Strong, please?

Last Wednesday I was at a workshop on disaster risk reduction and management (DRRM), and over lunch the conversation drifted, inevitably, to one question: Are we Filipinos prepared for the Big One next week?

We weren’t referring to the West Valley Fault and earthquakes or typhoons, but to May 9, with a dreadful feeling of impending disaster.

As an appointed government official, I’ve had to hold back on what might be called electioneering, but with the Big One around the corner, I thought it was high time to shift gears and do a political DRRM considering how so many of our candidates are now flirting with “strong” government in varying degrees, including imposing an outright dictatorship.  We need a DRRM to defend government, not in terms of favoring the party in power, but of government as an institution intended to ensure equal opportunities for people to advance in life, to reach the good life, through due processes.

I can understand the appeal of a strong ruler, given the aspirations of citizens that do want a better life for ourselves and our children, and a nation weary of corruption and of leaders who plunder.  I want to believe that even the political candidates pushing for authoritarian rule genuinely believe that it is the solution, but may not have thought out what is involved for that kind of government.

Which is why I’m doing this political, very empirical, DRRM. I went back in history to look at the record of authoritarian governments and to see how well they worked to bring about a better life for citizens. There was no lack of such governments, but I was hard pressed to identify those that worked out in terms of progress for their peoples. In fact, the overwhelming pattern was that such governments ruined the countries, through leaders who became corrupt and used their power for wholesale plunder, and/or from the internal armed conflicts and external wars that inevitably resulted from such governments.

Success?

But I’ll be generous and presume, as so many Filipinos are doing, that there’s potential for an authoritarian government to work for the better. What conditions are needed to have it succeed?

First, we would need a long period for authoritarianism to work.  We want short cuts, and so we want to believe that a short period—say six months—is enough for discipline to set in and solve all our problems.

Just think of a small initiative like the antilittering campaign in Puerto Princesa City of then Mayor Edward Hagedorn. It was an admirable, and successful, campaign but it took years before it became part of culture.  It took consistent law enforcement that did not spare Hagedorn himself who was once caught littering, but it had to keep going for several years. I wrote once about how impressed I was, a few years after the antilittering campaign started, at seeing a tricycle driver catching the candy wrapper his son had thrown away, and then putting it in his pocket. I was thrilled to see cultural change at work.

Alas, in recent visits to Puerto Princesa, I see signs of what Ferdinand Marcos called backsliding, not in a major way yet but definitely in a slow creep that might eventually make littering the norm again.

People need to be constantly motivated to initiate and sustain cultural change, and that is why our strongmen or strongwomen to be will need to think through their programs for convincing people to change, and to sustain the changes.

Second, since authoritarian governments rely on coercive force to bring about discipline, leaders would have to be ready to ride the tiger—in this case, the military.  The problem is that once you ride the tiger, you will have to find ways to make sure you are in control. The problem is also that the allure of authoritarianism wears down easily, given the people’s high expectations. And so, as internal strife begins to boil over, authoritarian leaders need to rely even more on the tiger, realizing that they can no longer dismount and might be riding into disaster, if not oblivion.

Third, besides the military, authoritarian leaders have to capture the mass imagination. Monarchies have that appeal, but that’s not likely to happen in the Philippines because we already have movie stars playing that role.

The alternative is to develop one-party rule and, together with that, a cult of personality to ensure uncritical loyalty and obedience. North Korea is the most extreme example, extended to become a dynastic cult of personality, but we have many less extreme examples from Latin American caudillos (a Spanish term that originally meant “leaders” but now refers to dictators).  Argentina’s Juan Peron was the prime example, one which the Marcoses were said to have emulated, with a conjugal cult that still has followers today.

Fourth, authoritarian leaders know very well that their attempts at reforms, even if totally sincere, will be difficult by simply relying on their loyal followers. Inevitably, authoritarian leaders will find scapegoats to blame for a nation’s persistent problems. Hitler blamed the Jews, the communists, the gypsies, even homosexuals—and his followers, an entire nation, believed him in the short term.  Again, we have seen similar attempts among caudillos worldwide, including the mini-versions in the Philippines, blaming the communists, the Moros, the Chinese, to whip up groupthink and fanaticism, even a willingness to take up arms to fight the enemies, whoever they might be.

Leaders and citizens

I have focused on the machinery needed to propagate authoritarian rule. Let me now move to the leaders and the followers.

Authoritarian leaders need to set an example of clean leadership, as Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew did, and really, he is the only one I could find evidence of for successful strongman rule—but for a city-state with a population half of Metro Manila’s. The prognosis is not good about having clean dictators (the late senator Jose W. Diokno warned all the time about how power corrupts, and how absolute power corrupts absolutely).

Finally, let’s get personal. We all want discipline, but are we ready to be disciplined ourselves?  When the law on juvenile accountability was passed, exempting minors from criminal prosecution, I heard parents in urban poor communities protesting that they could no longer control their kids. Some of them actually went to barangay leaders to ask that the kids be rounded up, detained, even beaten. But when that happens, the same parents come around protesting and whining, and trying to utilize political connections to get the kids out.

We have to look inward. Are we ready to discipline ourselves under a strongman?  As a university administrator, I’ve seen how the ones who complain the most are often the ones who also have the strongest sense of entitlement: Apply the rules, but exempt me, please.

Our politics in the next few months may well be similar to coffee. We boldly say we want our coffee strong, no sugar, no cream.  When it’s served and when we taste it, we sheepishly say, Oops, too strong, can I have some sugar or cream, please?  The more macho will take up the cup and begin drinking, but wondering if  barako  is really better, or too bitter.

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mtan@inquirer.com.ph