We still have a long-running debate on how to best to protect human rights and promote religious tolerance. Existing social diversity, income disparities and educational inequalities complicate matters further.
The Jakarta Post:
Our experience has taught us the wisdom of moderation: Optimism needs to be tempered by a sense of realism. We have become more aware of the weight of history.
We make history, but we cannot make it as we please; even revolutionary Karl Marx would have admitted this!
We therefore have to accept the fact that we have to work in an imperfect setting. And, of course, we always have our innate human failings.
The most we can hope for from democratic politics, with its checks and balances, is a process of continual and incremental improvement, not a perfect set of policies. The most we can hope for is a democratic idea of the future that is without the illusion and the impatience of utopianism.