Binay voters deserve better than Binay

Filipino left-wingers are an odd breed. Unlike Marx, they believe that the masses are always right. For the lolo of socialism, capitalism, as both an economic and cultural system, produced a “false consciousness” among the poor—one that needed to be confronted through education and praxis.

But the Pinoy Left has a habit of patronizing the masa. During martial law, the populists of the Communist Party of the Philippines mainstreamed the concept of the “mass line” of “learning from the masses.” This romantic notion, which—to be fair—did produce cadres with a genuine love for the lower classes, traces its origins to Mao Zedong’s practice of exiling anyone who disagreed with him (including his oft-abused sons) to far-flung rural villages. Mao claimed these expulsions served the purpose of “re-education,” but they were also convenient ways to get rid of political undesirables—a tamer version of Stalin exiling enemies to Siberia or sending them to the gulag.

The romance with the abstract concept of “the masses”  has produced a Pinoy Left that dreams of a bucolic countryside with heterosexual nuclear families and glorifies phenomena like millenarian Christian cults headed by demagogues. Anything the masses do has a “hidden wisdom” simply because they are poor. Including voting for Nancy Binay.

The Communist Left has been a spent political force since the 1980s, but its influence can still be gleaned from baby-boomer intellectuals who were introduced to politics via the Party and its fronts (well, Bayan Muna has influence too). Many of them have left the Party, but still think like cadres. These intellectuals, rather than residing in farming communities, are now ensconced in universities and broadsheets, where they pass on the “wisdom of the masses” to their millennial heirs. These days, you can be in a “reactionary” school like Ateneo and think like a Maoist populist. Hence the extended honeymoon with Nancy Binay voters, whom, we are told, are not undereducated, but merely express a mentality distinct from “us.”

On the one hand, the injunction to respect the choice of Binay serves as a necessary corrective to the elitism of a Twitterverse that has condemned the lower-class Pinoy electorate as stupid. Such vitriol, apart from being unfair to an entire class, will only produce a backlash against so-called smarties who know better than the rest. The Binays and their ilk will use the elitism to their advantage.

On the other hand, the politically correct tendency to always respect the choice of the masses can easily slide into a form of moral relativism. A recent Rappler article, which echoes the sentiments of many of my progressive friends, warns us against calling Nancy Binay voters uneducated. “There are no “bobo” or “enlightened” voters,” it explains. “It’s just a matter of class perspective.” It then tells us that we should not call voters uneducated.

I too would avoid the term “bobo.” But there is a difference between calling someone stupid and claiming they are uneducated. Citing a lack of education is, unlike calling someone stupid, an empirical observation. It is true that many poor Filipinos lack a political education and are, thus, uneducated. This fact is not a matter of class perspective; it is evidence of injustice.

Ironically, it is the elite who have the luxury to bask in the “hidden truths” of the masa experience—a kind of touristic patronage that turns the poor into social-scientific specimens. Ask illegal settlers if they prefer learning the lower-class perspective of Tondo or if they would like to study at a university.

There is a simple, albeit painful, truth: The poor, though they have explainable and valid reasons, can make disastrous choices—in the same way the elite or anybody in society can. Let me cite an extreme example to illustrate my point. The German and the Italian poor overwhelmingly supported Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini—the two most brutal tyrants of the 20th century. Would it be wrong to decry the miseducation of the masses in those cases?

Nancy Binay is, of course, a far lesser evil than Hitler or Mussolini. (At this point, let me pre-empt people who will claim that my comparison does not hold by saying that extreme examples are meant to be extreme; they illustrate that a certain line of thinking, brought to its logical conclusion, belies unreasonable assumptions.)

Nonetheless, the case of the European fascists shows that the rule against decrying the choices of the masa is not absolute. So we understand why some people vote for an underqualified candidate. Maybe that’s fine. But will this understanding extend to the worst manifestations of electoral miseducation? Is there ever a time when you should just call the D and E vote wrong? Not stupid, of course, just wrong.

The solution to the debate over the “uneducated voter” is simple. We have to first acknowledge that there is a problem. Moving forward, we should engage in the painstaking work of voter education. We should lobby for greater education spending. We should insist on better media coverage of politics. Most importantly, intellectuals should engage the masa instead of patronizing them. After all, you should be willing to argue with people you respect.

All of this is very prosaic, really, but misguided populism obscures simple solutions. At the end of the day, when all is said and done and the PCOS machines have transmitted their results, people who vote for Nancy Binay deserve better than Nancy Binay.

Author Leloy Claudio is a professor of political science at Ateneo de Manila University and a member of Akbayan.