The Cha-Cha Zarzuela

The Liberal-Left position against Charter Change is, unfortunately, both reactionary and a losing battle in the long run. It is reactionary, for it is reactive rather than proactive. The more this delusion continues, the more energy will be sapped out from them, most especially in a landscape where mobilization has been rendered inactive and sterile.

Before proceeding, it needs to be acknowledged that the hostile reception of much of the Liberal and the Leftist camp to Charter Change in the Philippines is understandable, since these tendencies, the general Left more recently, has doubled down towards a spirited defense of the EDSA People Power Revolution and its memory.

This stems from the logic that if the memory of EDSA is to be invoked, terms such as democracy, human rights and the rule of law will continue their function as talking points for their pedants. But much of the public has become skeptical and dismissive of these phrases, whether for contorted or sober justifications.

The latter has to do with the general bankruptcy and hollowness of these rhetorical devices, as they have been stripped of their material basis so long ago. Rather than the promised reinvigoration through Zarathustra, it instead facilitated the rise of the last man: the complacent, nihilistic, self-defeating man.

Personally, this author considers the EDSA Spirit as dead. It was mortally wounded and in comatose from as early as 1987, when the supposed bastions of liberty mercilessly repressed the desperate and starving peasants of Mendiola, whose only cry is for land, in 1987. The regime that it furnished has been on a decline ever since. The only relevance of the EDSA Revolution to those who seek to clear its name must be simple.

It is an instructive episode of how a revolution can miserably fail on bringing much needed measures that will allow it to flourish. It is an event that is hijacked by the same heads who ruled prior to the Marcos dictatorship, and even merged with its cronies to form this bestial and decadent oligarchy that eats away the people's general will. The more that this interpretation is accepted, the less hesitation on working toward an alternative that is bold, decisive, and forward-looking.

One must remember that it took an ill-fated Paris Commune of 1871, to be redeemed by the Bolsheviks in 1917. The Self Strengthening Movement of the Qing dynasty in the 1870s imploded, for the Kuomintang to overthrow the Chinese monarchy, and for the Communists to drag China out of its Century of Humiliation.

The Propaganda Movement had to fail, for the Katipunan to struggle for Philippine independence. And finally, Vietnam must undergo a ferocious war of liberation against the Japanese, French, and American imperialists, to make its country whole, proud, and defiant. A dialectical view of history can greatly endow an endless repository of inspiration in which if others can do it, we have no excuse to not act in this present moment that we are stuck in.

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The greatest defect of our Constitution for instance, is a consistent lack of an Enabling Act to its provisions on State Policies and Principles. An Enabling Act is integral if a constitution’s aim is to allow for the fundamental reorganization of the country, with its citizens as its driver. Absent an Enabling Act, the declarations are highly dependent on laws passed by Congress or by Court jurisprudence.

It is therefore unsurprising if measures such as land reform and dissolving political dynasties will never be carried out by this establishment, as these are the mechanisms that will undermine their hegemony.

Thus, instead of a mere reaction against Charter Change, an alternative response is more productive and sorely needed, in which the Leftist and the Liberal camps must re-appropriate Charter Change to serve their own ends.

Enforcing that water and electricity must be a public good, is a good start, as a backlash against the State-enforced privatization measures aimed to fatten the pockets of the venal monopolists that this ruling class has fostered. One can scold all they want of the public's apathy towards EDSA and insult their fixation on the oligarchy as the source of their misery, yet the public is relatively correct to point their fingers in these places.

There is indeed an elite. There is indeed a constitution that is no longer representative. There is indeed an oligarchy that parrots the virtues of social progressivism or conservatism, so that they will never be torn down from their pedestals. It is indeed spite that fueled the ongoing disavowal against the hypocrisies and the ineptitude of this failure of a liberal democracy. The Liberals and the Left, these self-appointed servants of the people, must recognize and redirect the public's energy against these malevolent forces, to their advantage.

If they let themselves still be dictated by not attacking the sacred cows, they will continue wandering in limbo. The stalemate between the so-called left, liberal, right, and center camps will go on, with the leftist and the liberal wings as the sore losers. And these factions have been addicted so much to losing, as the source of their virtue. If this carries on unabated, then they deserve to be humiliated many times over.

For these reckonings are but the symptoms of a wider systemic impotence, institutional rot, and civilizational decay that is not just isolated to the conditions of the Philippines, for this is now felt globally across liberal democracies whose foundations are sterile by design, and are waning considerably, before the rising tides of populist challengers and the emerging multipolar world order. It is to brave or brace the current as our paving stone to greatness, or that of our common ruin.

Either these Liberals and Leftists will start the heads rolling, or they will be consigned to the historical dustbins. The hourglass has called, and that time is running out. It is only by committing the greatest heresy, can orthodoxy be reaffirmed, with this orthodoxy nothing more but the beating heart of this great nation and its search for freedom, as it continues marching on despite the tribulations and the odds.