[The Wide Shot] Beyond ‘Team Kadiliman’ vs ‘Team Kasamaan’
Harry Roque, former spokesperson of Rodrigo Duterte, gave us a good laugh after he rallied his supporters to fight the forces of darkness.
“Hindi na po ‘to laban ng Duterte at Marcos. Ang laban po ngayon ay puwersa ng kadiliman laban sa puwersa ng… (This is no longer a fight between Duterte and Marcos. This is a fight between the forces of darkness against the forces of…),” Roque yelled, asking his followers to complete his sentence.
“Kasamaan (Evil)!” his followers responded in chorus.
Roque, looking flustered, said in a softer tone as if to correct the audience: “Kabutihan (Goodness).” To which the followers sheepishly responded: “Kabutihan!”
“This is a fight between good or evil!” emphasized Roque in this viral video.
It’s comically tragic that Roque’s rallying cry backfired on him. The other tragedy is how political figures like Roque still use — and many Filipinos still subscribe to — the political narrative of “good versus evil.”
Beyond Roque’s “Team Kadiliman” (Team Darkness) versus “Team Kasamaan” (Team Evil), it’s time that the Philippines, one of the world’s most deeply religious countries, went beyond the “good versus evil” frame in politics.
Japanese scholar Wataru Kusaka, who has closely studied Philippine politics and even lived in the slums for a year to understand the Filipino psyche, said what prevails in the Philippines is called “moral politics.”
Kusaka, a professor at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, wrote book on this topic — Moral Politics in the Philippines: Inequality, Democracy, and the Urban Poor, published by NUS Press Singapore in 2017 — which is now widely cited by scholars and is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand Phlippine politics.
Kusaka explained in his book: “By ‘moral politics,’ I mean politics that creates groups that are seen as either ‘good’ or ‘evil’ and draw a demarcation line between the two — in other words, politics concerned with definitions of good and evil. Moral politics is clearly distinguishable from ‘interest politics,’ which is concerned with the distribution of resources.”
Moral politics and post-EDSA presidents
The rise of moral politics has characterized Philippine politics after the 1986 EDSA People Power revolt that toppled dictator Ferdinand Marcos, according to Kusaka’s 2017 journal article, “Bandit Grabbed the State: Duterte’s Moral Politics.”
Especially in national elections, he argued, “moral discourses became a more important determinant of political processes than machinery fueled by money.” This was proven by how “candidates with smaller budgets and weaker organization were able to defeat their rivals by utilizing moral appeals in recent presidential elections.”
Projections of morality came in different forms, however, for each post-EDSA president.
Fidel V. Ramos and Benigno Aquino III both connected themselves to the 1986 legacy of “solidarity of the people.”
Joseph Estrada “exploited another moral discourse of ‘kindness to the poor’” — which would have also led to the victory of Fernando Poe Jr., according to Kusaka, “had it not been for vote cheating by Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2004.” Kusaka noted how “the sum of the votes gained by Estrada and Manuel Villar, who both used pro-poor discourses, was bigger than Aquino’s.”
Rodrigo Duterte, although denounced as immoral by critics such as the Catholic Church, espoused his own brand of moral politics: “social bandit-like morality.”
This “is characterized by the coexistence of compassion and violence under a patriarchal boss who maintains justice outside of the law,” Kusaka wrote. Within this paradigm, Duterte “insisted that executing bad criminals in order to save the nation was justifiable from a moral standpoint, which was superior to the rule of law.”
The problem with moral politics
Now, one might ask, what is the problem with moral politics? Shouldn’t morality be our aim?
In his seminal work Moral Politics in the Philippines, Kusaka said that moral politics, since it is based on right and wrong, “readily lends itself to zero-sum confrontations that make compromise difficult.” He added, “By morally justifying the exclusion of others, it threatens the practice of democracy, which is predicated on plurality.”
Kusaka wrote: “The moralization of politics threatens democracy either by intensifying antagonistic ‘we/they’ relations to the extent that it advocates the exclusion and eradication of the other as ‘enemy,’ or by depoliticizing socioeconomic inequality to perpetuate elite rule in the name of the people’s moral solidarity.”
Carmel Abao, who is now political science department chair of Ateneo de Manila University, raised similar points in 2014, in a Rappler Thought Leaders piece titled “2016 presidential choices: Beyond good or evil.”
In this piece on the 2016 presidential election, Abao wrote that “it may no longer be enough to choose between a ‘good’ or ‘evil’ presidential candidate (or worse, between two or more ‘evils’).”
“Discerning electoral choices must entail not just an ethical/moralistic perspective but also an institutionalist one. The latter is important because electoral choices are political choices and politics is largely about the banal, complex task of organizing society through institutions. It is not about paths to a metaphysical heaven or hell. In electoral exercises, thus, even one’s concept of what’s good and what’s evil has to have some metrics,” Abao said.
She said voters should not choose a president in haste, and should push for at least two things: “free and informed choice and democratic party politics.”
“We do not need another hero or a warrior or a saint. We just need someone who is visibly intent on deepening Philippine democracy,” she added.
The role of faith communities
Reversing this “good versus evil” mindset, however, requires much effort not only from the political sphere but also from faith-based communities. Many of our mental frameworks, after all, are rooted in religious worldviews. Our day-to-day decision-making on what is right or wrong, good or evil, can influence even our choices in the voting precincts.
Conditioned by religious upbringing, the understanding of morality as “black and white” has weakened our ability to navigate the many gray areas of life, including our politics. The “good versus evil” narrative, then, becomes a convenient fallback when things get complicated… or when it suits the agenda of politicians like Roque.
But we need an electorate that understands context — that is to say, history, motives, concrete achievements and incompetencies — and goes beyond depictions that “this politician is good” or “this politician is evil” on the basis of the latest political news.
To cite a recent example, look at many of the House lawmakers who now question and grill Vice President Sara Duterte over her office’s budget. Are they heroes or villains? Sinners or saints?
In his latest political analysis, Rappler reporter Dwight de Leon points out how the same House lawmakers gave Duterte a “free pass” in previous years. Marikina 2nd District Representative Stella Quimbo, who presided over the recent House budget hearing that Duterte resented, was in fact a key defender of Duterte’s confidential funds last year.
The winds of politics have changed, however, given Duterte’s rift with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his cousin, House Speaker Martin Romualdez. House lawmakers, who take their cue from the President, “are now more at ease” criticizing Duterte.
If villains can turn into heroes based on a President’s prerogatives, then the “fight between good or evil” will always fall short when applied to politics.
The words of Pope Francis in August 2016, while originally in reference to priestly formation, also apply to the problem of moral politics: “In life, not everything is black over white or white over black. No! The shades of gray prevail in life. We must teach them to discern in this gray area.”
In politics and even in morality, perspective is the enemy of the simplistic.
The true darkness, the real evil, is the one that pretends the gray does not exist. – Rappler.com