Abstract
This essay highlights democracy in the Philippines and how the Trump administration may have accelerated disenchantment with American democracy for Filipinos.
The new line is not between democracy and authoritarianism...but cuts across democracy, distinguishing liberal from illiberal variants.
Liberal democracy defined itself against fascism in the 1930s and 40s and against Communism during the Cold War. In the last thirty years or so, the goal of many developing countries has been to consolidate their democracies. To many Filipinos, this meant making their democracy look more like U.S. democracy. The American standard was something to aspire to but also cause for self-flagellation as repeated efforts at democratic reform floundered. My sense is that the stars have shifted yet again, their realignment crystallizing over the course of the Trump administration. The new line is not between democracy and authoritarianism, as some have drawn it, but cuts across democracy, distinguishing liberal from illiberal variants.
In just four long years, the Trump administration has profoundly undermined, perhaps irreversibly, the status of the United States as a symbol of liberal democracy around the world. The administration’s bad example—including, most recently, attempts to overturn the results of the presidential election, at first through fraud and then by instigating rebellion—has shaken people’s faith in American democracy and bolstered the case of autocratic and quasi-autocratic leaders in Turkey, Brazil, India, and the Philippines.
Democracy in the Philippines was instituted under American colonial rule, and for a long time, Filipinos looked to the U.S. as a model of what democracy was supposed to look like. They would tell stories of their brother or cousin being reformed in America. A drunken layabout in the Philippines—he would go to the States and within months have kicked the habit, found a job, settled down, and start attending church regularly on Sundays. He would even put money in the collection basket. This picture, idealized though it may have been, served to provide a yardstick against which Philippine democracy was measured and found wanting. People resigned themselves to the idea that their politics needed time to mature. As people became richer and more educated, the hope was that they too would acquire the virtues distinguishing democracy in America.
This picture has been fading for some time now, but the Trump administration really drew back the veil. Filipinos saw that U.S. politics could be as unruly, uncivil, and ugly as politics in the Philippines. This was a politics drained of civic virtue. It’s not that Filipinos hadn’t seen this before; if anything, it was all too familiar—the election denial particularly. (The old joke is that no one ever loses an election in the Philippines; they’re just cheated.) What was striking was that it was an American president acting this way. His misconduct exposed the line between “strong” and “weak” institutions to be paper-thin. To see the tissue of civility, nearly two and a half centuries in the making, shamelessly waved aside—it was a kind of epiphany.
The Trump administration may have accelerated disenchantment with American democracy, but in truth, the process had already set in well before he took office. Filipinos’ frustration with democracy has been mounting over the years. Other models, closer at hand, are increasingly being seen as viable: China and especially Singapore, which combines elections with single-party dominance. People have been shaking free of the “U.S. or bust” attitude towards democracy and reimagining their political future. Survey data show that support for democracy is largely conditional, and that many people remain open to the possibility of authoritarian forms of government.
In the course of my own ethnographic research, people spoke of the need to “discipline” democracy. They imagined this would take the form of a strong leader imposing order from above. My findings from 2010 prefigured the election of Rodrigo Duterte in 2016. Tellingly, Filipinos’ satisfaction with democracy hit an all-time high following Duterte’s election—86 percent in 2016 compared to an average of 51 percent between 1991 and 2015. This is ironic given that Duterte has been the country’s most anti-democratic president since Marcos, but it’s also revealing. It suggests a vision of democracy that is different from the liberal one we have come to expect. This vision may not even be one we recognize as democracy at all.
I think we can expect to see greater contention over the terms of democracy in the decades to come.