Of particular relevance here is David Bourchier’s seminal work on the family state in Indonesia, the refashioning of state-society relations as a unified family marching for illiberal developmentalism inspired by Catholic social theory, Cold War social sciences, and Japanese occupation.
This essay, while largely agrees with his interpretation, offers a modest new interpretation: the trio’s brand of conservatism also echoed arguments from Burkean conservatism, a bastardized version of “anti-totalitarianism,” and developmental state-building.
The Trio and Their Ideas
Like many others in the anti-Sukarno coalition, the trio watched Sukarno’s authoritarian-populist rule and the Communists’ support for it with horror. Moertopo saw such experiment as a betrayal of the spirit of the anti-colonial National Revolution and a source of economic underdevelopment. Wanandi, seeing through the lens of a double-minority – a Chinese Catholic in a left-leaning Muslim-majority nation – wrote in his memoir aptly titled Shades of Grey that had Indonesia turned communist, the Catholics “would be the first up against the wall.”
As the New Order rule consolidated – after unseating Sukarno and mass killing the communists – the trio became close aides to the new president Suharto and formulated and institutionalized their ideas. As I have outlined previously, what they offered in Moertopo’s (in)famous manifesto, Some Basic Thoughts on the Acceleration and Modernization of 25 Years Development, was the following: 1) an inclusive yet corporatist notion of citizenship, 2) democracy as electoral trusteeship under carefully-managed elections and opposition parties, and 3) political participation of the military as the most “program-oriented” force in the nation.
Altogether, this guaranteed political stability with constrained pluralism conducive for (capitalist) development with limited welfare intervention.
These principles were reaffirmed in their latter writings, for example, Silalahi’s pamphlet The New Order’s National Political Consensus: Its Orthodoxy and Actualization.
This was typical in Cold War Southeast Asia, where class and ethnic mobilizations prompted elites and their middle-class supporters to erect authoritarian fortress against mass politics.
Bourchier credited reactionary/anti-democratic strands of Catholic thinking and stability-obsessed American modernization theories as major influences of the trio’s political model.
However, while looking at the genealogy of their ideas is necessary and useful, one should also look at their parallels in other world-historical contexts and broader intellectual history. Here, I show how their ideas resonate with the three abovementioned intellectual traditions.
Burkean Conservatism
Much has been written about Edmund Burke as the progenitor of modern conservatism and the complexity of his corpus of thought – an Irishman critical of injustices of the British Empire and the excesses of the French Revolution. Such a (proto)anti-colonial yet counter-revolutionary perspective might as well resonate with the thinking of Moertopo, Wanandi, and Silalahi. After all, did not Indonesia under Sukarno’s rule face its own version of revolutionary excesses?
Burke advanced what can be called a classic conservatism of fear in his Reflections on the Revolution in France where he warned what would be endangered and lost in the revolutionary fervor in France and stated his preference for the more gradualist Glorious Revolution in England. Such thinking also found its resonance in the trio’s brand of conservatism – the fear of Communism, class warfare, and “ideological” mobilization.
The fear lingered even until 1990, when statist Communism was in crisis globally. In one essay, Silalahi declared the following: “…we should learn the lessons of other nations…which successfully upgraded their level of economic development…Never think that socio-economic problems…can only be answered by Marxist solutions.”
Bastardized “Anti-Totalitarianism”
Anti-totalitarianism or anti-extremism can serve as a vehicle or reasoning for democratic struggles. Think about democracies in interwar Europe. Or constitutional defense mechanisms against extremist forces gaining power or extending their term limits.
However, it can be bastardized and exploited too, especially in postcolonial context where political incorporation of the lower-classes is often seen as inherently disturbing. Moreover, anti-totalitarian “humanitarian” arguments can even be used as justifications for jingoistic misadventures and imperialism, as we can see in the intellectual defense for the United States’ war in Iraq and current war with Iran.
In New Order Indonesia, this translated into repressing the communists – and their “specter” in civil society – and taming political Islam. Both red and green, Left and (religious) Right, should be defused in the name of “combating extremism.” Moertopo was notorious for his Machiavellian manipulation – he revived the network of Islamist rebels to promote an anti-Communist stance and the regime’s party, Golkar, only to abandon and frame them as insurrectionists and in doing so delegitimized mainstream Muslim parties and movements.
Developmental State Thinking
Finally, another obvious yet overlooked element of the trio’s thinking is the idea of developmental state: state-led capitalist development driven by the private sector. Bourchier argued that Moertopo was more influenced by the Japanese fascist corporatism during their wartime occupation of Indonesia rather than their postwar economic growth.
While this is plausible, we can also speculate that he and his intellectual brothers-in-arms were equally attracted by the East Asian developmental state. In the 1960s and 1970s, Japan’s development model mesmerized Asia and the world. It certainly provided a model for the trio.
Another model that the trio looked at was South Korea under the Yushin Dictatorship. “The model that most appealed to us back in the early days was South Korea, and we convinced Soeharto that this was the way to go. Politics later, economics first and rule with an iron hand for the time being” said Wanandi in his memoir.
Clearly, developmental state captivated their minds. Their commitment to balanced growth combined with labor discipline, as elaborated in Moertopo’s other pamphlet Workers and Peasants in Development, is a proof of that.
The Radical, Paradoxical Nature of New Order Conservatism
However, this “accelerated” development was implemented and achieved at a high price of human suffering. Oppositional politics was stifled, democratic expressions of leftism and political Islam were demonized, and the national aspirations of the peoples of West Papua and East Timor were trampled – all in the name of combating extremism, promoting a modern and structural-functionalist version of democracy, and participating in the Western-led Cold War international order.
The trio’s project of authoritarian conservatism is innovative and full of paradoxes and ironies. It was a conservative project for its defense of (petit)-bourgeois class privileges and for a restorationist political vision.
But their conservatism, unlike that of their Western counterparts, was achieved through a radical method of toppling Sukarnoist socialism. They claimed to restore democracy by tearing it apart. In 1986, Wanandi made an argument for reforming the New Order system but keeping its corporatist core and ruling party intact. But by that time, grassroots social movements had demanded a more substantial change, making his plea obsolete.
A new interpretation that I offer here is a modest interpretive exercise to demonstrate the material power of ideas-as-programs, their innovativeness and global resonance, and their possible afterlives. With the return of New Order-style politics under the New Order-linked, authoritarian-leaning Prabowo presidency in Indonesia and the rise and consolidation of reactionary politics worldwide, it is high time to revisit the history of Indonesian conservative thoughts and take them seriously.
Acknowledgement: Audiences at the 2025 European Workshops on International Studies and Seoul National University generously offered thought-provoking feedback for this project. In particular, suggestions from Angelos Chryssogelos on global conservatism and Katharina Bluhm on the notion of conceptive ideologists greatly sharpened my arguments.
Iqra Anugrah is a Trapezio MSCA Research Fellow at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Modern Cultures at the University of Turin. He holds affiliate positions at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden University and the Institute for Economic and Social Research, Education, and Information (LP3ES). An interdisciplinary political theorist, he studies modern political thought in Indonesia and Southeast Asia.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
