When the presidency becomes a personality cult

Let him try.

 

This is my reaction to the talk about President Aquino entertaining the thought of pushing for the amendment of the Constitution not only to allow him a second term, but also to enable him to clip the powers of a Supreme Court that has turned adversarial.

 

And if it was just a knee-jerk reaction, a slip of tongue, a Freudian slip, or he was just thinking out loud, or as Walden Bello said, he was just pulling our legs to piss off his critics, I wish he was sincerely serious.

 

And if it was a calculated move to arrest the slide in his political capital due to his being a lame duck, I wish he would be bold enough to put his mouth where the politics of those who speak on his behalf are—from Evardone to Erice to Roxas.

 

Let him try, so that he would suffer the most precipitous fall from being a demi-god to one who will be consigned to the universe of political infamy reserved only to the much maligned and over-demonized enemies of his family—from Marcos to Arroyo.

 

When PNoy lashed out at the Supreme Court after it ruled against the salient features of the DAP, I took that as simply an authentic expression of a tantrum from someone who is used to getting his way—irritating and childish, but still from the heart.

 

And when he almost broke in tears during his SONA, I sympathized with his genuine show of vulnerability. After all, we have a President who is deeply wounded and hurt, and it would have been against any sense of decency, good will, or civility not to recognize some element of fallibility, or even humility on his part for him to almost, since he did not actually say it but somewhat alluded to it, ask his bosses for some understanding. After all, he has a difficult job.

 

Despite being one of his critics, and I say that with a lot of pride, and would dare those who call me names to make my day by continuing to heap insulting comments at me in the space below, I nevertheless am cognizant of the goodness in his heart, and the sincere desire to reform our political system. Unlike his supportive anonymous trolls in cyberspace who are either demonizing his critics simply for fun, or are miserably misled and blinded, or are seriously fatally attracted to his critics, my criticisms of the President are neither frivolous nor obsessive.

 

Indeed, my criticisms of the President do not in any way negate my admiration of his authenticity. Unfortunately, it is an authenticity that is weakened by lack of self-control. The people around him have tried to manage his image, in the same way they stage a theatrical production. They have in fact turned PNoy’s presidency into a personality cult. 

 

However, much as they try, we occasionally get to see the real Noynoy Aquino slipping through the simulations and the stage-directed speeches and coached or scripted punchlines.

 

The problem of the President, which is in fact a flaw so fundamental that it effectively negates everything that such good heart and good intention could bring, is that he is simply a spoiled brat, a person who is so self-absorbed in himself, and he considers governance simply as a black and white game. This produced a lethal combination of someone who has the proclivity to throw a tantrum, of making himself as the center of our nation’s politics, and of looking at critics and criticisms as dysfunctional elements of the political process. He is not used to being told that he is wrong, and appears to be fixated on those who offend him. He simply does not forget, and is not contented in being angry. Renato Corona had the pleasure of experiencing this fixation, which some can interpret as cacique vindictiveness, or the wrath of a haciendero on a warpath.

 

And this brattish, self-absorbed and self-righteous attitude, more so that he truly believes in the supremacy and non-negotiability of his Daang Matuwid, has practically undermined the good will and the political capital that many people were willing to grant him. In his authentic desire to clean the stables of government, a Herculean task at that, he misunderstood the limits of his influence and the bounds set by the Constitution, and he failed to see that even if he is the son of glorified political icons, he is not a son of Zeus, more so a son of God.

 

The President thought that he made his message clear to all when he was able to mobilize the House of Representatives to indict, and the Senate to convict a sitting Chief Justice. What further emboldened him was the manner by which the public showed its approval of such moves.  

 

But politics is not just about human agency. The rise and fall of political systems do not rest simply on the popularity and the goodness of hearts of leaders. 

 

President Aquino may be accused of megalomania, not because he is megalomanic, but because in his ardent desire to reform the system, he has placed so much emphasis on his goodness, and has in effect over-inflated his indispensability. In doing so, he failed to recognize the limits of his reason, and he forgot that the stability of political systems rests not only on the goodness of leaders, but also on the robustness of institutions.

