Let the Bad Times End (3): Duterte

Too Close For Comfort

Of all the reading I’ve been doing to prepare for writing this series of essays for the newsletter, reading about the Phillipines under the rule of Rodrigo Duterte has been the most distressing so far, in particular Patricia Evangelista’s excellent book Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country.

The most depressing point is simply that the bad times have not ended. Duterte isn’t still the president of the Philippines, but he remains heavily involved in Filipino politics, his family look to be an ongoing part of Filipino politics for the foreseeable future, and his popularity is largely undiminished by the violence of his time in office between 2016-2022.

There is also the unmistakeable resemblance between Donald Trump and Duterte’s erratic verbal extremism, his personal dishonesty and corruption, and so on. There are important differences between them—Duterte’s background is quite different, and his identification with the Filipino underclass is rooted in his own life history. Duterte’s involvement with politics is historically deeper and his apprenticeship in violence, conspiracy and corruption goes back through his time as mayor of Davao City and before that as a lawyer and prosecutor. But in many respects Trump and Duterte are recognizably fellow travellers in their approach to power and politics.

Duterte’s focus on achieving law and order at any cost is not a cynical campaign ploy, but instead a driving ideology that has defined his pursuit of power. Trump has a broader range of themes in his repertoire since 2015, but the common ethos that both share that connects with their ardent followers is brutalism—that there should be no law, no mercy, no procedures that inhibit the state from doing what is needful, that there are people who deserve to die or be harmed or be expelled and that nothing must be allowed to stand in the way of doing that. It remains difficult for a lot of liberal-left Americans to grasp the epistemological and political coherence of that point-of-view within Trumpism, but I think Filipino opponents of Duterte are under no such illusions. They know that Duterte’s ethos has real popular support, and their faith has not been shaken by the bleak and awful reality of what his rhetoric has led to, both in Davao City and then nationwide.

Those consequences are not just the tens of thousands dead, but also the suppression of dissent via both legal and extralegal means and the expansion of secretive paramilitary capacity bound to the exclusive command of the head of state. It has been in the metric tons of lies and euphemisms that have attended on Duterte’s crusade, and in the coarseness and viciousness of his frequent outbursts. The thorough subordination of the country’s legal system to Duterte’s will.

More complicatedly, however, Duterte has done what other post-Ferdinand Marcos’ democratic rulers in the Philippines did not, could not: he’s acted decisively to build a massive amount of infrastructure, he regained effective government sovereignty over areas long held by insurgents, notably improved health care provisioning, and genuinely streamlined the bureaucracy. At least in the view of some observers, it’s not necessarily his brutality towards drug users and the marginalized poor that has established his popularity, but all the other reforms he has undertaken with his authoritarian style—even if he or some of his supporters are getting some form of kickbacks on the other end of those transformations. Even if the people who died weren’t really the powerful traffickers—or the powerful who were drug-users—but just the poor and vulnerable.

If Duterte hasn’t really ended, why do I bring him up at all in this context? What does he have to teach Americans who look at the Trumpist future with fear and loathing.?

The first point might be simply that Duterte, despite his contempt for rights, for established institutions, for dissent, hasn’t actually ended democracy in the Philippines. The first post-Duterte election was a complicated mess with a result that can hardly be described as a re-embrace of democratic norms, in that the victor was Bongbong Romualdez Marcos, the son of Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos. Since 2022, Marcos and Duterte have clashed in multiple ways, including accusing one another of drug use. Just last month, Duterte was called before a commission of inquiry and unrepentedly declared his willingness to do it all again if need be. Democracy goes on, and his popularity remains largely undimmed. The bad times still have left the democratic possibility of other times in the future.

The bad times also turn out to be good times in other respects. I don’t see anything like the drive from Duterte for improving public services or expanding access to public goods anywhere in Trumpism, but it may be that accidentally or otherwise, Trumpism will deliver benefits to many that we don’t expect. Almost no bad times are so unrelievedly awful in their initial unfolding that there is universal consensus afterwards about their darkness—except among the survivors who were surrounded by the dead. There are presumably people around Bashir al-Assad or closely tied to his regime that think of the Syrian Civil War as not being that big a deal. If you’re dealing captagon, it might feel like life is the best it’s ever been.

A third thing Duterte teaches me is kind of the opposite of that point—that when we mourn the coming of bad times, we sometimes should realize that we weren’t kind enough in our assessment of the times we now deem good. I made a similar point a long time ago about the American left’s reaction to the Patriot Act and the Iraq War. If you wanted to evaluate those as a dramatic change for the worse in American military and security policy, then you sort of needed to own up to having underestimated how much better the situation used to be. There are ways to do this kind of readjustment without being pollyanna about it, but that reexamination might sometimes also force us to acknowledge that our best times were bad times in some ways and for some people, that we didn’t think hard enough about until we were confronted with a sudden turn for the worse. Filipino democracy, after all, hardly seems to have a glorious history of institutional transparency, sensitivity to the concerns of the people or effectiveness in policy-making, nor of respect for human rights and a constrained use of legal violence. Evangelista’s book is pretty forthright about this: the last good moment was the evanescent moment where Ferdinand Marcos and Imelda Marcos were sent packing because the people of the Philippines flooded the roads in the EDSA Revolution. Corazon Aquino looked like a saint the day after the Marcos’ left with their shoes and money to enjoy life in Hawaii. She had a hell of a mess to clean up and I suppose anybody who has to muck out the sewers is going to get dirty. You can say she left things better than she found them but you can’t say that she looked anything like a golden era when it was all said and done, nor did any of her successors.

The fourth point is maybe the most depressing. Whatever Trumpism ends up being, it’s best not to count on the intact restoration of our own sense of civic virtue whenever it loses or fails, as I believe it must. (Even Duterte seems to acknowledge now that having embraced killing without constraint, he didn’t even make a meaningful and lasting dent in drug trafficking or addiction. Filipino political history going forward, democratic or not, will always have Duterte.) You only get a complete reset after war or revolution, and arguably not even then. Alessandra Mussolini, after all, is presently an elected representative in the European Parliament. History has its own thermodynamics: events are neither created nor destroyed.