We Are All Leftists
Nationalism, being the political formula of the State, has been used to justify every form of expansion on its end upon tradition, family and property. It is the dominant ideology that unites, in some way, every rival political camp that carries some influence in Philippine society.
Ernest Gellner once wrote that "Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist." This formulation is especially true in the Philippine context, where the government—at least from Commonwealth onwards—sought to invent the Filipino identity to serve as a useful political formula to justify its continued existence.
For ever since its inception, the Philippine State has carried out a policy of centralization which had little to no regard for regional realities. President Quezon, a man with markedly dictatorial tendencies, imposed Tagalog as the national language in 1937, all the while attempting to increase the the power of the executive over Filipino politics with the guiding hand of American influence.
President Laurel, a man who would replace him, was no less dictatorial in his intentions. Inspired by the collectivist ethos of Imperial Japan, he sought to use the opportunities afforded to him by the new occupier to put his political philosophy into practice; all the while promoting the nationalist fabrication by the further imposition of Tagalog.
President Garcia, in an act of nationalist protectionism, implemented economic measures that scapegoated the resident Chinese population, forbidding them from conducting trade or commerce in the country. Such measures, taken with the broad support of leftist and labor organizations, would be the precursor to the cronyist monopolization of commerce characteristic of later regimes (Joseph Scalice, Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership: Martial Law and the Communist Parties of the Philippines, 1959–1974 [UC Berkeley, 2017], 98-99, 131-134).
And, ever since the Macapagal presidency, the Philippine State has consistently appropriated Leftist motifs. It was Jose Maria Sison who was promoted Macapagal's land reform program, one which converted share-tenancy arrangements into cash-rent ones (ibid., 156-157, 201-203).
Come the Marcos administration, and the State would usher in its own version of managerial democracy under a broad welfare bureaucracy that still exists to this day. Marcos, too, steamrolled the institutions of family and local community by his "Democratic Revolution from the Center," and basic human rights with his Martial Law regime. At the wake of his downfall his nationalism remained along with the permanent interests of centralization and power (Fellglow Keep, “An Ideological Analysis of Philippine Politics,” Pillar of Liberty, November 24, 2021).
Today, I am free to speak my mind on these issues—something to the credit of the Fifth Republic. But the welfare state remains a malevolent political entity. It was in the spirit of nationalism that Rodrigo Duterte was elected—a man whose style hearkened back to the earlier days of Filipino statecraft. And its basic ideology of statist nationalism remains unchanged, and is now expressed through the lenses of the Left, as heterogenous as it is.
To be “Filipino”, in the way that the ruling elite and the State want us to be, is to be liberal, leftist, and woke. It is to be angry when the government or society fails to live up to its own standards, the standards which we believe so ardently in our hearts because we learned them in school. We have become over-socialized leftists whose psychological conditioning leashes us to the basic principles of the only society we ever knew, try as we might to break free.
We may complain about the Church, about society, about capitalism, about the environment, fancying ourselves warriors and revolutionaries when in reality we are boring and conventional. All our acquaintances think as we do, and so does every professor, bureaucrat, journalist, and corporate P.R. officer who tells us to "speak truth to power." What does it matter when a few guerrillas die in the mountains, when the Revolution has already made its headway in the academic and in the social movements?
Can we truly believe that the Left is so distant from being Filipino, when the nation's intellectual and political elite speak with its idioms? Only two centuries ago did we see the ilustrado spearheading the nationalist movement after paradise abroad: today there is only the preponderance of nationalist, progressive, and postcolonial discourses in private schools, while media corporations serve to communicate their bourgeois insights though never neglecting to, once in a while, signal their "progressive" bent.
Even universities of ecclesiastical charter celebrate the virtues of deviance, values affirmed by student societies that proliferate in colleges and universities and finally enforced by the State in their educational and social projects, to no other end of course than the formation of a mass, detached from the 'petty tyrannies' of family and church, in exchange of no other master than the revolutionary Tagalog State, bound by its socialist nature. And insofar as we continue to hold fast to the Great Fabrication, we will all be colored with different shades of red.
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.