 

It now appears that the reform agenda of PNoy is not about strengthening institutions, but in making institutional processes dependent only on moral uprightness, of which his is the template from where others have to be measured. He inflicts a lethal blow on corruption not by striking deep at the heart of its watershed, but in simply putting as exhibit the jailing of three Senators. Already pregnant with a personalistic ethos, the moral yardstick used by PNoy is further personalized by limiting its application only to his enemies, as he spares his friends from its reach.  

 

He has perfected the science of forging a pliant legislature and the art of making politics as a performance based on images and representations, and not on substance. He challenged the power of the Supreme Court to interpret laws, and weakened the majesty of the Constitution by making its interpretation as subjective and relative to his notions of the moral and the ethical. These are acts that undermined the stability of institutions, but nevertheless made him a rock star to many of his supporters. A President undermining the very foundation of his rule led to the entrenchment of a powerful narrative of an agency-based, and not an institutionally-driven reform agenda. It was the triumph of the personal over the institutional. It is the celebration of a personality cult around Noynoy—clean and upright, on a mission to exorcise the political system of its ghosts, and bold enough to challenge traditional politicians and political traditions.

 

One can argue that his desire to change the Constitution may appear to be a more structural and institutional approach to political reform. He attempts to present charter change as an opportunity for the Executive to regain its much-clipped power, by clipping the powers of what he now considers as an obstructionist and overreaching Judiciary.

 

But this stance is not in fact a sincere attack on the structural roots of what he alleges as an imbalance of power, but is simply a subterfuge for personal anger at a Court that has inflicted on DAP a fundamental slap in the face. The lukewarm and obligatory protest which he raised when the PDAF was declared unconstitutional pales in comparison to the rage he felt when the guardians of Padre Faura reminded him of the limits of his powers to redefine savings, and to transfer funds generated therefrom to offices outside the Executive branch on items that are not covered by appropriations identified by Congress. The PDAF he could have lived without. It is the DAP that hurts him most, as it is a direct assault on something that bore his personal imprint. The Court inflicted on him a ruling that practically judged his act as wrong. And he took it personally.

 

On its face, the Aquino presidency, despite its reformist image, is obviously ruled by personalistic politics. This is a Presidency that has personalized the impacts of Constitutional constraints. He looks at the Constitution not as a fundamental law upon which his decisions have to be based. Instead, the Constitution is only as good as it serves his personal vision.

 

One just has to look at the manner PNoy candidly elicited a personalistic view about his reforms that need to be continued, of how he will use as basis the decision of his bosses on whether he should move to change the Constitution so that it will no longer be an obstacle to reform that he has owned as his, and can only pass to someone he supports. And since Mar Roxas’ chances in 2016 are increasingly becoming weaker and bleaker on account of every survey that comes out, and that the specter of a Binay presidency is perceived to be too risky for his reforms as well as for his liberty should cases be filed against him when he steps down, it is understandable for Malacañang and the Liberal Party to float the idea of term extension, if not of allowing for re-election.

 

What you therefore see is clearly a personalistic attitude towards the fundamental law of the land. What is increasingly becoming visible is a President who sees our redemption in the hands only of good men, and in this world, only him, his friends and his allies can qualify.

 

The danger of a Presidency that subsists on a personalistic cult, and is derived from a near-hero worship, is that it faces the risk of sinking or swimming on the attitudes of a citizenry that has a short memory, and has an unstable notion of what is popular. For these people, leaders and idols are dispensable.

 

The other danger lies in the presence of dedicated crusaders for reform and good governance who are willing to part ways with a leader who has gone astray. These are the people whose convictions on what constitutes reform are deeply embedded not on loyalties to one single person, or to political parties, but on political movements and their genuine desire to see reform in its barest minimum, and where the rubric for good governance rests not on leaders alone. For these people, leaders are dispensable too.

 

This is the tragedy that may befall the president. The masses who deliver to him the popularity ratings can easily abandon him for the next available heroic personality.

 

And those who are committed to a reform agenda can easily abandon him when he ceases to become the hero that he promised them to be.

 

And what will be left with him will be the loyally blind apologists who will still keep on seeing in him the hero image even if it is no longer there.

The author is a former dean of De La Salle University. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of this website.