Rodrigo Duterte’s Arrest: The Broad Strokes

In a span of two days, former President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested on a plane returning from Hong Kong due to an ICC warrant for his arrest, as well as a request from Interpol. I do not think myself competent to comment on the legality (or illegality) of his arrest and extradition, I do wish to take this moment to make some reflections on the dynamics of the Philippine State.

The actions taken by the Marcos administration against the Dutertes is, to be quite honest, another push on the part of the State in consolidating its stability—something which I do not necessarily think is a good thing. It is fair to say that this is a case of one family fighting another, but it just so happens that right now the interests of the Marcos family are aligned with, to use the terminology of Bertrand de Jouvenel, the expansion of “Power.”

We should therefore not miss the forest for the trees: families and individuals seeking to win in the game of Power must ultimately play by its rules. The interest of the chief executive is in consolidating the Center by any means possible while other groups are in the process of supporting it, undermining it, or biding their time until they have a chance to seize the throne. And then the roles are reversed.

This is why Senator Marcos and President Marcos, though the same person, are now acting in two seemingly different ways. Now that Marcos is Chief Executive his commitments as Senator can no longer be used as a hallmark by which his conduct as President is to be evaluated. He is now responsible for a burgeoning, large, and deadly bureaucracy that cannot risk being destabilized by divergent elements. This was not the case when he was still Senator.

And the Dutertes—though taking the role of “opposition” for now, will have to play by the same rules of centralization and repression once they get back into power. It is not a matter of which family intends what. All this will kowtow to the cold, hard realities of running a bureaucratic leviathan of a hundred million Filipinos.

Sure, the families hate each other and would do anything to crush one another, but they must use the Machine to do so and the Machine runs under a very particular mechanism. Otherwise, they risk bringing themselves down with their enemies. Such is the fragility of the bureaucratic State. Its interest is not in promoting “unity in diversity” or any like platitude. It seeks to impose entropic, stable, equilibrium over and against Church, family, tribe, and people.

And what about justice? The historical expansion of Power always operates by a process detailed by Bertrand de Jouvenel. The Power center forges an alliance with the powerless in order to undermine those subsidiaries of power which could rival it, i.e., those elements in society that can exercise a command other than that of the centralized State. (You can see the work of C.A. Bond or Neema Parvini for more on this.)

By appealing to these powerless sectors of society, Power finds in them a loyal base of people who serve as its clientele. These clients are then used as pawns to legitimize and support the central government. So we have ordinary people terrorized by criminal syndicates and those left out by the oligarchic democracy of the post-EDSA Republic serving as a loyal base for the elder Duterte.

And now we have those people who felt left out (or were wronged) by Duterte: victims of the drug war, people of a “progressive” bent, and certain parts of the religious sector, though President Marcos originally did not appeal to these demographics. But now that the Dutertes are a destabilizing factor in the “orderly” government of the commonwealth, Marcos is left to consolidate support among these elements by putting the fullest extent of the monopoly of violence against a man who is now little more than a private citizen.

In other words: the portion of the populace who would rejoice in this—especially the victims—are being used as pawns in order to further consolidate Power in the name of “stability,” just like how other sectors of ‘the People’ who were victimized by criminals were used as a pawn to centralize the State by means of the drug war, concomitant with the increase in police power and the growth of the Philippine bureaucracy.

Both sides of the aisle perceive the fulfilment of justice from such a centralization, even over and against the functions of the judiciary: whether it be justice for those victimized by drug pushers and addicts or those victimized by the drug war. And these perceptions are shaped in many ways by the competing sectors of the nation’s elite.

Therefore, the so-called “will of the people” as able to formulate complex and abstracted strategies does not exist. It takes an elite to make coherent the collation of experiences given by a mass of individuals into a narrative useful for establishing their influence, and concomitantly, the influence of the institutions that they simultaneously legitimize and are legitimized by.

And the worst part is that while Duterte enjoys the rest of his life in an IKEA hotel, impunity remains insofar as our deadly political machine will never be smashed—for as long as we continue to adhere to the nation-state model. The only thing that stops the next Chief Executive from pulling another Duterte would be plain political convenience.

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.