Brittle

A chorus of assorted voices rose to condemn as unconstitutional Alan Peter Cayetano’s casual suggestion for all senior elected officials to resign and for snap elections to be held.

That chorus missed the point. There is obviously nothing in the 1987 Constitution that allows for this extraordinary move. The call for resignation is an extraconstitutional proposal. It is ultimately an admission that the present constitutional order cannot heal itself.

We have reached that dreaded point where more and more of our citizens are open to the need for an extraconstitutional process to escape the bankruptcy of the persisting political order.

The gregarious Palace mouthpiece has threatened repressive action against those entertaining the idea of extraconstitutional change. That will not end the nascent conversation. It will be a vain attempt to shut down the vents of public expression. We all know what happens when the vents are shut and public anger is pent up.

In all the gatherings I have been to the past week, this question inevitably pops up: is there still hope for our country?

It is a question always raised with an earnest gaze. There are many thoughts playing in the minds of our people. Some of those thoughts may be punishable by law and are hardly openly articulated.

I have come across many memes that are outrightly seditious. One reads: “We have a criminal syndicate in place of a government.”

Another is more poignant: “How can we love our country if we cannot trust our government?”

The AFP chief admitted that some retired officers are testing the idea of a coup. But they have been rejected by the rank and file – for the moment, at least. This is not a reassuring admission.

The 1987 Constitution brought forth a constitutional order shaped by fear. It was, after all, framed immediately after a popular insurrection and under the shadow of brewing coup conspiracies.

By a margin of one vote, the framers rejected a shift to a parliamentary system and opted instead to something akin to the 1935 Constitution. For good measure, they made constitutional reform almost impossible.

The framers chose rigidity over resilience. They chose stolidness over adaptability. But what they gave us was a very brittle political order where institutional change can come about only by means of an uprising or a coup.

The immediate concern at that time was to “constitutionalize” the leadership of Corazon Aquino. That meant turning away then vice president Salvador Laurel who claims he was promised the post of prime minister. That meant adopting an electoral system that effectively killed off genuine political parties and subsequently returned us to the old patronage system.

All efforts since the 90s to reform the constitutional order were stopped by conservative resistance from both the entrenched dynastic elite and the churches. True, predictability was achieved. But injustice was also entrenched.

Within the framework of this imperfect Charter, a feudal polity was fostered. Dynasties held sway. Election outcomes were dictated by money politics. Economic opportunities slipped by and the country has again become the Sick Man of Asia. We simply did not have the political and institutional flexibilities needed to take advantage of new historical trends.

Our politics deteriorated into wars between dynasts. Our political choices have been canalized to choosing between one ruling family or the other. Our political discourse shriveled into comparisons between contending personalities.

In this barren political landscape, there are no real progressive ideas blooming. There are no contending visions of greatness for the nation. Like our nation’s poor or our deflated agriculture, our nation subsists from day to day, incapable of transcending the structural limitations our history condemned us to.

Our conservative middle classes prefer to imagine the problem on a limited spectrum. Those who organize marches in the streets prefer to believe all these is a matter of identifying the crooks and sending them to jail. They are reluctant to recognize that the problem, like a cancer, has run rampant.

The beleaguered regime will, understandably, try to preserve its hold on power. It will find the scapegoats necessary to absolve itself of blame. It will yield to some small-time crooks landing in jail. But it will shield its most important supporters.

The commission it organized is turning out too puny for the grand expectations placed upon it. Three commissioners with a tiny staff of clerks will not break the large edifice of corruption our patronage politics erected.

Perhaps this commission was designed to function merely as a bottleneck, to slow down the process of exacting accountability while hoping to satisfy the public thirst for retribution. If so, it is functioning well according to design.

It is understandable that the regime will try every means to survive. It appointed its own reliable ombudsman to take care of business. It has built a well-endowed public relations machinery to manage the narrative and discredit all imaginable alternatives.

Nothing, however, conceals the reality that its strategic goal is to achieve an orderly retreat and survive to the end of its constitutional term. When it could not do that, it might venture into its own autogolpe: a coup from within. But that will simply raise the stakes.

It is entirely possible that the Marcos II regime might actually survive to the end of its constitutional calendar. But then what?