It’s interesting that the Marcos-Arroyo-‍Duterte coalition seized upon three deflections to disguise their true goals. This is why, until now, there remains the distinct possibility, born of political logic, that the Marcos-Duterte houses will unite, rather than divide their votes, as Roxas-Poe did.

Interestingly, in the SWS surveys from 1987 to 2015, the percentage wanting martial law has never exceeded the 30 percent or so (except in 1987, when it reached 40 percent since then, the highest has been 29 percent in 20) the Marcoses obtain in national elections, suggesting a crossover between the two. The problem now is that there is a more recent branding for the iron fist, and it’s marked Davao and no longer Sarrat. The core of this winning minority was the subsection (ranging from a fifth to even a quarter of Filipinos) that has always been pining for a dictatorship. The outcome, then, was that a winning plurality of Filipinos rejected the disruption of modernity for a backward-looking but comfortingly familiar tough love of an elected strongman. In the case of the Marcoses, belief that thousands if not tens of thousands of pesos will be the voter’s share in the Marcos billions.īack in 2016 I’d suggested that if modernity was the central challenge of Philippine society and institutions, then that election represented a crisis of modernity.

The cargo cult aspect requires a brief explanation: It’s the fostering of belief in the imminence of a new age of blessings that will start with the arrival of a special cargo. The data science aspect speaks for itself in terms of recruiting social media accounts with followers, and innovating on YouTube and TikTok. Except in their case, the Marcos creed can be best described as a hybrid of data science and cargo cult. 13, and culminating on the 15th, “The Big Day.” It has all the characteristics of folk religion, and I find it striking that all the fervor is being matched by the fervor in another cultic camp, that of the Marcoses. A stampita of the faithful consists of an infographic circulating online: the “Sara All Philippines 2022 Caravan” is supposed to kick off tomorrow in Cotobato City, arriving in Manila on Nov. In recent weeks, Lakas-CMD, and then PDP-Laban, seem to have lost faith in this Second Coming. Bongbong Marcos leads, maybe hard to beat

How long to beat deus ex