‘Dutertismo’ or clearheaded patriotism?
At the last presidential debate, the candidates were asked how they would deal with China’s incursions in the West Philippine Sea. Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte had a ready answer. He will tell the Coast Guard to take him to the middle of the sea, and, from there, he will ride a jet ski to the nearest disputed atoll. There, in full view of the Chinese naval forces, he will plant the Philippine flag—alone.
Wherever the mayor talks about it, his audiences greet this verbal bravura with rousing laughter and effusive cheers. It makes no difference to them whether he’s joking or he’s serious about this grave policy issue. No matter what he says, Mayor Digong seems to fulfill their expectations of the kind of leader the country needs for our desperate times.
He must be tough, decisive, fearless, and, yes, heroic. “I don’t care if they kill me,” the mayor adds. “That will make me a hero, and I have always dreamed of being a hero. But, I will not risk the life of a single Filipino soldier in this fight.”
I don’t think the man is joking. I do not doubt his readiness to do exactly what he says on impulse. Nothing seems to intimidate him. There, I believe, lies his dark charisma.
But charisma, in Max Weber’s definition, is not a magical quality possessed by a person. It is, rather, a type of relationship. To make sense of charisma, one has to understand the social context in which a leader attracts throngs of followers.
The context is typically one characterized by crisis—as in the aftermath of a war or in the face of famine or a calamity. Institutions have broken down. Criminals, bandits, and armed individuals roam the streets. People are gripped by a sense of despair and panic. They feel they have no one to turn to for protection, assistance, or justice.
It was this situation that the anti-Semitic writer, Dietrich Eckart, saw in his defeated and demoralized country in the wake of World War I. He saw Adolf Hitler at a meeting of the German Workers’ Party, and at once he knew this was the man who could lift Germany from its humiliation. “[A] fellow who can stand the rattle of a machine gun. The rabble has to be scared sh*tless. I can’t use an officer; the people no longer have any respect for them. Best of all would be a worker who’s got his mouth in the right place … He doesn’t need much intelligence; politics is the stupidest business in the world.” (Quoted in Lawrence Rees, “Hitler’s Charisma,” 2012)
All this sounds frighteningly familiar when one views the phenomenal rise of Digong Duterte in Philippine politics. Except for one thing: The Philippines is not struggling to recover from the desolation of war. There’s threat of hunger in some parts of the country because of the drought, but food is readily available everywhere else. Some areas devastated by Supertyphoon “Yolanda” are still not fully rehabilitated, but much has been done to resettle the displaced communities. There’s poverty, but this is occurring in the midst of unprecedented economic growth. There’s crime, but there is no anarchy in our streets. Some judges and prosecutors are corrupt, but the rule of law remains.
In short, the country is not in crisis—at least not in the way it was in the aftermath of the 1983 assassination of Ninoy Aquino. During that time, the economy shrank by 10 percent. The peso lost much value. We could not pay the nation’s creditors. International banks refused to extend credit lines to pay for basic imports. We didn’t know if the ailing dictator in Malacañang was still in command of government. Daily demonstrations filled the streets, and rumors of a military coup were rampant. There was loud clamor for a new government that would rebuild the nation’s institutions.
No doubt our problems have multiplied over the years. That is what happens to any country that is growing in density and diversity. Our national situation is more complex today not only because there are more of us, but also because our daily lives have become increasingly shaped not just by innovations in technology, but by shifts in the global economic system and world politics as well. We have been able to reasonably adapt to the challenges and opportunities of this changing global reality. But, undeniably, many of our countrymen are falling through the cracks of these developments.
Interestingly, it is not the extremely poor who are reacting to these complex issues with great impatience. The sense of desperation is coming rather from those who have relatively more in life. It is they who righteously proclaim their entitlement to something better—better paying jobs, better public transport, more responsive public service, safer neighborhoods, lower taxes, better airports, better hospitals and better schools.
This is nothing extraordinary. We find this in every country that is in the throes of modernity—the sense of drowning in an accumulation of problems beyond the capacity of existing institutions and leaders to solve. In a flash, the people’s pent-up resentments against the existing order come to a head and find release in the quest for a god who can solve their problems—the traffic jams, the petty criminals, the undisciplined motorists, the insensitive government employee, the abusive cop, the bribe-taking judge, and the thousand and one aggravations that mark their daily lives.
We don’t need a dictator to tell us how to live. We need a president who can form a capable team that will sort out the complex problems of governance. Yet, no government will ever succeed unless we, the citizens, can rise above our unexamined fears and emotions—high enough to be able to ask what we can do to help our country or, at least, not add to its problems.
