THE ascendance of Rodrigo Duterte to the presidency was seen by many as an embodiment of a rebellion of those who have been excluded, marginalized or diminished by elite politics. But bereft of any grand narrative that can justify his ascension cast in the usual forms that ideologies take, Duterte ended up being thrust into the political landscape not as a bearer of the agenda of the left or the right but as an embodiment of a personality cult. He personified the anger and frustration of a people ignored, betrayed and abandoned by their elites. His being a provincial city mayor amplified his representation of being an outsider from the margins.
In a personalistic political culture such as the Philippines, the development of a counter-ideology was appropriated not through a grand narrative of what should become of the Philippines. Instead, the agenda for defining a rationale for challenging elitist, exclusionary politics was appropriated into a personality cult that fed into the mythologies and rationalizations about Rodrigo Duterte. In the end, he became the ideology, with his utterances becoming the textual narratives, and his actions becoming the templates to justify his actions.
Duterte is no longer the politician that required some external or grand text to properly explain him. He personified the justification needed to give sense and meaning to the political narratives that emerge from his presidency. This is precisely why his political base is composed of different social classes, and he draws support from across the ideological spectrum, or whatever may approximate it. He has supporters from the urban poor and peasants, the blue-collar workers, the middle class, and the gated communities. He has support from grassroots activists and military adventurists.
If there is any cohort where his support is weak, it is from the ideological left and the liberal progressives, mainly from academe and activist civil society. What is, however, ironic is that this section of the intellectual elites is the one that inaugurated “Dutertismo” as a label for his ideological base through a “Duterte Reader” released when Duterte was barely in his second year in office.
However, the criticisms may not even be grounded in reality. “Dutertismo” painted Duterte as a fascist. Intellectual elitists like Randy David, John Nery and their cohorts forced into Duterte the profile of a Filipino Mussolini, Hitler or Franco.
Unfortunately, much as his critics try so hard to image him as a fascist, fascism does not fit the mold of Rodrigo Duterte. A fascist is a radical, right-wing, authoritarian ultra-nationalist who uses his dictatorial powers to suppress the political opposition, establish a tightly regimented and totalitarian society and a highly centralized and controlled economy. However, despite his bravado and crude language, the President is not a radical, right-wing politician but, instead, one who promotes land reform with the left hand while presiding over a bloody drug war with his right hand.
The President is not a fascist also because, far from being an ultra-nationalist, he is in fact a pragmatist in his foreign policy. While he may have pivoted away from the United States, it was not fueled by a post-colonial, identity-based, anti-Western logic. His pivot towards China is driven by practical considerations of taking a more diplomatic approach that can bring in economic dividends, instead of a confrontational path that is fueled by symbolic nationalist sentiment. His politics is based not on the lofty symbolic goals of nationalism but the more materialist gut issues of economic security and freedom from crime and drugs.
Some scholars of politics argue that President Duterte is a populist. Indeed he is. However, populism is not an ideology but a political strategy. A populist is someone who endeavors to appeal to the hearts and minds of ordinary people who feel that they are being ignored, disregarded and abandoned by the political elites. There are left-wing populists as there are right-wing ones.
It is as a populist that Rodrigo Duterte ascends to the status of being an ideology. His brand of politics defies being entombed in a fixed place in the ideological spectrum, even as his populism turns him into a cult-like figure that no longer needs a text to justify. Rodrigo Duterte is the embodiment of a belief system that aggregates the frustrations and anger of the people who have been ignored and excluded by the liberal elites. These kinds of elites spoke of democracy, human rights and social justice. But they spoke in their advocacies, or as literary pieces, or in academic journals and conferences, but never in the real and everyday lives of people who bear the burdens that academic and civil society ideologues theorize and perorate about.
Rodrigo Duterte’s power as a living ideology, a person-as-text presence in the political landscape, rests in his authenticity and the accessibility of his symbolic representations. He is a performance, a living spectacle, a joke and a comic relief, an ongoing soap opera, a hope and a prayer, a curse to the enemies of, and a blessing to, the people. He is all of these rolled into one.
Yet, every ideology has its pitfall, a dark side, an undesirable outcome. An ideology can inspire, but it can also blind. In history, ideologies were able to propel people to rise up in arms against oppressors, but they were also able to whip up irrational acts of collective inhumanity that ended in injustice, even genocide. Ideologies can build hope and bring liberation, even as they can destroy dreams and usher in damnation. It is in this spectrum of possible consequences that we will have to imagine the effects and impacts of Rodrigo Duterte as ideology. Next: The dangers of ‘Dutertismo’
https://www.manilatimes.net/rodrigo-duterte-as-counter-ideology-to-elite-liberal-politics/543817/
https://www.manilatimes.net/rodrigo-duterte-as-counter-ideology-to-elite-liberal-politics/543817/
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