Politics as hugot

Crosshatching

We voted and we lost. We congratulated the new President and his supporters, those we engaged in heated debates for months. We said we wish him the best, after all he is no longer just their President, he is ours too. And we are about two-thirds of the nation that did not vote for him.

Yet we never let our guards down. We aired our disagreements over some of his choices for the Cabinet positions; his neglect of protocols; his controversial proposals; his endorsement of the death penalty and summary executions; his plan to give the late Ferdinand Marcos a hero’s burial; his continued cursing and condescending remarks; his flip-plopping and lack of clarity; his vindictiveness and combative attitude towards the “yellows,” the human rights groups, the Church and, recently, the media.

We continued to rant and his supporters called us sore losers who could not move on. Of course, we could not move on. There was no way you could just play deaf and blind to what’s going on. It’s not as if it’s just some teenage hugot that we are all going through.

No way. He is not just going to be another President coming to replace the whole government bureaucracy with new faces. He comes to replace government itself with a new system, an overhaul that requires a change of the Constitution. He even threatens to abolish Congress if it gets in the way and install a revolutionary government if the majority backs him up.

Most people voted for him for his iron-hand approach on curbing criminality and are willing to support his attack on due process and the rule of law.

But beyond criminality, the “change” that is coming really means major policy changes that will have serious consequences for all of us. I don’t know if people fully realize the implications of that change and if they are ready for it.

Are we in for a “socialist experiment” with the first-ever self-proclaimed leftist in government? Or will that honeymoon with the Left soon end with a reversal, a turn to the extreme right with the President becoming a fascist dictator. Already, he said that coalition government with the communists is not happening as his friends in the military are not up to it.

Or, as Randy David said in an essay, this populist authoritarianism that is becoming the global trend nowadays is ushering in a new form of fascism, one that can have both leftist and rightist characteristics. We saw that in the rise of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, for example, and that social experiment led to the big mess that that country is in right now.

Will this balancing act between the Left and the Right not lead to a situation like Sukarno in Indonesia, where a President that tried desperately to give concessions to both leftists and rightists only ended up being removed by the latter in a military coup that led to a genocidal campaign that killed nearly a million people in 1965-1966. Conversely, will it not be a case of our President metamorphosing from a leftwing Sukarno into a rightwing Suharto?

Those are scary scenarios that we all must consider. Already, Trillanes is talking about a possible coup d’ etat if our new President continues to be a “lunatic.”

People have very high expectations for the “change” that the new administration is promising and those of us who did not vote for him shares that hope. Of course, we don’t want to see him fail for that would be failure for all of us. We don’t want to see another bloody coup d’ etat similar to what were attempted in the past.

So as stakeholders in this country, each of us have the right to air an opinion. And, contrary to what the President’s supporters think, now is actually the best time to let our concerns known. Discourse is even more important at this crucial transition to that big change for federalism, socialism, or whatever the President has in mind. Now is the time to demand the blueprint and scrutinize it to the last detail.

So sorry if it feels like we are raining on your parade. But we are just as wary of populist rhetoric and mythmaking that the President seems to be enjoying himself.

At this early, we want to point out important issues that might be lost in the euphoria. We never really mind if in exchange of that vigilance we are being tagged alarmist, paranoid, or simply bitter. Unlike him, we feel that our nation’s future is more important than what our friends feel. That’s the hugot that is easier to deal with.