Shaking the Veep

“Do we fall in love with people or with our idea of them?” wrote the Greek philosopher Plato in his dialogue “Symposium.”

By his question, Plato suggests that not only do we fall in love with a person for the way they appear to us but how we love that person is shaped by our imagination.

Plato broadly teaches us about love and beauty. But what he teaches can also apply to politics and be taken as a guide to explain today’s riveting political events.

Just last week, Plato’s question became broadly relevant to the Veep’s impeachment trial when the House prosecutors debunked her public image of simple living, after an expert witness testified that he found in her tax and other records an estimated P817.87 million in allegedly undeclared assets and income.

Confessedly, as I write this, talking about the Veep’s public image is perhaps the only balanced approach insofar as to where we can start teasing out what last week’s explosive revelations so far mean.

Such a limited approach was suggested by Senator-Judge Panfilo Lacson when he said, “Without intending to prejudge the outcome, and subject to any convincing rebuttal the defense may present during the cross-examination of prosecution expert witness Atty. Alexander B. Cabrera, Congressman Chel Diokno appears to have tied up the issues under Article II (unexplained wealth) with remarkable clarity, precision and coherence.”

Though Lacson’s framing looks adequate, it nonetheless probably provoked a negative reaction among some people who concluded that no “clarity, precision and coherence” had been made on the prosecution’s claim of the Veep’s alleged unexplained wealth.

Nonetheless, talking about the Veep’s public image set us towards tackling another relevant issue: the politics of perception.

Now, the politics of perception is generally the idea that how people interpret, feel about, and frame political events, leaders, and policies often matter more than the objective reality itself, which, as you can quickly see, echoes Plato’s question.

Anyway, by knowing the politics of perception we can readily see why House prosecutors last week loudly questioned the Veep’s public image of simplicity. An image which they said, in the face of the unresolved issues about her alleged wealth and spending, shouldn’t be held true, much less imagined.

In short, what the House prosecutors were obviously trying to do was shatter the narrative of “simplicity” which the Veep and her camp had cultivated, especially in Mindanao.

It, of course, remains to be seen if the House prosecutors are succeeding in tearing down the Veep’s public image. There’s yet no convincing evidence the trial’s explosive revelations have reversed the Veep’s “simple” image.

Anyway, whatever the case, in puncturing the Veep’s cultivated public image the House prosecutors inadvertently brought up a grave malaise plaguing our politics that is in need of a cure: Extreme blind partisanship.

Blind partisanship undoubtedly is a pronounced incapacitating disease of our present politics.

And, “extreme partisanship is generally regarded as detrimental to the functioning of democratic governments, in part because of its typical basis in motivated reasoning and misperceptions of political reality,” bluntly says the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Now, should extreme partisanship not be quickly cured, radicalized political polarization will be our likely lot in the near future. And, says the Britannica, “polarization of this sort can damage a country’s long-term interests, in part because the resulting dysfunction and gridlock will make it difficult for any government to adequately address national problems.”