Thread by @mlq3

Along thread with a Friday reflection on family, power, change, and country. With a lot of readings. It begins with something I heard Paulynn Paredes Sicam say in a peace advocates’ forum close to 20 years ago: for change to become permanent, she said, you need ten years…

In a fundamental way I think shortening Marcos’ rule to “20 years” is misleading; it was 7 years of democratic rule and 13 of dictatorship. The distinction is important and requires a bit of explanation. The 1st phase was within the confines of institutions and precedents;

The 2nd phase was without limits and even more fundamentally, without the possibility of establishing a succession because despots cannot risk it; if democracies are about succession, dictatorship is about elimination.

The moderate (democratic/middle) opposition to Marcos wanted in their heart of hearts, to bring back the country to where it was on the eve of martial law; to continue the arrested development of society/institutions. But dictatorship lasting over a decade made this impossible.

Which underscores that at its very heart, stripping away the veneer of modernity (FM adored renaming institutions with the word “development” as if it would magically transform inept and corrupt agencies), it was a family enterprise running a country as if it owned it….

Which brings us to a crucial talking point of the Marcoses, then & now: that their loss of power and efforts at rehabilitation and restoration are all an unfortunate hassle merely because of a family feud. This is a powerful argument. Leon Ma. Guerrero and Luigi Barzini tell why.

The Marcoses probably believe it and many Filipinos equally believe it because part of the Marcosian secret of success was a shrewd understanding of the Filipino. Everything must be personal because everything is about the family. But read Apolinario Mabini reflecting on Rizal.

Mabini wasn’t saying anything new in that this is a fundamental difference in old and new approaches to history for example: is it great men who mold their times or do the times mold us, etc. A point to be made is that as with Rizal however a person becomes a colossus in their…

time, it also requires a confluence of events, trends or a consensus among previously squabbling people, to actually effect change however much an individual may have been advocating it. This was something revealed in the fall of the Marcoses, too. Which Marcos and friends…

did not see. Proof of this is how he or his henchmen or whatever combination thought that liquidating Ninoy Aquino would solve their problems when it was unsure if Marcos would be alive much longer and succession fever was gripping the country in 1983. Ninoy had identified the…

fatal flaw in the family orientation of FM: time. The dictators health was failing before the son and heir could possibly take over and his wife though a faction in herself was not him; thus for the first time in a decade people could actually contemplate replacing the family.

Here let’s pause for a little detail that would prove mightily important:

So long as Marcos could make people believe it was only s personal grudge he was facing, people had an excuse to duck and avoid being dragged in, as the dictator was proving all-powerful. But when others begin opting in, as Chitang Nakpil saw, well, they create yellow…

Here is where grudge match became People of the Philippines vs. Ferdinand Marcos and Friends: the opinions of many ended up pushing the leaders to get together, however uneasily (or resentfully, or falsely). But this coalition proved more able than one utterly dependent on FM.

To be sure there was also a battle of wills with the dictator ailing and presiding over a regime he had built: where competence was punished if it got in the way of loyalty; in a negative sense it had dark echoes in 2001 as well as chronicled by Nick Joaquin.

The writer Garry Wills wrote leadership requires three things: leaders, followers, shared goals. The wider the goal the vaster the followership; conversely the narrower the goal and more personal the more brittle the shared goal can become. In the end only family will be left.

The (in)famous photo which shows the gathering of clans that have dominated our political life also has, in common, bearing the brunt of public outrage to the extent it made them all fall from power, until they recombined to find s new champion.

But again its worth underlining what they have in common: remarkable success, even adulation, combined with phenomenal public disgrace. It is a powerful glue composed of resentment and even fear, combined with a cunning and shrewdness to rise, fall, and claw ones way back up.

As time went on, memories faded, disappointments mounted, the core arguments necessary for rehabilitation and restoration: 1. They are all the same 2. It’s just personal grudges, mounted in powerfulness and effectivity. But again fate serves to make things clear. Take away…

the family they (all the many “they”!) could finger point to, and what would be left, in the end, would be them. It only underscores what they have in common and thus their shared motivation —specifically because they still stand under scrutiny because the people still remain.

Remember the trivia about Eva Estrada Kalaw and yellow? A similar distinction applies to the many nameless volunteers who ended the upstairs leaders’ bickering over symbols and colors by putting forward their own referendum on identity. scmp.com/week-asia/poli…

This is very interesting precisely because it demonstrates two things: evolution on one part, the combining of old and new constituencies on the basis of shared values, driven by constituents themselves, in contrast to the cults of personality revealed for what they are.

But again having experienced what few have experienced: the sense not just of loss, but of terror and humiliation, from being being loathed and rejected by the people, the combination of forces today realize it is they who are stuck in a rut because try as they may none of them…

have been able to last long enough to permanently reverse history’s verdict; or put another way, reverse the tide that keeps sweeping them eventually away to places where ultimately their liberty and property are always going to be in danger. Imagine the crushing reality of this.

Theirs isn’t the serenity of those who can lose power and go home knowing they have a clean conscience. Theirs is the gnawing unease of having to master the game or be ultimately done in should a reckoning be allowed to happen. It is one the current ruling family now feels.

We have seen how this realization can be a motivation for unity among the usual suspects but it can be a cause for disunity because in the end its all about I, me, and myself. The veterans may appeal for solidarity but those enjoying the perks for first time can insist otherwise.

But my closing reflection is this. The public, the electorate, is evolving faster than the leaders who both fear and loathe the public but need it as the source of their mandate for office. The national parties are losing their relevance, local parties only think of their turf.

People vote with their feet: they go abroad or move elsewhere in the country. With that comes a dangerous independence as far as the local and national leaders are concerned. Because if what remains strong and may even be stronger are local versus national leaders, what is weak

is their hold on power in their districts. Ties of shared community are gone; more often than not a cynical or desperate or both electorate wants elections reduced to a cash transaction. This has made the political clans evolve to survive: first they have stopped competing with

each other so as to save money time and other resources: hence, more unopposed candidacies. But they are still faced with spiraling costs which means the recuits for politics are getting fewer. There too remains the pesky problem that however much you figure out new tricks to

Turn the people against each other or tune in to your message, sooner or later old fashioned concerns like graft and corruption, or freedom, or simple basic good behavior will come back and matter and sway the opinions of many. Again interfering with the 10 year plan required to

make change permanent. So we have what we have: the public and the politicians exercising a veto power over each other. The public puts a veto on anyone or any group staying in power more than 6 years; no single group or attitude has full reign; and it can swing from one side to

another to precisely prevent anything permanent from being accomplished. Where the public has consistently agreed on a way forward to effect change, say a constitutional convention to try and address the obvious defects of our system of government, the political class exercises

its own permanent veto: the one way forward, a ConCon, is precisely what the political class refuses to consider because unpredictable. So it insists on Charter Change through schemes that are too predictable as always geared to what the public refuses: unicameral parliament that

abolish national elections where public directly votes for the chief executive (not to mention senate: remember the survey when mindanao preferred retaining the senate but abolishing the House?). So we have what we have: round and round with no resolution which in the end is

more dangerous to the politicians than the public. But now there is the sense the damaged clans can finally achieve what they could already taste in 1992 —restoration— and it is entirely possible they will do so; but the campaign already reveals their own internal fault lines and

furthermore points to what is ultimately a restoration that will ultimately rob them of what the crave most —vindication. Because for as long as people are people, the ingredients that led to their disgrace will continue to exist. /end

Note: these are the Barzini and Guerrero articles"