Cautionary tale

Much has been said about the results of the US presidential election, but the best post-mortem comes from Bernie Sanders.

Says the progressive Senator from Vermont:

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.

“First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.

“Today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.

“Today, despite an explosion in technology and worker productivity, many young people will have a worse standard of living than their parents. And many of them worry that Artificial Intelligence and robotics will make a bad situation even worse.

“Today, despite spending far more per capita than other countries, we remain the only wealthy nation not to guarantee health care to all as a human right, and we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. We, alone among major countries, cannot even guarantee paid family and medical leave.

“Today, despite strong opposition from a majority of Americans, we continue to spend billions funding the extremist Netanyahu government’s all-out war against the Palestinian people, which has led to the horrific humanitarian disaster of mass malnutrition and the starvation of thousands of children.

“Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.”

Sanders may as well be talking about the Philippines.
For far too long, the Filipino masses have felt alienated, sidelined and unheard by the ruling elite.

Thus, as we try to understand what happened in the US, it’s also a chance for our political parties – or whatever’s left of them – to heed the lessons from the Democrats’ failure to make it back to the White House.

Take our very own Liberal Party, for instance. For the longest time, LP – not surprisingly so – has been perceived as elitist, holier-than-thou and out of touch with the masses.

It was therefore no surprise that Filipinos would turn to Davao’s long-time mayor, the unorthodox, foul-mouthed, tough and abrasive Rody Duterte. He speaks their language, after all, sleeps in a mosquito-net-covered cot and eats in the neighborhood carinderia.

The LP, on the other hand, was, in recent years, identified with the Aquinos. While I personally admire President Noynoy’s sincerity and what he strived to accomplish during his administration, it is a fact that the masses had difficulty identifying with him and the Aquinos in general – even with Queen of All Media Kris Aquino with her kolehiyala accent.

Instead, their clan was identified more with the sprawling Hacienda Luisita.

After PNoy’s term, Mar Roxas vied for the presidency. I covered his stint as trade secretary and I’ve seen his hard work. I believed then – and still do now – that he would have been a good leader for the country. But Mar Roxas is also that guy from the prominent Roxas-Araneta clan. The masses simply could not relate with him, no matter how hard he tried with his once-upon-a-time “Mr. Palengke” image.

Thus, Rody Duterte happened – he who easily developed a cult following because of his tough leadership and made the crowd laugh with his misogynist jokes.

I believe that Marcos 2.0 also happened because the masses felt that after 1986, nothing significant changed in their lives under the administration of Corazon Aquino and her successors.

Thus, the way I see it, even if the Philippine economy performs strongly, working-class families need to feel significant improvements in their lives. They need to feel that such economic growth is not rigged against them or that it just favors the elite.

It is not enough that the GDP numbers are good. Filipinos must feel that this growth is actually trickling down to them.

Filipinos need to be able to afford to have a roof over their heads and not be saddled by rent or expensive amortization; they need quality education for their children, and they also need access to health care for their families.

They also need jobs to be able to put food on the table.
It is not enough that leaders provide an environment for the working class to just survive – they also need to thrive.

If their elected leaders can’t provide this, they will just turn to those they feel can at least hear them or share their disgust toward the elites. And that’s exactly how Rody Duterte made them feel. The same is true in America.

Now, that’s a cautionary tale for leaders genuinely aspiring for economic justice to prevail in this country.

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Email: [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @eyesgonzales. Column archives at EyesWideOpen on FB.