Source: Rappler
As a progressive activist, I am dismayed by the election of Marcos Jr. by a landslide. But as a sociologist I can understand why.
I am not referring to the malfunction, intended or non-intended, of 1,000-plus voting machines. I am not alluding to the massive release of billions of pesos for vote buying that made the 2022 elections one of the dirtiest in recent years. Nor do I have in mind the decade-long online campaign of disinformation that transmogrified the nightmare years of Martial Law into a “Golden Age.”
A democratic outcome?
Undoubtedly, each of these factors played a role in the electoral result. But the 31 million-plus votes (or 59% of the electorate) is simply too massive to attribute solely to them. The truth is, the Marcos victory was largely a democratic outcome in the narrow electoral sense, and the challenge for progressives is to understand why the runaway majority of the electorate voted to bring an unrepentant thieving family back to power after 36 years. How could democracy produce such a wayward outcome?
The truth is that no matter how slick or sophisticated the internet campaign was, it would have made little impact had there not been a receptive audience for it. While many in the middle and upper classes also went for Marcos, that audience was, in absolute numbers, largely working class (classes “D” and “E” in pollsters’ jargon). It was also largely a youth audience, more than half of whom were either small children during the late Martial Law period or born after the 1986 EDSA Uprising. That audience had no direct experience of the Marcos years. But what they had a direct experience of was the gap between the extravagant rhetoric of democratic restoration and a just and egalitarian future of the EDSA Uprising, and the hard realities of continuing inequality and poverty and frustration of the last 36 years. That gap can be called the “hypocrisy gap,” and it is one that created greater and greater resentment every year that the EDSA establishment celebrated the uprising on February 25 or mourned the imposition of Martial Law on September 21.
A vote against the EDSA status quo?
Seen from this angle, the Marcos vote can be interpreted as being largely a protest vote, which first surfaced in a dramatic fashion in the 2016 elections that propelled Rodrigo Duterte to the presidency. Though probably inchoate and diffuse at the level of conscious motivation, the vote for Duterte then and the even larger vote for Marcos now were propelled by widespread resentment at the persistence of gross inequality in a country where less than 5% of the population corners over 50% of the wealth. It was a protest against the extreme poverty that engulfs 25% of the people and the poverty, broadly defined, that has about 40% of them in its clutches. Against the loss of decent jobs and livelihoods owing to the destruction of our manufacturing sector and our agriculture by the policies imposed on us by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, and the United States. Against the despair and cynicism that engulf the youth of the working masses who grow up in a society where they learn that the only way to get a decent job that allows you to get ahead in life is to go abroad. Against the daily blows to one’s dignity inflicted by a rotten public transport system in a country where 95% of the population do not own cars.
These conditions, not the horrors of the Marcos period, are what most of the Class D and E Marcos voters experienced directly, and it was their subjective resentment of them that primed them for the seductive appeals of a return to a fictive Golden Age.
In the presidential elections, the full force of this resentment against the EDSA status quo was directed at Leni Robredo. Unfairly, since she is a woman of great personal integrity. The problem is that in the eyes of the marginalized and the poor that went for Marcos, she was not able to separate her image from its various damaging associations – with the Liberal Party, the Makati Business Club, the Aquino clan, the double standards on corruption under Aquino III that rendered the kung walang korap walang mahirap slogan as much as an object of ridicule as the color yellow, and, above all, with the devastating failure of the EDSA Republic to deliver.
The rhetoric of “good governance” may have resonated with Leni’s middle class and elite base, but for the masa it smacked of the same old hypocrisy. Good governance or “tapat na papamalakad” sounded in their ears much like the Liberals painting themselves as the “gente decente” or “decent people,” which led to their rout in the 2016 elections and the ascendancy of Rodrigo Duterte.
Moreover, the Marcos base was not a passive, inert mass. Fed with lies by the Marcos troll machinery, a very large number of them eagerly did battle on the internet with the Robredo camp, the media, historians, the Left — with all those that dared to question their certainties. TV Patrol, 24 Oras, and other programs became sites whose comments sections they plastered with pro-Marcos propaganda, much of it memes either glorifying Marcos or unfairly satirizing Robredo.
Generational rebellion?
This protest against the EDSA Republic had a generational component. Now, it is not unusual that a new generation sets itself against that which the old generation holds dear. But it is usually the case that the younger generation rebels in the service of a vision of the future, of a more just order of things. What was unusual with the millennial and Gen Z generations of the working masses was that they were not inspired by a vision of the future but by a fabricated image of the past, the persuasiveness of which was enhanced by what sociologists like Nicole Curato have called the “toxic positivity” of Marcos Jr.’s online persona, where he was reconstructed by cybersurgery to comes across as a normal, indeed benign, fellow who simply wanted the best for all.
Vacuum on the Left
Now, from the French Revolution to the Philippine Revolution to the Chinese Revolution to the global anti-war movement of the 1960’s to the First Quarter Storm, it was the Left that usually offered the vision that youth latched on to to express their generational rebellion. Unfortunately, in the case of the Philippines, the Left has simply been unable to offer that dream of a future order worth fighting for. Ever since it failed to influence the course of events in 1986 by assuming the role of bystander during the EDSA Uprising, the Left has failed to recapture the dynamism that made it so attractive to youth during Martial Law.
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