The Sociological Perspective of A Marcos Jr. Win

     How can the sociological perspective help you make sense of Marcos Jr’s win?

    And how can it equip you to respond as a development practitioner?

    The Marcos victory hinges on a single, simple lie: that the Marcoses are not as bad as people think they are. It would take decades before the lie became enough to propel a Marcos back into the presidency, and as such, the family has done whatever it can to return to Malacañang. Using the money that they had unrightfully plundered from the Filipino people, they have put all of their resources into bending the truth to their will. If they could convince enough people that their lies were the real truth and that the objective truth of history did not exist, then they would have all the power before it would be formally handed to them.

    For Weber, who believed in intersubjectivity and the power of an idea expanding through time, the Marcos victory must be the most horrible perversion of his life’s work.

    The thrust of the Marcos campaign had relied on forgoing formal institutions and bureaucracy for the sake of something more maka-masa. Where other candidates might allow a renowned national news and media company to interview them about their platforms and plans for the country, Marcos Jr. would rather stage a YouTube vlog talking about how much he admired his father. Where other candidates might welcome the endorsement of respected professionals to bolster their name, Marcos Jr. instead taps small-time vloggers and micro-influencers to lend a more personal touch to their more intimate audience. Where other candidates may center their campaign on bettering government processes and institutionalizing accountability, Marcos Jr. instead rejects such highfalutin sensibilities and appeals to non-confrontational unity. He had successfully co-opted the populism that had elected his predecessor by having the Duterte daughter as his running mate, and the machinery they had been meticulously fine-tuning had given them a landslide victory built from the most unconventional of places. If you believe that the Marcoses are not as bad as people think they are, then you believe that Marcos Jr. has the capacity to be a sincere and personable politician.

    It is this appeal to the masses that create such a strong case for Marcos Jr., and he is careful not to publicize anything to forsake his “relatable” image. The results of the past elections, and the case of Mar Roxas’ failed campaign, have clearly shown that the best candidate is not the most capable one but simply the most relatable and visible. For his part, he has spent the last six years showing that he is committed to reaching out to the people where they are: not in government buildings nor on serious news coverage, but where they spend almost all of their free time. It is all the more convenient, of course, that there are little to no strict laws regulating the conduct of social media companies in the same way that traditional media companies are; it allows him to bury his controversies and create this image that he is sympathetic to the people’s plight. If you believe that the Marcoses are not as bad as people think they are, then you believe that Marcos Jr. has the capacity to truly sympathize with the citizenry and their plight.

    Marcos Jr. has become the president of the masses. Through YouTube vlogs and TikToks and Facebook engagements, he has established himself as a simple man with the aspiration to lead the Philippines towards prosperity; the simple man encumbered with the great shackle that is his political adversaries and biased media falsely associating the brutality of Martial Law with his innocent family. Like the disenchanted masses, Marcos Jr. has been shunned by the haughty educated and the neoliberal petty rich and trapped in a bureaucracy that will not let his “sincere” intentions shine through. If you believe that the Marcoses are not as bad as people think they are, then you believe that Marcos Jr. is a victim of unfortunate circumstances in the same way that everybody else in this country is a victim of poverty — the social pariahs of what has become an elitist society run by oligarchs.

    If you believe all of these things and the hundred other mistruths that the Marcos political machinery has been churning out for decades, then you believe that Marcos Jr. deserves the chance to rewrite the tarnished legacy of his family name by winning the presidency. On May 09, 31 million voters proved exactly that.

    These are the shared meanings that Marcos Jr. has created with his disinformation and blood money. He has corrupted the concept of Weber’s verstehen to maliciously insinuate a false equivalence — that just because the people can empathize with a false image of him, then he must be able to empathize with them as well. The antipositivism inherent in that empathy has led many to believe in a false reality funneled by the rabbit hole of that initial lie, a reality that denies our history and denies justice to our countrymen. Because the concept of what is real truth has become so muddled, then the Marcoses are free to claim their version of events as fact and derive their power from it. It is a masterful and bone-chillingly evil way to apply Weber’s observations about capitalism’s rise to power in modern society. Even better (worse?), it only further proves Weber’s philosophy that inequality exists in power and prestige — and no doubt, the Marcoses will continue to use their own power and prestige to widen the gap further.

    As a first-time voter and ardent supporter of the Robredo campaign, I am devastated by these results. Yet like Weber, I must concede that this thing that I loathe has been a long time coming. The lie that the Marcoses are not as bad as people think they are seems too innocuous to have led to this. Then again, at the time, who could have predicted that the belief that material wealth is a promise to heaven would have snowballed like that either? My own social media feed seems full of people looking back in retrospect: that if fake news peddlers in 2016 were handled better, that if free Facebook wasn’t offered the year prior, that if PNoy were more aggressive against historical revisionism during his term, that if the Marcoses weren’t allowed to return back to the country, and a hundred other “for want of a nail” fantasies, perhaps it would not have ended up like this. But if there is anything the success of the Marcos campaign has proved, it is that small ideas can become bigger.

    I know this is true because the Pink Revolution has proved much the same. The house-to-house campaign may have been a last-minute Hail Mary and the spirit of festive volunteerism may not have won us this battle, but we have still accomplished so much in so little time. As development practitioners, I believe we must move forward, continue what this campaign inspired, and see it through. We cannot know how the impact of a people’s campaign will shape our country five, twenty, fifty years from now. We must hope, as 15 million Filipinos have hoped with us, that there is still worth in our efforts even if we cannot appreciate it today. Most of all, we must keep working to empathize with our fellow countrymen and show the power that the true, uncorrupted application of Weber’s verstehen has.

To quote our outgoing Vice President and incoming leader of the Angat Buhay Foundation, “Walang nasayang.”

    Let us work like hell to make sure that doesn't turn out to be another single, simple lie.

jdBandrada

25 May 2022

DEV 100.3 - A

Finals Exam