On Tuesday the Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist John Nery pointed out that should we have a presidential election in 2010, the election would serve as a kind of referendum on EDSA People Power. [Read Nery column] Will EDSA People Power I and II “be recovered as a renewed republic’s true foundation stone?” he asked. Not least because the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration has declared EDSA I and People Power in general as an unworthy foundation for a “Strong Republic.”

Let us adopt a charitable perspective and suggest that President Arroyo prefers to look back to her father, who viewed himself as part of the process of political evolution of our country. He titled his presidential memoirs “A Stone for the Edifice,” a deliberate reference to the era of his own political maturity, when President Manuel L. Quezon declared in his own inaugural address that a “new edifice [the Filipino nation-state] would arise not from the ashes of the past, but the standing materials of the living present.” But this institutional orientation requires a selective memory, ignoring the manner in which the edifice of the Third Republic crumbled under the onslaught of the Left and of the Right in the 1970s.

President Arroyo has also embraced the criticism of foreign observers who looked upon EDSA II with dismay, because they couldn’t reconcile how a direct assertion of sovereignty by the people could be shoehorned into the tight confines of constitutional democracy. And so, they proclaimed EDSA II to be not People Power but rather of either mob rule or a coup. That was a characterization embraced by the deposed president Joseph Estrada and betrayed by the bragging of figures like President Arroyo’s own controversial husband.

In truth, the debate over whether People Power is a manifestation of direct democracy or a subversion of it by means of mob rule (however peacefully applied) has taken place over and over again. The late Justice Cecilia Munoz Palma opposed the proclamation of a revolutionary government by Corazon Aquino just as she condemned people taking to the streets when the impeachment trial of Estrada failed.

The answer, of course lies, in the revalidation of EDSA People Power by means of democratic exercises: the plebiscite on the 1987 Constitution, the first national legislative elections also in that year, and the holding of local and legislative elections in 2001. Ex post facto they may have been, but plebiscites they were: And the public overwhelmingly endorsed the regimes both People Power exercises brought into power.

What we overlook, however, is something that first manifested itself in 1992, and took place in 1998, and which looms like a grim shadow of foreboding over the coming 2010 polls. And that is the negative plebiscite that seems to be gathering strength. In 1992, if Imelda Marcos and Eduardo Cojuangco Jr. had joined forces, no candidate could have defeated their combined votes, proving the residual loyalties and strength of the Marcos KBL party machine. That machine solidly fell behind Joseph Estrada and contributed to his victory. Only a combination of luck and stubborn opposition to an outright Marcos restoration and political rehabilitation has prevented an incontestable victory for the “New Society’s” forces and its remnants.

Those forces have survived and they have also produced heirs. Imelda Marcos herself, by means of a string of startling legal victories, and cronies like Cojuangco have recovered their economic clout and brandished growing political power. And they have heirs like Sen. Francis Escudero, who is being groomed to express unapologetic admiration for the late dictator and his works. There are many, up and down the political ladders of power, who have taken it upon themselves to repudiate People Power, and by so doing, rehabilitate “constitutional authoritarianism,” which incidentally best describes the political instincts of the present dispensation, which so eagerly wants to banish the specter of People Power permanently.

The best lesson of 2001 may be what 1986 logically fulfilled: If Filipinos are to wield their veto power over their leaders, they must be prepared to do so over the political apparatus of those leaders. There must be a revolution, but a peaceful one.