The American brand of democracy won't do



As most evenings go, I treated myself to a movie the other night from one of those pirated DVDs peddled by Muslim vendors along our sidewalks. You’ve probably seen it, “Gods and Generals”. The year was 1861, the time of the civil war. Virginians had to make their decision whether to secede from the union and fight against their own countrymen, or send its regiments to help the stars and stripes. In one of the scenes, one witnessed how people made their decisions and arrived at conscnsus. Prior discussion was thorough and verged on the philosophical. There was homegrown social awareness that laid down the premises and, in a society that was largely middleclass, consensus making of this sort was grounded on American tradition. That defined their brand of democracy.

Forty years later, they brought the same concepts to the Philippines in their neocolonial adventure and instituted that very brand of democracy in the first popular elections which naturally resulted in disaster. In the first place, there was no large middle class that took pains to discuss and explain issues. We had instead a thin layer of principalia or prominent citizens who traditionally served as gobernadorcillos or alcaldes, and a large section of unshod peasants who barely left their farms and generally remained ignorant of what was going on around them. Thus, the first American-sponsored popular elections were manipulated by the principalia who practiced dagdag-bawas and inflated the counts of votes. In Leyte, elections had to be repeated in several pueblos because of electoral protests. 

The practice went on despite these failures and in time the principalia found the need to organize political parties whose membership consisted mainly of their own class. The middle class concept of democracy simply could not work because of the large social divide. The peasants could not be made to participate in meaningful discussion of issues not because they were uneducated and stupid but because they were left out of the information train. The peasants remained in their farms and went down to the pueblos only to trade their surplus, isolated and far removed from the issues of governance and politics. They also came down to vote during elections.

Today, the peasants are still denied information crucial to making intelligent choices and decisions. While the radio and TV have reached the farthest corners of the archipelago, the quality of information reaching them borders on the trivial and inconsequential. Radios are inevitably tuned in to soap operas the whole day, and where TVs exist, the main fares are noontime shows of either Eat Bulaga or Wowowie where sexy starlets entertain their audiences with their gyrating torsos and provocative boobs.

Even if assuming we have clean, honest and computerized elections, what good will these do if the consciousness of the majority border on the irrelevant and inconsequential?

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