Impasse

There are two signal political events this year.

The opposition, for the second time in two years, tried to impeach the President. They were flustered and then floored by the awesome pro-administration majority in the House.

That same awesome majority then tried to introduce amendments to the Constitution after the people’s initiative was killed by the Supreme Court. That effort, in turn, was stopped in its tracks.

Irresistible force. Immovable object. That sums up the story of our politics.

There is a more impressive word for it, imported from French: impasse. One would not retreat and the other could not advance.

The situation is not helped by the unseemly positions held by all the major players on the political stage.

In order to set our economy aright, the President had to court extreme unpopularity. In an economy under pressure from higher world oil prices, the administration has had to collect more taxes in order to improve our fiscal position, tame inflation and keep the currency strong. The benefits are backloaded; the political costs frontloaded.

In the near term, the administration is bamboozled each day by a hostile media: blamed for continuing high unemployment, poverty rates and self-rated incidence of hunger. But for four years running, the Senate has blocked the enactment of a national budget commensurate to our spending needs. Without an updated budget, the administration is hamstrung meeting the needs for greater expenditure on public services and infra investments.

The opposition has devised every means foul and fair to prevent the administration from consolidating and building momentum, including contriving foreign bank accounts attributed to the First Family. Yet, that diverse and amorphous mob of doomsayers could not rally around a single pole nor present a clear alternative. They wish the leadership to fail and the nation to stagnate.

The radical left will never have its revolution, which intends to transform our vibrant nation into an inward-looking hell akin to North Korea. In the highly unlikely event the radical left takes over, I suppose all they would do is to coerce the pyrotechnic workers of Bocaue into developing a missile program so we can threaten Vietnam or oblige China to appease us by sending over shiploads of Ma Ling.

Like North Korea, we will maintain a foreign policy of international blackmail. Extortion, on which the insurgent movement relies to sustain itself, will be elevated to national policy, making us yet another pest to the rest of the world. We will be home to every terrorist gang in Southeast Asia, every marauder smart enough to swear by the gospel of anti-imperialism.

The once forward-looking "civil society" groups have become opportunistic political whores, reduced to supplying street protesters for rallies instigated by urban warlords or by fascist coup plotters. They would march for every degenerate populist cause or oligarchic whim, every conservative politician’s fancy to prevent any and all possibility for change.

While the leftist insurgency is there, a parasitic force on the economic landscape, they will only succeed in keeping our poorest provinces poor. Observe Samar and Masbate, the interior of Negros island or the Bondoc peninsula. The insurgency thrives on misery and must keep that misery there in order to thrive some more.

A recent AFP report indicates that the insurgents’ recruitment pattern is intended to enhance their movement’s capacity to extort. The better able they are to extort, the more inhospitable to investments the localities they threaten will become. A cycle of violence and poverty defeats the possibility for cooperation and growth.

The Catholic Church has ceased to be a vital force for celebrating our community and catalyzing a dynamic moral order. It the recent past, it has become an institution constantly disgruntled with modern lifestyle choices, reduced to leveraging government by dipping its hands on policy issues of the day to protect its doctrinal concerns. It has ceased to offer grounds for optimism about the future, becoming a peddler of bitterness over the present.

The new religious movements could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered purveyors of reinvigorated patriotism. Some of them are animated by fantasies of instant gratification. Others have become nothing more than personality cults led by egotistic ayatollah wannabes.

I have written enough to be unduly repetitive about how we have chosen to continue enduring a political system that is incapable of producing the leadership the nation needs to break out of the track of low growth. Our presidential system is designed to produce minority presidents doomed to enduring constant sieges. Our electoral system breeds corruption. Our public agencies, captured by vested interests and protected by public sector unions opposed to every mode of reform, are rapidly degenerating.

In an essay on the two decades after the Edsa Revolution, I ranted about how we have managed to equate democracy with weak government, freedom with national indirection. We would rather be in a drift than have purposeful leadership. We would rather have a dozen minor political factions constantly squabbling than have true statesmen at the helm. We somehow feel safer under a gridlocked government.

Sure, we can do some little things like lifting our growth from 5% to 6% and eventually learning to live with a balanced budget. We can feasibly create a million jobs a year, although that will never be enough to eradicate poverty within our children’s lifetime.

But the system we choose to conserve cannot allow the nation to achieve any real breakthrough, to leap to a new path and fundamentally reinvent the national future.

The political impasse that so starkly characterizes this year is not a divergent reality. It is simply an emphatic icon of the period we have woven for ourselves.

We have evolved a civic culture that diminishes our imagination of what our nation could possibly achieve. It is a culture cynical of leadership, distrustful of statesmen and fearful of shifting to another track. Regardless of the petty outcomes of the coming elections, the next year will be pretty much like this one.