Dilawan: Rise and fall of the EDSA regime - Duterte and the Next Wave

            

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.

Episode 26: Yellow Alert! How do you address populism?

In the first part of this series, we showed how the weakening of democratic institutions in the country can be traced to the establishment of neoliberal economic policies, which have given rise to a populist backlash. 

The Philippine debt driven, crony capitalist growth of the 1970s under Pres. Marcos led to the IMF prescribed austerity measures of the 1980s under Pres. Cory Aquino and the globalist trend of the 1990s under Pres. Fidel Ramos. The Philippine state and its economy was too weak for the state to say no to the imposition of policies from external lenders.

This led to a populist backlash from the left in 1998, in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. The election of Pres. Joseph Erap Estrada was a response to the austerity under which  the government had to spend more on debt service than education contrary to our constitutional provisions. It was also based on Erap’s charisma and cult of personality.

Episode 24: Yellow Alert: Why democratic forces have fallen out of favour in the Philippines (and how they can win it back)

It’s important at the start of the program to define key terms. I’d like to do this, by way of question and answer, so...

A plutarchy with populist tendencies

The title of this piece is inspired by Prof. Yuen Yuen Ang’s take on how China escaped the poverty trap. Ang argues that despite one party rule, China was able to forge merit-based mechanisms of accountability that led to its development. She describes it as an “autocracy with democratic characteristics”.

The Beijing Consensus refers to the political economy instituted by the People’s Republic under Deng Xiaoping, after Mao’s death in 1976. It is an alternate path to development, sitting in contrast to the failed Russian Soviet experiment with a command economy and all its inherent inefficiency, unwieldiness and poor incentives.

Under the China model, Beijing sets national economic policy through its five year plans. It then assigns to regional counterparts the task of meeting these targets through a “franchise-like” system. Each local government uses its own connections (“guanxi”) to attract investment to contribute to the the national goal under a process of “directed improvisation”.

Promotion within Communist party is based on performing well against official targets, relative to peers. Individuals rising to the highest policy-making body, the Politburo standing committee, prove themselves in towns and villages first, then at cities and regional levels.

The central government, in giving agency to regional executives, is able to keep its “distance” from local politics and avoid blame when their administration fails, due to ineptitude or corruption. It can overrule or interfere with local affairs, if public outcry reaches the capital. This is what gives the autocratic state some form of democratic accountability.

Beijing adapted local customs to mimic Western institutions that foster open competition within a marketplace of ideas. Instead of inter-party competition, the Chinese have created internal tournaments within the ruling party. They follow through on long-range plans, without disruption from corruptible, short-term election cycles that occur in developing states.

The Philippines has been characterised as a cacique democracy, from its inception in the 1890s with local and national politics dominated by a small set of wealthy, well-connected families. Even with American “tutelage” in democracy, participation in politics was largely confined to those with political pedigree and deep pockets.

A lack of policy consensus after independence from the 1950s to 1970s ensued leading to boom and bust cycles. Since EDSA ‘86, multiparty democracy is seen as chaotic, with limited participation and increasing concentration of power even within the partylist system.

But there has been considerable policy continuity in economic affairs since EDSA. This has led to increased rates of economic growth with greater capacity to handle internal contradictions of a market-based system, namely the disparity by which its spoils are shared.

Developmental spending enables political families to retain legitimacy. They are slowly moving away from direct forms of patronage to programmatic, institutional responses to poverty and other challenges. The evidence? … Free college, universal health care coverage and public school feeding programs, cash transfers to poor families, senior citizen benefits, among others.

Rivalry among political families has created conditions that mimic democratic accountability, stealing the thunder from progressive movements. Chief executives act as family figures making government seem near and personal.

Apo Marcos, Tita Cory, Steady Eddie, Pareng Erap, Ate Glo, PNoy and Tatay Digong were personages meant to instill a sense of filial piety in the nation through pakikisama and bayanihan, the illusion that we are all part of an “imagined community” despite our regional, ethnic differences.

The Philippines may thus be regarded as a plutarchy with populist tendencies. The adoption of democratic forms of governance without the institutions performing their function, has given rise to political dynasties. Through local customs, the Philippines has begun to develop a consensus for economic growth and development under a market-based system.

This has led to increased concentration of economic and political capital. To retain legitimacy, actors voluntarily initiate populist programs that increasingly rely on fiscal space afforded by growth to fund them, sustainably. This constitutes an alternate path to development, which might be dubbed the Manila Consensus. 

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?

As I pick up this pen...

It was November 2008 when I first took up blogging in this space, right after Sen. Barrack Obama's election as America's 44th president.

How times have changed.

We now are witnessing the dawn of a new era in America, and the world undoubtedly.

The election of Donald J. Trump to succeed Mr. Obama heralds a new direction for America.

From an outward-looking, open, diverse, collaborative, and multilateralist polity, to one that would have an inward-looking, isolationist, and competitive/winner-take-all mentality.

It comes on the heels of the Brexit vote in the UK and the rise of far-right parties in Western Europe. 

Having taken a break from blogging in the past two years, I feel the need to start writing again.

Now more than ever, the need to find new, better ideas to deal with complex, long-standing problems is emerging.