There are politicians who leave a country better than they found it. And then there are those who, through sheer force of will, reshape a nation in their own image, for good and ill in roughly equal measure. Mahathir Mohamad belongs to the second category, though his admirers have spent decades insisting otherwise. The case for Mahathir is well rehearsed: the Proton national car project, the Petronas Twin Towers, the push to industrialise a commodity-dependent economy. For a generation of Malaysians who remember the 1980s and 1990s, he represents ambition, a small nation daring to punch above its weight. That narrative is not entirely false. But it is incomplete to the point of dishonesty. What Mahathir built, as much as anything else, was a culture of institutional dependency on one man's approval. During his first tenure from 1981 to 2003, he systematically dismantled the checks that might have constrained him. The judiciary was humiliated publicly in 1988 when he engineered the...