A democracy that can only produce bad government

By Alejandro Lichauco

ANALYSIS

05/17/2007

If, after seeing and experiencing the latest electoral exercise, you still believe that democracy is the best form of government and that it is something worth dying for, then you must have your ass where your brain is supposed to be.

By now you should be more than convinced that democracy, as practiced here and identified with elections, is a sure formula for the worst possible form of political governance.

It has been the singular good fortune of our now prosperous and still prospering neighbors that at some crucial stage in their post-war history, they weren’t saddled by a political mindset nourished in the notion that democracy is the best possible form of government. Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia were for decades, after the last World War, were governed either by military dictatorships or by authoritarian civilian governments consumed by the ambition of engineering their own industrial revolution. And it was only after that industrial revolution was completed, or reached the stage of near-completion that the iron grip of political authoritarianism was gradually relaxed toward democratic directions.

Read the modern history of Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan and even Indonesia, and you’ll see what I mean. But our schools don’t point that out to you and make sure that you don’t see the point.

Let’s take the latest ongoing example. And that’s Vietnam.

Vietnam today is regarded as, next to China, the most vibrant and progressive economy in the region. In fact, the World Bank has begun to hold Vietnam up as a model and that came long before that stupid Wolfowitz came to the picture.

In the brief space of 10 years, Vietnam’s political authorities managed to cut Vietnam’s poverty level by 50 percent and today Vietnam has far fewer poor people than the Philippines.

And yet, only last week, according to an Associated Press story carried on-line in CNN.com, two human rights lawyers were arrested and given a prison sentence of four years. And what was the crime about? The crime was for having advocated a multi-party state in Vietnam in collaboration with overseas pro-democracy advocates.

Now you ask me: Why haven’t those meddlesome international human rights activists raised a howl about that? Why hasn’t the West “sanctioned” Vietnam for that?

Truth and fact are that what passes for democracy and elections in this country serves only the interest of those who can afford to throw tens of millions into an electoral campaign and you can count with your toes and fingers how many they are. That, at any rate, is what the last electoral exercise has demonstrated, and demonstrated with a clarity and impact never demonstrated before.

Whatever the outcome of the elections, the one point about democracy and the election process that has been most dramatically conveyed is that form being a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.” Democracy in the Philippine context is all about big money — of big money, by big money and for big money lusting for political power so that they can get even bigger.

In brief, democracy in the Philippines is plain big business, and big business, as even the most earnest of human rights advocate should know, is hardly concerned with anything else except how to get bigger. And if good government will stand in the way of big money getting bigger, then to hell with good government.

That’s the iron logic of democracy in the Philippine context. And that should explain why politics and governance have progressively degenerated, morally and intellectually, over the years.

No point complaining. You must simply accept that as fact and if you insist on venerating democracy then you shouldn’t complain about bad government or about bad government getting worse. Or of corrupt elections.

To expect Philippine democracy to reform is to cry for the moon. It can’t possibly reform because its essential nature and inner logic require that it gets more corrupt with time.

And time is proof enough of that.

As time and current developments have now made clear, democracy and governance in the Philippines can only change for the better through a Park Chung-hee, a Nasser, a Chavez, a Castro or, if need be, even a Mao. And curiously enough, one can have that only through the kind of revolution which Bonifacio started and which remains unfinished.

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