The longer view

Someone asked me recently: Do you think the people will erupt into People Power if Renato Corona is acquitted?

Yes and no.

No in the traditional sense of People Power, which is the massing of people in the streets to oust someone.  Which is how we’ve always understood it. I don’t know that its days are over, though the fact that we weren’t able to mount one against Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who rivaled Ferdinand Marcos in depth or height of unpopularity, must suggest that it is no longer our first, or natural, response to something violently odious. Our failure to launch People Power over the last 10 years didn’t just owe to Arroyo’s talent for dividing and ruling, as well indeed as corrupting the thereto seemingly incorruptible; it also owed to our diminished confidence in its power to change things. We ousted Erap only to get Gloria.

In any case, so far we’ve mounted People Power only against presidents and only to protest oppressive rules. We’ve never mounted People Power against violently odious officials during fairly benign rules. I doubt we’re going to start now.

Yes in the non-traditional sense of People Power, which is the massing of people at voting precincts to reject an evil and embrace a good. I’ve always said the last presidential polls were an Edsa masquerading as an election for reasons I need not repeat here. Its culmination, which was Election Day, bore all the earmarks of something we know very well: A multitude pouring out into the streets, braving heat, long lines and the threat it would be a repeat of 2004, Garci intensified a hundredfold with the advent of computerized counting. Election Day wasn’t just an acceptance of P-Noy, it was a rejection of Arroyo.

Next year’s elections could very well sound not very faint echoes of it—assuming the impeachment court acquits Corona. The people have found other ways of expressing their fury in the age of text and Facebook. Of course it will be a whole year next year after the verdict on Corona comes out, and those who voted for acquittal and who are running for senators can always hope the national amnesia will have snowed everything under. But the 2010 elections also took place a year after Arroyo became a lame-duck president—though she never felt lame-duck enough to be stopped from promoting a protégé to chief justice at the midnight hour—and people remembered.

But all this is just shooting the breeze. Whether or not the people will erupt into People Power of one kind or another from the verdict of the impeachment court we can’t really know. I’ve seen enough of the magic-realism of this country to insist on the power of prediction. Could you have predicted that Cory would die when she did and change the game? Could you have predicted that Juan Ponce Enrile would be the Senate president when the Chief Justice was impeached, and resurrect from the grave?

But what is not speculation and something we can know, or predict with reasonable assurance, is that P-Noy will need the people behind him before all this is over. P-Noy will need to reinvent People Power and put it to work for him before all this is over.

“All this” is not just the trial of Corona, or even the prosecution of Arroyo if P-Noy ever gets to it. “All this” is P-Noy’s fight against corruption itself.

He will need the people behind him because they are his only real allies in it. He will need some kind of People Power behind him because that is his only real weapon in it.

The defense’s threat to expose the SALNs of P-Noy’s own officials, to show that corruption is far more pervasive than Corona’s impeachment proposes, suggests it. Far more so is the fear among various elite groups, which the Corona-Arroyo camp is fanning, that if P-Noy’s anticorruption crusade prospers, nobody will be safe from it. Not Congress, not the Executive, not big business, not the Church, not even media. True enough, those institutions are also steeped in corruption. True enough, many of them would eventually stop being allies in fighting corruption and become obstacles to it. At the end of the day, whose interests does fighting corruption really serve? At the end of the day, who will be left to carry out the fight?

Of course government has every reason to be pragmatic, to form alliances or build coalitions with one elite group and another to push its agenda. Such as what it has done with the congressmen to impeach Corona, however the defense howls its head off about it being a case of political mugging. Such as what it is doing with the senators, getting a sense of where they are and where they are going, building common cause with them on the strength of common short-term goals. But pragmatism can only go so far. Fighting corruption from above can only go so far. You need vision too, you need idealism too.

You need to fight it from below too.

People Power doesn’t always have to take the form of massing in physical space to oust a nasty non-president, or an unsavory non-chief justice. It can always take the form of massing in cyberspace to bring the corrupt to heel. These days, with the interactive media having made instantaneous reaction possible, that is probably the more viable, or realizable, option. It can always take the form of an epic campaign to make people realize that taxes are their money. You’re not going to be furious about corruption unless you see that it is stealing, or worse that it is stealing your money. It can always take the form of not voting for the monstrously corrupt and their protectors.

In the longer view, any serious anticorruption campaign can really only count on one thing to see it through. That is not the Executive, Congress, the Judiciary, big business the Church or media. That is the people.

There is no other.