‘Boring’ is winning

Surprisingly, the cultish Duterte faction, “with the inexplicable craven quasi-religious fervor of its believers,” has been knee-capped by the Marcos faction’s deliberate strategy of blandness.

It’s a stinging predicament for the boisterous faction that recently caught the eye of perceptive historian Manolo Quezon.

After examining Mr. Marcos Jr.’s perceptible “drama-averse” reactions to various domestic and international crises, as well as the political strong-arm twisting by the former strongman’s faction, Quezon in a Facebook post observed:

“It (drama-averse) is driving everyone, including the public, crazy, precisely because all it can see is blandness, a disinclination to confrontation, a refusal to engage in the usual macho posturing and any fighting is left to subordinates which denies a mano-a-mano, datu-to-datu duel --- the sabong --- which our entire political culture is orientated to expect and demand.”

Quezon’s “sabong” metaphor is apt. The Duterte faction’s fighting-cock posturing — also displaying in full its proto-ideology “Dutertismo’s” emotional reliance on speed, spectacle, and celebration of impunity — is being quietly met and dulled by the seeming blandness or the intentional use of mundane, slow, and methodical actions by the President’s faction.

Here, “the overall goal seems to be to marshal the inherent strengths and advantages of incumbency while denying a forum that would give weaker foes a forum to burnish their credentials. Take the whole (inevitable) split in the former ruling coalition: it has always been the other side that makes the aggressive move and every countermove has been marked with overwhelming numbers, but also stealth, until the actual confrontation that the other side inevitably loses,” as Quezon thoughtfully put it.

Which only testifies that the Marcos faction’s “boring” tactics seem more Machiavellian for its clear-eyed realism about power and its refusal to confuse how politics ought to work with how it does work.

At any rate, the “boring” strategy --- which political scholars refer to as “simple sabotage” or bureaucratic obstruction — intriguingly also relatively derailed rowdy “Dutertismo’s” (coined by sociologist Randy David) efficacy and efficiency. Lately illustrative of this “simple sabotage” is perhaps the recent amusing incident during the National Bureau of Investigation’s (NBI) probe of the 18 so-called ex-Marines’ alleged deliveries of cash suitcases to Marcos’s supporters.

Citing basic investigative procedures, NBI officials demanded individual interviews of the ex-Marines. Probably sensing that the NBI’s move jeopardized the credibility of the ex-Marines and their suitcase-cash claims, their lawyers screamed “harassment.” The issue remains unresolved.

But, if anything, the NBI’s preemptive strike spoiled the Duterte faction’s calibrated attempt to give the ex-Marines’ narratives investigative meaning.

On a larger note, the NBI showed that the digital attempt to grab our attention by the Duterte faction’s acolytes and their mercenary troll armies is beginning to stall.

So pronounced is the flagging of the Duterte faction’s carefree sense of entitlement in politics — which previously held many in thrall — that even bureaucrats now routinely refuse to be glassy-eyed to the faction’s deliberate use of post-literacy, myth, and emotion to replace logic, evidence and investigative procedures.

As a result, these are seemingly the days “Dutertismo” is past its peak unquestioning.

So much so that if “Dutertismo’s” previous “inhuman” epithet simply referred to cruelty and brutality it presently refers to its process of gradually replacing human judgement and experience with blind tribal loyalty.

A political difficulty that seems to have affected the Duterte faction’s algorithm-driven politics — that in reacting to its gutter language soundbites and posts many somehow now sense these as masturbating without pleasure.