Conflicted

BY ANTONIO P. CONTRERAS       NOVEMBER 24, 2018

MANY supporters of President Rodrigo Duterte bristle at any suggestion that he is a tyrant or a fascist. They will be the very first to argue that we are still under the rule of law.

Yet, what is revealed is a portrait of contradiction when they are confronted with actual decision points where their understanding of what tyranny and fascism are, or their opinions when specific instances where adherence to the rule of law are tested. This betrays a conflicted state, or perhaps of simply being confused.

President Duterte ascended to the presidency buoyed by a populist wave of people sick and tired of exclusionary politics which only brought maldevelopment, corruption and crime. A deeper analysis of the dynamics of this crisis in governance would reveal that these are primarily consequences not of an excess of democracy, but of a deficit. Elites have sequestered power long enough, where the centers of power, from the geographic to the political, have largely failed to bring development to the geographic and political margins.

The festering rebellion waged by the communist Left is for all intents and purposes simply a symptom of this malaise. The communist insurgency thrives in those areas where there is a high incidence of landlessness and poverty, juxtaposed with the expansionist agenda of oligarchs and petty oligarchs that end up encroaching into the little that is left of land being cultivated and inhabited by the rural peasants and the indigenous peoples. This, even as the urban poor has to contend with problems of homelessness and unemployment, which only feeds into urban decay, forcing many, including the very young, to live a life of crime where they are conscripted as foot soldiers for crime syndicates.

If there is one glaring representation of the hapless state of the ordinary Filipino living in the margins, it would be those poor people involved in the drug trade whose main consumers are the middle to upper classes, and whose main traders are from the elite and their enablers in the corrupted government bureaucracy.

President Duterte was voted into power to be the harbinger of change, and to be the voice of these hapless victims of elite misrule, and of the structures they created and which enabled them. He came in strongly as someone who would focus on the roots and not on the symptoms. He appointed left-wing activists to key positions in social welfare and agrarian reform, precisely because he was cognizant of the structural rootedness of poverty. He started out even inviting the leaders of the progressive leftists to Malacañang, and even spoke in their post-SONA rally. There was hope that his drug war would go into the roots and the sources of drugs, to constrict the flow and take down their elite bosses and financiers.

It was therefore most unfortunate that the President’s policy strategy ended up focusing more on the rebels, and the poor drug users and couriers as the main targets. This is not to say that he totally abandoned looking at the roots of rebellion and criminality, but what was highlighted was his war on drugs and the communist Left, which he even reclassified as a terrorist group, and not his war on poverty. And this spin is not to be blamed on the media, but is in fact what the President has repeatedly discoursed on in his speeches and pronouncements, and in his actions. It is also what his supporters have actively enabled.

And this is what effectively influenced the optics and the narratives. The President’s war on drugs, and his anti-communist pronouncements, became the fodder for the political opposition and critics, even as it is also the preferred imaging of a President in action by his most vocal supporters.

The Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO), through its many agencies, tried so hard to redirect the presidential narrative to also focus on the developmental, anti-poverty programs and activities of government. Unfortunately, aside from the fact that good news tends to be boring, it even landed the PCOO in trouble with the loyal Duterte supporters who felt that not enough attention was being given to defend the President from his critics and bashers.

To the Duterte supporters, the Martin Andanars can easily be sidetracked by the Oscar Albayaldes. This is a crowd that cheered the non-confirmation of a Judy Taguiwalo. While it is not the intention, the appointment of a retired general to eventually replace Taguiwalo is a most apropos optics for the narrative of the war on poverty that is now devoid of a recognition of the structural roots of rebellion. This imaging has even drawn more logic from the subsequent firing of three undersecretaries whose common denominator is that they were all left-leaning.

The adversarial stance of the President towards the Left is enabled by his pollical base of support, particularly in social media, where there is a palpable visceral hatred towards leftist politics, largely as a reaction to their anti-Duterte stance. Not many realize that the Left will always be anti-government, whoever sits as President in Malacañang.

It is indeed a challenge to make sense of how a movement that started out as pro-poor, anti-elite and anti-oligarch could make a 180-degree turn and become rabidly unappreciative of the voices of those who speak for the poor, and against the elites and the oligarchs.

It is contradictory that people who bristled at how Yellow politics have coopted the writing of public narratives to impose their own version of the story could now be a crowd that roars in approval to silence the voices that are critical of the President.

It behooves one to ask how a political base that rebelled against elite sequestration of political power, and the silencing of opposition voices through their total demonization — like how they demonized Marcos — can now support the use of demonizing tactics to delegitimize the voices of those who are at the margins. Instead of understanding the structural roots of their predicament, we see people who are now quick to condemn the urban lumpenproletariat struggling to live even if it is one in crime, and the lumad who are fighting for their lands and are forced to join the rebellion.

It defies logic how a people who voted for a president who promised change from a state led by Noynoy Aquino that focused on symbols and not on meaningful development, can approve of moves that fail to attack the root causes. It is most confusing that people who hated the corruption of the uniformed personnel can agree with Albayalde’s move to sanitize their representation by demanding that ABS-CBN rewrite the script of its top-rating soap opera.

And the worst thing is that some of them do so not because they defend the police, or are Coco Martin haters. They do so simply because they hate ABS-CBN which they accuse of being Yellow.

Duterte supporters are relentless when they attack those who accuse the President of being a tyrant. Yet they unknowingly show a tyrannical streak when they approve of censoring critical voices and demonizing their bearers.

https://www.manilatimes.net/conflicted/472703/