Political will

The 39th anniversary of the imposition of martial rule was commemorated yesterday, at least in print, by people of a certain age. I doubt if the event was noted in any significant way in the new media, populated mainly by those born after the event.

Year after year, the commemoration follows a fixed theme, a rigorous template: Never Again!

It is the template we inherited from the Edsa Revolution, a military coup turned popular rising. It is the template officially endorsed, reinforced year after year by such institutions as the Edsa People Power Commission that I served for eight years.

It is to be sure a valid template. Martial rule ushered in a dictatorship and eradicated most of the institutions that made our democracy function. The period of dictatorship saw the dissipation of whatever civility there was in our politics, reducing governance to coercion and eliminating the space for public engagement in the policy-making process.

My generation suffered the most from the polarized politics an anti-democratic regime invariably brings. The best and the brightest among us were tortured and killed, emotionally and psychologically crippled. Our life choices and our career options were sucked into the vortex of passionate political engagement. Artists were constrained to be warriors. Engineers were asked to be assassins.

In the politically correct literature, however, not much note is taken of the fact that opinion was deeply divided about the “revolution from the center” that Ferdinand E. Marcos launched nearly four decades ago. There were those who liked the sense of order, or the semblance of it, that martial rule brought to our streets.

Life, to be fair, seemed to improve after authoritarian rule was imposed. The economy grew robustly in the first few years of dictatorship. A middle class began to be palpable. Government, manned by the most competent technocrats, showed some capacity for long-term planning and policy coherence. That created a degree of certainty business preferred.

The press, of course, was tightly controlled. Overnight we lost the rambunctious media we had before, the scandal-driven reporting and free-wheeling opinion-writing our people seemed to enjoy. The official euphemism for the regimented media was “developmental journalism” — denoting reportage that was constructive rather than destructive.

In the end, however, absolute power corrupted absolutely. The absence of checks and balances, of public instruments to enforce accountability, created fertile ground for abuse to proliferate. Eventually wealth, like power, concentrated in the hands of a few to the detriment of the many.

The last few years of the Marcos regime was a textbook case for what political scientists called regime aging. The orthodoxy preserved by intense repression could not allow new ideas to surface. The capacity of the political system to regenerate was seriously impaired. By preventing new contestants to power from consolidating, the regime eliminated the next generation of political leaders — literally, in many case. A whole political generation was lost.

The polarization of politics consumed energy and resources that might have been deployed for development. The nation was engulfed by internal war. We became the Sick Man of Asia. The opportunities we lost could never be recovered. The misery this inflicted on our people we have not managed to alleviate to this day.

The regime ended the day its tanks were stopped by prayerful hordes occupying the streets. On that day, the pendulum swung to the other extreme. A regime that tried to override the nation’s destiny and shape it according to its will was replaced by a political order that seems doomed to be unable to lead.

From a regime that tried very hard to enthrall us with dazzling visions of great things to come, we have shifted to a political order designed to prevent anyone from rising above the din of everyday politics, the noise of special interest groups and the cacophony of posturing politicians. From a regime that cultivated excellence, we shifted to a political order that enforced mediocrity.

Many complain that since the revolution, our political system seems to have lost the capacity to produce statesmen. That is merely a symptom. We have replaced an authoritarian system with a political order prevented from exercising political will.

We elect our leaders on the basis of name-recall or celebrity status, no longer on the quality of visions they offer us. That eventually taxes the quality of our public discourse, which has degenerated from the trite to the poisoned to the plain stupid.

Even those who march in the streets are animated by shortened horizons. They basically ask our leaders to keep squatters where they are, subsidize fuel and transport prices and keep education costs low. They are no longer asking for an alternative future to be imagined or for a new path to be cut through the thicket of challenges that confront the nation.

A political system designed to inhibit the exercise of political will is taken as synonymous with “democracy.” That seems to be the new public orthodoxy, forcing us to admit that effective leadership and a democratic way of life are irreconcilable entities.

There is no serious debate about the ineffectiveness of our institutions, the mediocrity of those who profess to lead us or the incoherence of the policies in place. The post-Edsa orthodoxy encourages us to fear strong leaders — and therefore regimes capable of setting the national course. That orthodoxy penalizes any attempt at revising the caricatures we have inflicted upon ourselves by simply classifying any demand for purposive leadership as a demand to return to some previous political status quo.

Sometime in the future, however, there should be some space for revisionist political ideas to flourish.