(First of two parts)
Donald Trump’s Presidency 2.0 exhibits a full picture of the past.
When Trump describes his picture of the USA’s future under him, it is literally a future under him: an autocrat on the make, ambitioning the manner of 20th Century fascist leaders: in different decades, Spain’s Franco, Portugal’s Salazar, Italy’s Mussolini, Russia’s Stalin, and the various monarchs of Europe, flattening the population underfoot. Trump hankers for absolutism.
He’s not there yet. But while not fully realized, Trumpian vanity ambitions total control that, to be sure, smells like decaying mansions.
The mansions (yes, showing cracks) that Trump and minions are battering, and the pundits are analyzing in real time are: the rule of law; the sanctity of the popular vote; a self-adjusting free market; the Constitution as bedrock; education as the great leveler; the three co-equal branches of government; a neutral military; universal human rights; a humanitarian bent; and secularism.
These riggings of Jeffersonian liberal democracy were built, in turn, by 800-some years of guarantees of freedom and distancing from central authority, i.e., kingdoms, in the consecutive versions of the English Magna Carta.
With apologies for history-lite here, it is useful to check in with the past to perhaps increase the odds of surviving and possibly besting assaults on democracy everywhere in the world, not the least, by Trumpian intemperance, which impacts the Philippines in probably greater ways than other small economies.
And that’s because the Trumpian demolition derby is driven by back-to-the-past imperialism — the bane of small countries and the rot at the heart of the big ones. Envisioned is a zombie resurrection of the Euro-American Industrial Revolution: to rebuild and repatriate manufacturing back to the US while new territory is officially coveted to extract rare or depleted materials and substances from vassal states.
The politico-economic ambition is so 19th — early 20th century in spirit.
WHITE
As it did a century ago, racism moves quickly into ethnic cleansing. Trump’s white supremacism is both totalizing and virulent. And it must be said that President Rodrigo R. Duterte’s anti-poor killing spree is fed by an unrecognized racism. As all fascists know, murders are eased by prior dehumanization.
The US’ Ku Klux Klansmen, a zoo of pointy-headed dunces now removing their mitres and white costumes, are exposing themselves in full MAGA range (and rage): anti-vaxxers, vigilantes armed with AK’s and the power of grievance, makers of crazy policy, army Barbies, ignorant Cabinet, and nihilists.
All of this menagerie lives in a delusional past, in a world retrospectively imagined as white, male, and happy in an idealized economics of industrialization governed by centralized political control.
EXACTLY
Sketching the Americana landscape from a perch in the Philippines, a question comes up. Did the Filipino fate under the consecutive presidencies — spawned by autocracy-inclined dynasties — presage the American catastrophe? Because of the way the doppelganger politics happened consecutively on either side of the Pacific?
Yes, exactly, says Filipina Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, who has of late been urging online audiences of American talk shows on cable, and the punditry circuits, to recognize the folding guardrails that used to protect democracy in the Philippines. Exactly: the outcome of big money, online disinformation campaigns operating transnationally through several generations of digital architecture, happened earlier in the Philippines. (Recall Cambridge Analytica.)
She urges Americans to recognize the precipitous democratic decay in the Philippines, through the consecutive Presidencies of Rodrigo R. Duterte and Ferdinand R. Marcos, Jr., as directly antecedent to the Trumpian years upon the US and the world.
She is right. About the speed of theft of freedoms and universal human rights; the crushing of dissent and independent thought. About the overwhelming, transnational reach of architectures of disinformation. And about the bad actors among tech, business, and political leaders who game electoral processes and corrode democracy from the inside of its institutions.
BUT
If there is anything to be learned from this mirroring, it is that at the edges of similarity are abundant differences. To add to Ressa’s advocacy for awareness, a few striking differences show up and demand attention.
Unlike in the past, today’s turn to authoritarianism in both the Philippines and the US is not built on ideology. And while the transactional character of both nation’s leadership harks back to “baron” days — sugar barons, railway barons, hacenderos, and so forth — today’s versions are built on controlling narrative by digital means.
More: the differences between the US and the Philippines, or Europe and the Philippines, offer some light on global affairs. At least to Filipinos.
Start with: the nearly complete capture of power by Filipino political dynasties. The US still has a meritocracy in place, and until the DOGE wrecking ball, a strong public bureaucracy. Which will move the discussion to the much earlier collapse of the Philippine educational system, complicated hugely by malnutrition. Not so, the US, which suffers from children killed frequently in school, by gunfire.
End with: the Philippines as an archipelago of tiny fiefdoms, and the US as actually really organized as operational states.
(To be continued.)
Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator and critic of institutions. Her body of work addresses the intersection of culture and politics.
