inspired by a fabricated image of the past
May 17, 2022 5:02 PM   Subscribe

The truth is, the Marcos victory was largely a democratic outcome in the narrow electoral sense, and the challenge for progressives is to understand why the runaway majority of the electorate voted to bring an unrepentant thieving family back to power after 36 years. How could democracy produce such a wayward outcome?

See also the Last Week Tonight episode on the Philippines (and the comment section full of heartbroken Filipinos and a few BBM stans).

For example, here's a historical side note re: the preposterous Michael Jordan story: "Nutribun was a nutrient-dense kind of bread that was part of USAID's food aid program to fight malnutrition in the Philippines. Imelda stamped her name on the packages to make it seem like they came from her. Decades later, it is still part of Marcos historical rewriting that Nuribun was developed and distributed by their family."
posted by spamandkimchi (19 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
I forgot to mention Rappler has lots of election coverage and the author of the article, Walden Mello, is also featured in the Last Week Tonight episode.
posted by spamandkimchi at 5:05 PM on May 17, 2022 [1 favorite]


The algorithmic feed must be banned, and its developers and adherents forbidden from developing any social media tools for the rest of their lives.
posted by tclark at 5:10 PM on May 17, 2022 [10 favorites]


A different Rappler piece:
The truth is that Marcos Jr. had only exploited Filipinos’ sentiments against the failures of liberal democracy. He did not materialize them of out of his own will.

When the elder Marcos was ousted in 1986, the Aquino regime brought with it the promise of a better Philippines: an end to corruption, murder, and violence, economic recovery, the restoration of democracy, the rule of law. Instead, Cory Aquino re-established the old political elite, reconciled with the new ones Marcos Sr. had introduced, disenfranchised the peasantry, and reneged on her commitment to genuine agrarian reform.

... For many since, the idealism that spurred the EDSA Revolution seemed all for nothing, its fire suffocated by a promise broken, a revolution betrayed. What took its place was an iron fist – a nostalgic longing for peace, order, stability, and the “golden age” fantasy of authoritarian rule. Indeed, many voters have become ambivalent to democracy, skeptical of their and their countrymen’s ability to adequately manage the freedom that democracy provides, exhausted with the tired old narratives of high-minded and lofty ideals.
posted by spamandkimchi at 5:12 PM on May 17, 2022 [12 favorites]


How could democracy produce such a wayward outcome?
After the embarrassment and horror that was Former Guy here in the US, this is a question that we sure as hell need to figure out the answer to as well. I imagine the reasons run fairly similar. Lately, there are so many days when I feel like my neighbor with the GIANT METEOR 2020 bumper sticker was on to something...
posted by xedrik at 5:19 PM on May 17, 2022 [8 favorites]


The article's swerve into accelerationism at the end left me cold. Do not expect people to be deterred from right wing populism because it fails to provide for their needs.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:24 PM on May 17, 2022 [12 favorites]




The algorithmic feed must be banned

Pretty sure demagoguery predates social media though.
posted by atoxyl at 6:43 PM on May 17, 2022 [4 favorites]


It isn’t just the medium. It is that one side is willing and able to lie, cheat, and steal to take and hold power. And the other side must play by the rules or everyone will cry foul. Same as it ever was.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 6:48 PM on May 17, 2022 [9 favorites]


All I know is that the US has done enough damage to the Philippines and I hope we avoid getting involved.
posted by interogative mood at 7:41 PM on May 17, 2022


Turns out all you need to do to bring about dictatorships and fascism is say voters are going to lose their status without you.

Too bad doing a hard thing like battling climate change is the opposite of that. We don’t really need more doom comments anywhere probably but I cant think of a clearer sign that it’s never happening. And that means things are… shrug.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 8:02 PM on May 17, 2022 [4 favorites]


Not a fan of how people in this thread are leaping to blaming the algorithm or painting this like it's that same narrative of "right wingers cheat to win, left wingers play by the rules and lose". None of that is actually relevant if you RTFA. You are all Americans making this be about America, and that sucks. Please stop.