Randy David
* Philippine Daily Inquirer. 12:06 AM May 8th, 2016:
http://opinion.inquirer.net/94649/dutertismo-or-clearheaded-patriotism#ixzz48EWh8lj7
‘Dutertismo’
At the end of his rambling speeches before mesmerized crowds, presidential candidate and preelection poll frontrunner Rodrigo Duterte touches the Philippine flag that is brought to him on cue. He brings it to his lips, and solemnly proclaims: “Together let’s fix this country.” As he raises his clenched fist, the audience breaks into ecstatic applause.
No other presidential candidate in Philippine political history has used the nation’s highest symbol so deliberately and to such effect. This melodramatic patriotic gesture seems to work. Instead of explaining his political program, Duterte regales his listeners with stories of his frustrating encounters with a dysfunctional national government and how he deals with these to produce tangible results in Davao City. He himself admits he has no program of his own to offer, and that he intends to copy some of the good plans of his rivals.
What is urgent, he says, is that we restore order and respect for authority. He laments the fact that criminals, drug peddlers, and corrupt public officials have been able to act with impunity by exploiting the weaknesses of the judicial system. In this manner, he articulates the exasperation and desperation that the people experience in their daily lives.
But more than this, he unleashes a torrent of aggressive and resentful impulses not previously seen in our society, except perhaps in social media. For now, the explicit targets are the drug syndicates, criminals, and government functionaries who spend more time making money for themselves than in serving the public. In the future, they can be any group that is perceived to stand in the way of genuine change.
Never going into specifics, Duterte promises just one thing: the will and leadership to do what needs to be done—to the point of killing and putting one’s own life on the line. “If you are not prepared to kill and be killed, you have no business being president of this country,” he has said on more than one occasion.
This is pure theater—a sensual experience rather than the rational application of ideas to society’s problems. Observing the same phenomenon in Europe in the 1920s, the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin interpreted the events that saw the rise of Hitler and Mussolini as the transformation of politics into aesthetics. In Germany, this phenomenon came to be known as Nazism; in Italy, it was called Fascism.
It would probably be appropriate to call its Philippine incarnation “Dutertismo.” Calling Duterte a fascist would probably not mean anything to the average Filipino. If at all, it might focus inordinate attention on the man himself and the dark charisma he projects, when what is needed is to understand the movement he has given life to and the collective anger and despair it represents.
It would be instructive for all of us, in this election season, to take a moment to step back from the political personalities that today occupy center stage, and view the broader picture that seems to be upon us in the light of the history of other countries. A book titled “The anatomy of fascism” written by former Columbia University professor Robert O. Paxton and published in 2004 has proved to be an eye-opener for me.
Fascism is neither a distinct ideology nor a coherent philosophy of government. Therefore, it would be hard to locate it in the political spectrum between Right and Left. Its agenda changes as it moves, rejecting what it regards as the flabbiness of existing moral and political institutions.
It draws its base from all social classes, from the cities as well as the countryside, attracting support from businessmen as well as former soldiers, workers and peasants, intellectuals and artists, statesmen and shopkeepers. Paxton quotes an entry from the diary of the novelist Thomas Mann in March 1933, shortly after Hitler became Germany’s chancellor. What Mann saw was a revolution “without underlying ideas, against ideas, against everything nobler, better, decent, against freedom, truth and justice.”
As puzzling as it might appear, this complex phenomenon can be explained, Paxton writes. “Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s mystical union with the historic destiny of his people…. Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. Mussolini exulted in that absence.” Hitler had a 25-point program but he also declared it to be changeable, staunchly refusing to make “cheap” promises. Indeed, what this really signified, says Paxton, is that “the debate had ceased.”
Fascists dismissed modern liberal politicians as “culpably incompetent guardians” against the enemies of the state. They had nothing but contempt for humanist enlightenment values. The supreme irony is that the typical bearers of these values—the educated middle classes—found themselves cooperating with, if not actively supporting, the movement. Unable to appreciate the complexity of the problems facing modern society, and seeing only the unpalatable choices before them, they primed themselves for a “brutal anti-intellectualism” that reduced everything to the “will and leadership” of the strongman.
Reading Paxton’s book while watching Digong Duterte speak before the Makati Business Club gave me goose pimples. These captains of industry came to listen to his economic program. The man started by reading the scanty notes before him with undisguised indifference. He then put these notes aside and used up the time telling them about how he dealt with criminals, and how he was more honest about his libido than any of them in the room. As it turned out, he was the program they came to hear.
Randy David
* Philippine Daily Inquirer. 12:06 AM May 1st, 2016:
http://opinion.inquirer.net/94530/dutertismo#ixzz48EYN9nZo
The political outsider
At this late stage of the ongoing presidential contest, the man to beat appears to be Rodrigo Duterte—until very recently an outsider to national politics whom very few thoughtful Filipinos took seriously. How does one account for the phenomenal rise to national stature of a local politician from a remote corner of Mindanao?
