A constituency of resentment

We often hear educated Filipinos blame the kind of government we have on the kind of public officials that the “bobotantes” choose during elections. The derisive term is a clever blending of two words: “bobo,” meaning stupid, and “botante,” meaning voter. It is applied to voters whose electoral choices are presumably uninformed by any understanding of the functions of public office, or of the qualifications of the candidates they vote for. The clear implication is that such voters are irrational.

To the extent that the term points to the existence of a sizable premodern voter formation that decides political outcomes, I believe it is quite accurate. That was the point I made in last week’s column, where I tried to interpret the latest Pulse Asia findings on presidential preferences for 2028. But its use as a pejorative also betrays an elitist and simplistic understanding of Philippine society and politics.

The “bobotante” way of voting has its own rationality. It is rooted in a worldview that sees government as a predatory institution that exists mainly to serve the interests of the rich and powerful. Conventional politicians, according to this view, are uniformly corrupt. They operate mainly to raid the public coffers and plunder the nation’s resources, the better to enrich themselves and their patrons. Their notion of public service is to deliver the occasional “ayuda” during disasters and emergencies. But what they hand out as assistance they recover in taxes and the high price of necessities. Instead of building an economy that provides stable jobs and secure incomes, they let people fend for themselves in the informal sector or in the overseas employment market.

Article continues after this advertisement

There is nothing ignorant about this view of government. It thrives in highly unequal societies like ours, where the levers of government are captured by the oligarchy. But instead of giving rise to a constituency of reform, what it breeds is a constituency of resentment, which particular kinds of politicians, like the Dutertes, are able to tap.

In July 2011, Sara Duterte, then mayor of Davao, walked into the middle of an ongoing demolition of squatter shanties, and punched a court sheriff in the face. I watched the footage several times, and wrote here that for all the criminal liability to which she exposed herself, “from hereon, it will be difficult to defeat her in any election for any public position in Davao,” that “her feistiness and readiness to stake her personal authority on behalf of the poor will become part of political legend,” and that “this is how folk heroes in a pre-modern society are made.” (Public Lives, 7/3/11)

Where society is deeply unequal, I wrote then, “the rule of law cannot be impartial. Its blind implementation will always appear harsh. Thus, instead of serving the ends of justice, law is perceived as one more tool of oppression. This uneven landscape creates ample room for the intervention of heroic equalizers.” The mauling of a sheriff by a lady mayor, in that landscape, is perceived not as an assault on a person of authority, but as the credential of a folk hero.

That legend traveled swiftly from the remote city of Davao to the national stage. Eleven years later, Sara Duterte was elected vice president in the 2022 elections as the running mate of Bongbong Marcos in the short-lived “UniTeam” alliance, drawing one of the largest vote totals in our electoral history. Her father, Rodrigo, later claimed that she could have won the presidency itself had she not agreed to step down and give way to Marcos.

Article continues after this advertisement

More recently, Pulse Asia measured her chances should she run in 2028. They stand at 49 percent of the country, the bulk of it from Mindanao, then the Visayas, and the lower-income communities of Metro Manila. It gives me little comfort to say that my diagnosis in 2011 has held. What has not held is a piece of wishful sociology I allowed myself in that same column.

Leaders like Sara, I wrote then, can be “the rearguard of a dying feudal system or the harbingers of a new less personal form of rule.” On the contrary, as we have seen, her appeal to the masa voter has endured not because she has become a modern leader, but because she has kept replicating the outsider leadership her father made famous: the decisive, foul-mouthed, personal equalizer who stands between the elites and the uneducated masses.

The demand for the leader as equalizer, it turns out, is not a stage a society passes through. It is a durable formation of voters that a society keeps reproducing, for as long as government goes on arriving in the lives of the poor as a predator rather than a benefactor.

Article continues after this advertisement

—————–

public.lives@gmail.com