It's easy to blame Aquino for being feckless and failing to deliver on her own promises, but it's also easy to forget that the only reason why the EDSA Uprising was peaceful was that Aquino got a bunch of ministers and power brokers in the regime to defect by essentially promising them some level of continued power and influence. That was further exacerbated by the wave of coups and counter- revolutions that different Marcos Loyalists or Communists launched against her regime showing how fragile it was.

Essentially it felt like the nation traded civil war for a dysfunctional compromise government that had too much of the old corruption to restore the middle class, but also had enough progressive aspiration to keep people continuously disappointed.

In the meantime Singapore is -just- over there on the other side of the South China Sea, and it's doing amazing. There are now enough Filipinos who live and work in Singapore and talk about how clean and orderly it is, and it is enough for people to believe that you don't need democracy to have prosperity. You just need order and a tough line against crime. As the article writes: people hear theories about the virtues of democracy but their lived experience is that democracy has given them a shitty life, and the autocracies that surround them or doing just as well if not better. People don't need disinfo on Facebook to feel that. They get it from their cousins and friends who are posting photos of living it up in Singapore and Shanghai and just feeding that FOMO.

I honestly don't know if it would've been better it the 1986 uprising chose violence and chose not to compromise with Marcos' generals and tried more valiantly to clean house. I think that scenario could've ended in bloody repression, or a different mix of corrupt leaders, or some form of ethnic cleansing, like what happened in Indonesia when Suharto was ousted. But it.does make me sad to think about all of the hope and optimism that fame out of EDSA and realize that this may have been the best that it could have accomplished.

And definitely one of the takeaways here for Western democracies is:. Asia has proven that you don't need freedom to have prosperity. More people see that now. Not everyone votes for autocrats because they're dumb or fascist or scared of foreigners. The Philippines voted for two autocratic families because democracy has concretely failed them.
posted by bl1nk at 8:55 PM on May 17, 2022 [56 favorites]


You can't just focused on the head of the snake. It has a body, too. The moneyed interests that exist in one regime will still exist in the next.

This will also be true if Putin goes away, and is a huge factor in the US.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 9:21 PM on May 17, 2022 [3 favorites]


In the meantime Singapore is -just- over there on the other side of the South China Sea,

I remember my work trips to Manila and despite my line of work and everything, while over here in Malaysia my circle was envious at the level of work the Filipino journalists and activists were able to do (and absolutely, it's because they HAD to), my colleagues were looking enviously right back at us and Singapore.

Asia has proven that you don't need freedom to have prosperity

You cracked the code for our regimes' propaganda huh. Certainly Singaporean media and commentariat had a field day when the results were posted. (No comments on the Malaysian side, we're too preoccupied as we're in the midst of our own modest post-reform era of fragile compromises)
posted by cendawanita at 9:30 PM on May 17, 2022 [10 favorites]


In the meantime Singapore is -just- over there on the other side of the South China Sea, and it's doing amazing... sad to think about all of the hope and optimism that fame out of EDSA and realize that this may have been the best that it could have accomplished.

there is another way!
@billychang: "Yup. We also have a Death Metal band's frontman as MP. Essentially Taiwan had a major event called 'The Sunflower Movement' in 2014 that completely changed how young ppl engage with politics, and have elected younger & more progressive MPs ever since"[1,2,3] :P
posted by kliuless at 2:02 AM on May 18, 2022 [5 favorites]


The article's swerve into accelerationism at the end left me cold.

Which parts do you think are accelerationist? As far as I can see, the ending is "this is an inherently unstable government that can't deliver its promises, so I would expect an ongoing power struggle, which is at least better than the alternative of long-term authoritarianism". I mean, it's not entirely hopeless, but I can't see that it implies we should be glad of this election result, or even that authoritarianism always fails in difficult times. I don't really see the accelerationist angle at all.
posted by howfar at 7:17 AM on May 18, 2022


South Korea has had its own recent flirtation with let's bring vote the dictator's kid into the presidency even though the narrative of prosperity that the conservatives tried to push about the years of autocratic rule isn't nearly as compelling given how much more prosperous the country got after the transition to democracy.

