(Part One)
No. But…
Said one Filipino senator a couple of weeks ago: “Lahat naman corrupt, tanggapin niyo na lang. (We are all corrupt, just accept it),” slurring all of the Senate, or all politicians. Or maybe all Filipinos carrying on, as he suggests, hypocritically in a so-so democracy.
Most of the time, “culture” is blamed. But in a Philippines where roots stories are not updated with new science, appeals to cultural explanation yield misguided, often ridiculous answers.
One misguided answer is that Filipinos, averse to rules, can’t help flouting them. May we all be averse to stereotypes and hold out for tougher answers. (More on this in future columns.)
For now, this senator’s classic peanut butter smear — spread the gunk all around enough, blame is diffused, no one is accountable — entertains cynics.
What doesn’t entertain anyone is the gut feel that the corruption may be permanent and natural. This unfunny sense of something-the-matter comes out of deeper parts of the Filipino heart than where the manipulative one-liners of politicians impact.
Even the cynics get it that runaway corruption ends in a failed state. Meanwhile, for many Filipinos, life is lived as though in a claustrophobic room with no doors or windows, locking everyone in with the baddest actors — this lived democracy.
Is it democracy though?
WORMS AND WORMS
Democracy corrupted, suggest some. “Corrupt,” the word, used to have great use to call up images of decaying bodies. What happens after death is bodily corruption, the work of worms and bacteria and natural decomposition of organic matter.
This word/image in time took on a double meaning — moral perversion and depravity on one hand, and on the other, betrayal of trust — as modern democracies emerged in the 20th century. Corruption is now the worm that eats the guts of a democratic project. The image today is still wormy in the new usage.
This is the difference between the English “corrupt” that in Tagalog is “bulok” (decayed, decomposed) and the modern translation of the English “corrupt” into the Tagalog “katiwalian” (corruption). The old worm-word of “bulok” remains useful in “katiwalian” but Tagalog needs two separate words.
The old worm lives on in the current voracious ones; maggots decomposing what was at some point a reasonably integrated whole. When that whole turns to rot, and the integrated system that democracy self-maintains stinks something awful, rage breaks out like explosive gas from decomposition chemistry.
The hundreds of thousands of Filipinos who turned up at Luneta, EDSA, and Mendiola on Sept. 21 in a cathartic collective rave against corruption, were whipped up by the stomach-churning visuals of bad actors fatly eating into the internal structures of democracy.
The hundreds of thousands were, also, more than slightly envious of the Gen Z protestors-turned-anarchists in Nepal and Indonesia. Many wished for the directness of arson exercised by outraged youth. Torch the worms. Cauterize away the corrupting.
INSIDE
At the risk of overdoing the worm metaphor here, it is good for another few sentences pointing out the externality of these corrupting agents. They worm in, hence allow for a hope that deteriorated democracy can be restored by keeping them out.
The same sense is pressed by the familiar quote: “Corruption in a democracy usually indicates a deficit of democracy.” In other words, democracy is diminished by corruption, which is outside badness gnawing in.
Hence the question is begged: Is there something inside democracy that facilitates its own corruption?
It is the promise and guarantee of democracy — freedom for all — that itself builds in potential for corruption. This guarantee assures space for some to feel free to wreck it, while building personal fortunes.
With the caveat that there are many variants of governments that are called democratic, and that therefore there are many variants of how the freedom ideal is mangled, it should be possible to say that all the various types of manglings are of titanic scale never before imaginable.
JUGGERNAUT
Over-the-top adjectives seem inadequate, for instance to describe the democratically elected American President Donald Trump as he destroys American liberal democracy. To his mind, his freedom to do so is absolute. Prayers to Constitutionally-set guardrails appear futile for now.
His rush to autocracy is merely the obvious part of a vengeance juggernaut that, on the backside, got him richer by $3.4 billion in only six months in office.
