Is the Right Afraid to Win?

It is a truth in politics that organization is a decisive factor in scoring victories. History has shown that the decisive factor in a revolution, one that distinguishes it from a mere rebellion, lies in its leadership and the extent of its organization. Without organization, a political movement will inevitably devolve into an inert mass of individuals guided by nothing more than their intuitions and sentiments.

Such remains the present case of the Filipino right wing. While I would say that we have made great improvements since the time of the pandemic, we have to understand that our movement remains embryonic. The vast majority of right-wing action is issue-based and dances to the tune set by its enemies. The Left pushes a bill, we move to block it. This model of political action is too defensive and resembles a long, protracted, siege.

It is true that many Filipinos are beginning to swing right in particular issues, but sentiments alone will not win us political success. We remain a loose coalition of online movements, church groups, and family organizations who squabble among themselves and have not made any serious efforts to establish channels for institutional cohesion or coalitional leadership. Our organizations are still cash-strapped, and our Catholic Church is too big and slow to fight a winning fight.

Compare this with our adversaries. Ever since the 1980s, the Left has established a robust political machine that continues to have a large presence in education, the media, the bureaucracy, and the houses of Congress. They have billions of pesos in funding, largely from patronage politics, in conjunction with their own means of procuring funds and enforcing compliance - with persuasion and force.

And the same can be said for the Duterte camp, which at some point in time overlapped with the Makabayan bloc. Duterte’s 2016 victory mobilized the sentiments of an inert nation by means of an organized campaign. Paid networks of trolls and communications agents, in conjunction with the mobilization of leftist groups and criminal elements (the biggest of which is the police), allowed him to cement the centralization of the political system and get the attention of millions.

These are people who are willing to fight, ostracize, kill and die for their interests. In fact, the DDS and the Left are really both puppets of an omnipotent Leviathan that will stop at nothing until its infinite greed for power is satiated. It feeds on the desperation of sycophants who are willing to believe anything for another shot at life. This is a highly organized protection racket that is backed by that cliché of guns, goons and gold.

Unlike us. We are the party of ideals, moderation and principles. But ideals do not always correspond with the realities of politics. We think that we can win fair-and-square, getting the right number of people on our side without appealing to the dirty, stupid DDS. But there is no fairness in the system—there is only power.

At the end of the day, the strength of an ideology comes not from the ground or the spirit of the Volk or some national ectoplasm. It comes from the intrigues of powerful people who want more money and more power. They will say whatever it takes to keep it that way, even if they bulldoze family and religion in the process. We are not only up against an idea (as if ideas were physical entities), but rather, a bureaucratic tyranny that uses “progressive” ideas to quench its own avarice.

And this tyranny grows more and more ambitious everyday: it is only a matter of time that things accelerate. And when it does, we risk becoming lame ducks, rebellious peasants to be crushed by the left-wing, professional-managerial, political machine. The only way to survive and keep the high ground would be to create an alternative order—but this means that we need to get organized, and we are running out of time. We need to buy ourselves time.

Daniel Tyler Chua is the founder and president of the Collegium Perulae Orientis. He is also a contributor to the Philippine Daily Inquirer and The Sentinel PH.