There's a lot to write about why South Korea and the Philippines had such different post WWII trajectories despite starting off in very similar situations post war economically and vis-a-vis entanglement with U.S. military. One set of reasons, weirdly enough, is the positive impact of the Cold War. Having North Korea outpacing South Korea during the 1960s in terms of human and economic development forced the regime to keep some of its promises to invest in infrastructure and education, albeit it very unevenly and shaped by the previous decades of Japanese colonial rule. Prosperity without democracy was primarily for the southeastern provinces and Seoul. And never for the working classes, who suffered and died to build the initial economic engine of export-focused production. A more eff-ed up positive Cold War outcome for South Korea was how much of a boost its economy got from the American war in Vietnam.

My parents left South Korea during its decades of military dictatorship. My first visit to Korea coincided with the May 18th 1980 Gwangju Uprising in which hundreds of civilians were murdered and disappeared. There have been tons of books and films about the years of democratic activism and the brutality of dictatorial rule. One of the Rappler writers mentioned how the memory hole of the Marcos years was too easily papered over with b.s. fantasies of how peaceful and prosperous that time was because the story of its brutality and venality hadn't really been etched into popular consciousness. I am curious to know what is taught in textbooks and what films and novels have come out about those years.
posted by spamandkimchi at 9:11 AM on May 18, 2022 [7 favorites]


There are now enough Filipinos who live and work in Singapore and talk about how clean and orderly it is, and it is enough for people to believe that you don't need democracy to have prosperity. You just need order and a tough line against crime.

This is an important point to raise. The test is sometimes phrased as knowing or caring who, say, the president of Switzerland is. The main benefit of democracy is not allowing a private oligarchy to steal all the resources and build castles and personal armies and hoard all the wealth in order to appear to be divine (and lead people to believe that wealth flows downstream from them). In other words, most of human history. Any other benefits rely on expanded opportunity, not direct results. If democracy delivered results, we could simply vote to give everyone medical and engineering degrees to create prosperity that way. The bottom line is about evolved public institutions and meeting the needs of a population so it doesn't feel ripped off. Today that might mean to take a shortcut and smartly imitate a modern democracy as a model, because it might not get there otherwise. Democracy begins with a revolution about individual rights, and goes from there in evolution, while most older cultures have static social classes and don't value the individual as an equal political entity. This raises many questions about how best to arrive at common prosperity, because western democracies recently competed with communism in socializing things in order to stave off revolutionary fever. Most democratic nations didn't demonize social programs as communist because economists showed it benefited the market economy overall. The other facts are that China has achieved prosperity by trading with democracies and this would not have happened if they were hostile to democracies. There is no cosmic rule to suggest that China can't evolve into a democracy from a stage of prosperity. It is always about order, and stability, because if it is not there then scared people want a bully to protect them, and that means trouble and scapegoating and foreign influence, and a generation lost to wondering how to get to normal in the fastest way.
posted by Brian B. at 9:44 AM on May 18, 2022


Metafilter: Enough progressive aspiration to keep people continuously disappointed.
posted by andythebean at 11:34 AM on May 18, 2022 [1 favorite]


I find the analysis that it was mostly younger (millennial and gen z) working class voters with no direct memories of the Marcos years who were behind the landslide vote for Marcos Jr. absolutely terrifying. That they were motivated by the disappointments of the last 36 years to vote as they did, by the gap between what the reformers promised and what they delivered. Also, that because they had no direct memories of the Marcos Sr. years they were susceptible to lies on Facebook about what those years were actually like. It's easy for me to draw comparisons with my own country and to the rightward shift I see among many many MANY of the youth here.
posted by subdee at 1:51 PM on May 18, 2022 [4 favorites]


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