My Two Cents On The Specter of The Marcoses
If I am to be ontologically cruel, the reason for the nostalgia for Marcos Sr. has something to do with the fact that today's political establishment, constantly flattered by its commentariat and its intelligentsia, neither has the spine to rule nor the teeth to back it up. They are instead submissive to the validation of official institutions and the machinations of the FIRE sector. The hoi polloi can see (whether we like it or not) that much of today’s enduring infrastructure—as substandard as it is—dates back to Marcos Sr. And that speaks volumes.
If you try to get a response from the average person on how they are able to overlook the abuses and excesses of that specific regime, you will get a simple answer: back then, food was at least subsidized; there was a sense of purpose via the nationalized sectors of the economy; and above all, there was a cultural impulse to overcome the limitations of the past in pursuit of a brighter tomorrow—even one tainted by vices and nepotism.
But nostalgia for the 1970s is not confined to the Philippines alone. If you asked an average person in post-1989 Eastern Europe whether they would choose between liberalism and communism, many would pick the latter—and for justifiable and cogent reasons. There was once social mobility; little to no credentialism to rise to the top of the pile; and a promise of material upliftment—even one punctuated by repression. The moment people prefer that autocracy over your democracy, or yesterday’s ration cards over today's supermarket coupons, you would have already lost the plot.
I am not whitewashing anything. I am simply saying that the liberal Left in this country will always resurrect the corpse of Marcos Sr. as the absolute bogeyman so they can tell spooky stories to themselves and be entertained. Disinformation and fake news are but symptoms—not causes—of the status quo that they have signed up for: where precarity, gridlock and stagnation is the constant—with chaos being the perceived alternative. And when the populace is given the choice between things as they are and the middle finger, many will pick the latter just to declare that those who adhere to the former are cucks—regardless of their declared advocacies and commitments.
The Left needs Marcos Sr., for without him they are but empty husks. This is why their claimed anti-fascism is a joke, and is more like a seance than a fighting doctrine. It is pathological and fixated on the sexual dimension of statecraft. It only offers eternal negation, and so even if they do not want to face this revelation, they will always be the shock troops and enforcers of a decaying ruling class. One can even argue that what they crave is to be dominated by the boot as a means to absolve their guilt and to re-enact the drama of yesterday's martyrdom as the logical conclusion of their addiction to victimhood.
And this is why I have no patience for today’s moralists, for they will always be the natural bastion of a reactive—rather than a proactive—means to make sense of our current paralysis. I have nothing to lament either. Any return to a dead person (like Marcos Sr.) is a delusion, a road to nowhere, a farce of what was once a tragedy, and a sign of decay—wherein the carcass of a tyrant is mistaken for life itself. A country that keeps summoning its ghosts will never build anything for the benefit of the living and its successors.
To call for a return to the ‘70s, or to even re-inscribe the protests of the ‘80s as the means to seize today’s levers, is to confuse direction with muscle memory—a hallmark of an unacknowledged narcissism inherent in many social movements embedded in the activist-donor-NGO pipeline. Instead, the task today is to bring politics to the gut, and therefore to sustenance, and harness the energies of the populist wave for that purpose; which will then serve as the substance of a future that will cut through the present discontent, and thus the reflex to look back.