Equipped with an enormous capacity to tell stories and tackle issues in street language dripping with expletives, the man talks tough against criminals, drug pushers and abusive people, promising to summarily purge them from our society. He laughs at his own dirty thoughts and desires, and ridicules our foibles as a people. But he reserves his harshest criticism and deepest contempt for what he considers the nation’s inept and corrupt public officials, and the ruling families they serve.
Despite, and perhaps because of, his crude language and coarse demeanor, he comes out—to his admirers—as an endearing rogue who articulates without fear their own resentments and fantasies. That is what is interesting—and, to the rest of us, disturbing.
I listened repeatedly to a video recording of Duterte’s controversial hourlong monologue at a political rally in which he recounted, with all the machismo he could summon, his reaction to the gang-rape and murder of the Australian lay missionary Jacqueline Hamill in 1989. Hamill and her companions were held hostage by 15 inmates inside a Davao detention center where they were conducting a prison ministry. Duterte’s remark about his feeling especially angry upon seeing the corpse—thinking he should have had a first go with the beautiful Hamill—struck me as totally perverse and disrespectful. Knowing that he is a lawyer and a former prosecutor, I didn’t expect it. I wondered if the tough-talking mayor was just carried away by the energy of the moment and, in his rush to tell a joke, had failed to censor a barbaric thought. But, he insists he wasn’t joking.
The applause, laughter and jeering from the complicit crowd left no doubt in my mind that the legendary mayor felt completely in his element. One could hear some of his admirers prompting him to share more of such stories—the more violent, it seemed, the better. It’s difficult to say where this is all coming from. My hunch is that we’re dealing here not so much with a mindset as with a configuration of raw emotions lying just beneath the surface of our culture. I suspect it is this that gives resonance to Mayor Duterte’s brand of political rhetoric.
People recognize themselves in him. They see him as someone who makes no attempt to represent our better or higher nature, but is content, rather, to speak to our unpolished, confused and insecure selves. He refuses to be bound by norms of political correctness, secure in the thought that in the fraudulent world of politics, talking bluntly is the only way to be authentic. “Take me for what I am,” he likes to tell his listeners. While the inability to admit a wrong may seem fatal to anyone with presidential ambitions, for Duterte fans, that same rebellious obstinacy seems to lie at the very core of his appeal.
There’s some basis to this, of course. I mean, Duterte would not be connecting to millions of Filipinos the way he has in recent weeks if he had not tapped into a rich vein of popular disenchantment. This public disaffection can flow from various sources. In a highly unequal society like ours, in which individuals find themselves permanently trapped in patron-client relationships, unexamined resentments silently build up in the hearts of those constantly at the receiving end of power and oppression. This is often accompanied by a vague yearning for emancipation and justice. But, instead of taking action, people are typically content to have a forceful figure like Rodrigo Duterte personify and articulate their rebellion, and displace their aggression, for them.
But, Duterte’s rise has equally been made possible by the grievances of Mindanao’s non-Muslim majority. Mostly Visayan settlers who made the island prosperous, they have long nurtured an antipathy to Manila politicians who speak of Mindanao’s peoples and their needs as though these were reducible to those of Muslim Mindanao. Davao’s longtime mayor deftly articulates their sentiments by harping on the big disparity between Mindanao’s contribution to the country’s gross national product and the pittance it receives in internal revenue allotments. In this regard, Duterte’s rise mirrors the revolt of the periphery.
We have not really had in our political history anyone quite like him, who has made his way into the national electoral stage by cursing at the nation’s officials and ruling elites, and mocking its institutions. We have had countless politicians who rose to national prominence by portraying themselves as men of the masses. But none of them ever challenged the prevailing system. In contrast, Duterte has made it a point to mock the system and its conventions, seeing in its openings nothing more than channels through which to undermine it.
At his rallies, he kisses the flag and professes patriotism, pledging to repair the country’s broken system of government. Many can sympathize with that goal. But, without a clear vision of a reformed political order and a coherent set of principles to guide his presidency, Duterte’s victory could mean one of two things. It could spark a popular movement of the poor and jump-start a process of radical ferment, or it could pave the way for a fascist regime supported by a disgruntled middle class. In either case, it is difficult to see how, under a Duterte presidency, the country can avoid entering another period of political uncertainty.
Randy David
* Philippine Daily Inquirer. 12:17 AM April 24th, 2016:
http://opinion.inquirer.net/94430/the-political-outsider#ixzz48EZmqKJz
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