by WALDEN BELLO
The failures of liberalism made illiberalism popular. But the inevitable crises of the Marcos-Duterte regime offer opportunities for progressive organizing.
As a progressive activist, I am dismayed at the election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of the former dictator, by a landslide in the recent Philippine presidential election. But as a sociologist, I can understand why.
I am not referring to the malfunction, intended or unintended, 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 during the senior Marcos’s rule into a “golden age.”
Undoubtedly, each of these factors played a role in the electoral result. But 31 million plus votes—59 percent of the electorate—is simply too massive to attribute to them alone.
The truth is the Marcos victory was largely a democratic outcome in the narrow electoral sense. The challenge for progressives is to understand why a runaway majority of the Philippine electorate voted to bring an unrepentant, thieving family back to power after 36 years.
How could democracy produce such a wayward outcome?
Illiberalism Is Popular
No matter how slick or sophisticated the internet campaign was, it would have made little impact had there not already been a receptive audience for it.
While the Marcos revisionist message also drew support from among the middle and upper classes, that audience was in absolute numbers largely working class. It was also a largely youth audience, more than half of whom were either small children during the late martial law period or born after the 1986 uprising that ousted Marcos—better known as the “EDSA Revolution.”
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’s one that created greater and greater resentment every year the EDSA establishment celebrated the uprising on February 25 or mourned the imposition of martial law on September 21. Seen from this angle, the Marcos vote can be interpreted as being largely a protest vote that 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 and the even larger vote for Marcos were propelled by widespread resentment at the persistence of gross inequality in a country where less than 5 percent of the population corners over 50 percent of the wealth. It was a protest against the extreme poverty that engulfs 25 percent of the people and the poverty, broadly defined, that has about 40 percent 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 percent of the population doesn’t own a car.
These are the conditions that most working class voters experienced directly, not the horrors of the Marcos period, and their subjective resentment primed them for the seductive appeals of a return to a fictive “Golden Age.”
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