Hidden agenda

The political slogans “Marcos Resign” and “Marcos-Duterte Resign” clearly show that the no-quarter-given battle between the Marcos and Duterte camps remains at a deadlock.

But, as matters stand, the Duterte camp, which loudly demands that the incumbent quit immediately, seems to be the more frustrated, despite its alleged multi-pronged destabilization schemes.

 Not least because they’ve been not only seemingly outwitted by the Marcos camp but also because the “pinklawans” are either disgusted with or blunt their pernicious power-grabbing schemes.   

Seen from this angle, it handily explains why of late, the edgy Duterte camp is relentlessly befouling the pinklawans; even as the Marcos camp seems pleased with their Marcos-Duterte Resign slogan, even if the slogan demands the incumbent’s head in the future.

Clearly, not only does the Marcos-Duterte Resign slogan allow Mr. Marcos Jr. to finish his term but also because the slogan’s non-negotiable demand for the Veep to step down ahead of Mr. Marcos Jr. puts the Duterte camp in a bind.

And the bind is expected to tighten further should today’s anti-corruption rallies, organized by the civil society-led “pinklawans” and their usual allies in the Catholic Church and the Left, hopefully ignite renewed democratic political passions.  

The pinklawans’ strong anti-corruption passions have had significant political consequences in our recent political history.  

And they may yet succeed in convincing a politics-weary public to once more re-engage in serious democratic politics or political activities to resolve the current corruption crisis.  Political engagements that the previous Duterte regime sidelined with “an anti-politics in the form of a strong leader who stands above ‘pulitika’ and dominates it.”

Undoubtedly, the Duterte camp too is clearly taking full advantage of the corruption crisis to further its agenda as the rightful “administration-in-waiting.”

But more than that guise, it is the Duterte camp’s vociferous criticism of the incumbent as a “weak leader” that proves to be more thought-provoking than its anti-corruption mantra, and perhaps harbors an even more dangerous agenda. 

Thought-provoking because their repeated calls expose their misty-eyed nostalgia for proto-authoritarianism, which, as perceptive Filipino sociologist Marco Garrido strikingly observed recently, somehow represented the previous regime as the “second turning point in the history of corruption in the Philippines.”

To grasp this point, Garrido in his useful history of Philippine corruption points out that in the tales of the country’s often-volatile mixture of politics and corruption scandals there emerged “a dichotomous view of politics, in terms of the corrupt and the clean, became a salient.”

What that meant in our fraught political history was that it divided the political field in terms of corrupt and clean leaders, hence “Marcos was dirty and Cory clean, Estrada was dirty and Arroyo clean, Arroyo was dirty and Noynoy clean.”

“Duterte,” however, says Garrido, “represented a different way of dividing the political field: not in terms of corrupt and clean leaders but strong and weak ones.”

Recalibrated into our moment, the point therefore is that the proto-authoritarian Duterte camp’s blowhard positions on the menaces of corruption carry hidden desires to resuscitate “strongman” politics.

These desires are there mostly because the Duterte camp is probably still clinging to their unproven notions that the public at large still holds their undemocratic, often violent, “strongman” politics in high regard. 

Political notions which now do lead to the probable explanation of the Duterte camp’s shocking logic never to hold to account the camp’s “strongman” progenitors, as well as its inheritors, as responsible too for the present corruption crisis.