If Marcos was the logical conclusion
of the Old Republic, which was built on a feudal society, where “a few enjoyed
the fat of the land, and the many suffered”, then the natural extension of our
post-EDSA republic, with its monopolistic capitalist model, is Duterte. The
internal contradictions of each society ultimately brought about the conditions
for the emergence of these leaders.
The lost opportunity of EDSA was
that rather than building a more just and humane society, we simply
re-incarnated the old one with the result of entrapping many Filipinos into a
life of servitude to the vagaries of the market, as we pursued a neoliberal
model of development.