That figure alone exceeds most people’s capacity to grasp. Or gasp. But this month, October, Elon Musk’s net worth hit $500 billion despite the massive dips he sustained from his crazy Right politics.
Musk is on his way to becoming the world’s first trillionaire (which should happen next month), bludgeoning US democracy’s newly discovered fragility. He arrogates the freedom the US affords him, well beyond the dangerous freedoms lived out by Russian plutocrats in Vladimir Putin’s virtual reality of a pseudo democracy.
Trump has re-institutionalized white supremacy, collapsing the provisions for equality and inclusivity that had assured superpower status for the United States in economics and culture. He rides on the principle of inclusivity but only that promised to white men pumped up with self-entitlement and bizarre grievance.
Trump, Musk, and MAGA cohorts were created within American liberal democracy, even if many of them are the outsider bumpkins to elite political and social circles. And never mind that they inherited white privilege — which they squandered.
Their politics of epic whining squeeze together democracy’s universal entitlement to freedom with the exclusivist expectation of privilege. The outcome is monstrous: democracy’s freedoms shrink into absurd shapes. For example: the poor are free to sell their kidneys. For example: the super-rich are free to redefine democracy (buy the kidneys with no moral qualms) for their untroubled gain.
This, too. Grievance as spectacle — variously performed by Trump, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte and Joseph Estrada, and other poseurs who claim to represent the under-represented, suffering demography — folds “the masses” into political theater.
The pathological Duterte, as a good case in point other than Trump, has his minions screaming for his human rights, leader and followers oblivious to the perhaps European notion of the absurd.
SECRETED
Paradox is inadvertently secreted in the folds of the American, Philippine, and other modern Constitutions of the last two centuries and a half.
The provisions for equal representation, legitimate reasons for the imposition of martial rule, equal branches of government, and the Bill of Rights, have each in turn been warped while supposedly exercised in good faith.
There are, of course, foundational principles written against the grain of prevailing cultures. Thomas Jefferson, avatar of equality in American Constitution, was a slave owner, albeit an apparently a benevolent one. Simon Bolivar insisted on a provision for a president-for-life in Bolivia in that country’s 2nd Constitution; he did so thinking stability to be the paramount Constitutional mission for the country named after him.
Strange contradictions abound. The switch in the last two decades to hard Right governments in Jair Bolsonario’s Brazil, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro Moros, Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Victor Orban’s Hungary, in fact Russia’s Vladimir Putin, were all accomplished by performing democratic elections.
Performance in each case worked within assurances of universal suffrage, inclusivity, and equality. They all have Constitutions guaranteeing these rights — yes, including Russia’s (1993, revised 2020), which includes a Bill of Rights. In all cases, these Constitutions were perverted by twisting ideal into opportunist space.
And as soon as electoral wins were secured, obscene wealth can be made within months. And the higher up the food chain the political pervert, the more insanely enormous the political and financial profit. This seems so terribly normal.
CHIMERA?
So: were the framers of all these Constitutions limited people after all? Is democracy a chimera, a utopian seduction that allows self-corruption?
Wrong questions. Each Constitution inscribes a political culture produced by specific histories, at the time of writing in the period language and spirit. Most consolidated ideas prevailed for centuries.
The 1987 Philippine Constitution, for whatever its vulnerabilities to corruption, has survived well all these decades; as did the antecedent principles enshrined in the 1898 Constitution. So has the US Constitution and those of South American nations for more than two centuries.
Then these and all others began to show those vulnerabilities, in the last two decades, to be openings to ecosystems collapse.
What changed? Current Constitutions were formulated way before digital technology commenced altering the nature of human societies and upending entire knowledge and truth systems. The democratic ideals were written down way before the present scale of corruption could even be conceived, as deep social instability is produced by technological change of vast scale.
Democracy will have to catch up. This, of course, is to state the obvious.
(Part 2 will come out in two weeks.)
Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator and critic of institutions. Her body of work addresses the intersection of culture and politics.
