From New Society to post-EDSA reality

The vision of the New Society under Pres. Marcos was to usher in a new order from the decaying old republic. The era of the Commonwealth in the Philippines was a gilded age that offered few avenues for upward mobility. Political bosses delivered the votes at national elections, and oligarchs fuelled party machineries to get out the vote.  

It naturally bred social unrest, which came to a boil in both the Huk rebellion and Marxist CPP insurgency. Marcos’ solution was to instigate a revolution from the center, to save the system from itself. Out of the chaos where both elites and mass movements conspired to rob the state of its capacity to govern, the New Society would bring such destructive forces to heel.

Marcos defied them by adopting a long-range vision and introducing modern methods in implementing that vision. He allowed technocrats to perform these functions. And while the president busied himself with economic matters, his wife took up the cudgels for art and culture.

State-run media controlled the narrative. The Philippines would be “great again” as Marcos pledged at his first inaugural.

The only plot hole in this arc was that it all depended on one individual. Marcos had arogated all power to himself. This lack of accountability tempted him, his wife and cronies to amass great wealth.This, in turn made them feel invincible. Thinking he could hold on to power indefinitely, Marcos failed to groom a successor.

When his regime finally fell, it left a massive hole, which took decades to fill. The EDSA ‘people power’ revolt that toppled him simply revived the old republic, with certain protections to prevent the state from interfering in the way individuals chose to live. Many of the New Society’s projects were abandoned. From one grand vision, it became, to each his own.

If the New Society sought to transform the individual through order and discipline, the EDSA regime sought to transform society by empowering people with individual freedoms. There was no obligation to serve a nobler cause. The individual was at the center of this universe. Everything else was meant to fulfill its desires.

The only problem was that over time, as the population grew rapidly, following the dismantling of Marcos’ population program, the enjoyment of one individual’s personal freedoms seemed to ‘crowd out’ that of others. These ‘negative externalities’ as economists like to call them, began to erode the quality of life for all, rich and poor alike.

The old republic survived thirty years from 1935 to Marcos’s election in 1964. His reign lasted twenty years from 1965 to 1985. The EDSA regime began in 1986. Thirty years later in 2016, the election of Pres. Duterte brought it to an end.

As the first post-EDSA president to enunciate a grand vision for society, Duterte’s war on drugs, corruption and criminality, his massive infrastructure program, and ambitious clean-up of Boracay and Manila Bay have sought to reimpose the welfare of society over the rights of the individual.

Duterte is doing this while supporting programs aimed at empowering people with economic freedoms. Under his watch, universal access to quality tertiary education, healthcare, school feeding programs, and the expansion of maternity leave and senior citizen benefits are occurring.

Is this a synthesis of the New Society and EDSA narratives? A golden mean between the welfare of society and the rights of individuals?

What happens after Duterte leaves? Will his successors hew strictly to one of these narratives? Or will they express them both in multiple ways.

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze illustrated, that the same word unités, stands for both unity and unit. Neither one precludes the other. The same applies to grand narratives involving society and the individual. There is no preordained hierarchy, no predestined point at which history concludes.

If politics is the art of the possible, then instead of posing the question, how must one govern, or what is to be done? The question might instead become, how could one govern, or how might things be done?