"It is not only through an insurgency or attempted putsches that democratic government can be destroyed."
"It is not only through an insurgency or attempted putsches that democratic government can be destroyed."
There are two ways in which democracy can be destroyed. One way is action directed at the democratically elected government by putschists, who then grab the levers of power. The other way in which democracy is destroyed is, surprisingly, action by the democratically elected government itself.
This country is no stranger to attempts to destroy democracy through violent, extra-constitutional means. On the left side of the political spectrum, the Filipino people have witnessed the seemingly-never-ending effort of the CPP-NDF-NPA to seize control of the government after a half-century of trying. Jose Ma. Sison and his comrades are still maintaining the oldest communist insurgency in this part of the world. And on the right side of the political spectrum, the Filipino people witnessed, in the late 1980s, the repeated attempts of former Senators Juan Ponce Enrile and Gregorio Honasan and their fellow-putschists to overthrow the democratically installed government of President Corazon C. Aquino.
But it is not only through an insurgency or attempted putsches that democratic government can be destroyed. It can also be destroyed by the use of democratic means to weaken the pillars of democracy—the electoral process, the media, the judicial system and the electoral mechanism—and constrict the democratic space.
The pseudo-democrats who wish to destroy democracy do not seek to accomplish their objective with one fell swoop; they go about their business deliberately but slowly, one slice of democracy at a time. Today it is a blow—the French say ‘coup’—against freedom of the press, tomorrow it is an assault on the citizenry’s constitutional right to protest unjust and oppressive governmental actions; and the day after that it is a campaign of intimidation against those who run this country’s judicial system.
Always, the pseudo-democrats who seek democracy’s destruction employ the language of the law to give their activity the color of legality and libertarianism. “Presumption of regularity in the performance of official duty,” “the right of the government to defend itself,” “conduct violative of the nation’s sovereignty,” and “maintaining contractual arrangements with provisions onerous to government.” These are the more salient of the legal precepts that the pseudo-democrats have invoked in their campaign to gradually destroy democracy from the inside. As everyone knows, the latest addition to that list of abused legal precepts is the quo warranto provision of the Rules of Court.
The existence of a functioning system of checks and balances—the Executive Department, the legislature and the judiciary checking on and balancing one another—is essential to the preservation and strengthening of a democracy. The attempt of pseudo-democrats to destroy a democracy will not succeed if the legislature and the judiciary swiftly stop Executive Department actions that have the effect of weakening any of the pillars of the rule of law. Democracy will be preserved and invigorated if the members of Congress and the highest magistrates thwart every pseudo-legal Executive Department move against the media, the courts, the legal community, civil society and the professionals’ groups. The legislature and the judiciary must not work hand-in-glove with, and be complicit in, the Executive Department’s pseudo-legal actions against the rule of law.
That’s just the problem. The 1987 Constitution, like its immediate predecessors, speaks of three co-equal branches of government. Modern Philippine political history has been such as to make it possible for the legislature to be a willing partner in the Executive Department’s anti-democracy actions and decisions. In the absence of a tradition of political-party discipline, even a President of the Philippines elected by a plurality vote can, with deft use of national-budget resources, cobble together a Congressional majority, whose members would then feel beholden to him while his term lasts. And in a cultural environment where the concept of utang na loob—debt of gratitude—is deeply ingrained, the Chief Executive’s ability to appoint most or all of the members of the Supreme Court can prove extremely useful in his campaign to eliminate the trappings of democracy.
Of the two groups of destroyers of democracy—those who seek to do so beyond the Constitution’s pale, like the communists and the putschists, and those who do so using Constitutionally sanctioned means—the latter is more damnable for two reasons. The first is that the pseudo-democrats operate in a highly insidious manner, using democracy’s tools—language, concepts and processes—against itself. The second reason is that the pseudo-democrats pursue their repugnant objective with resources that belong to the people—a case of one’s being cooked in one’s own cooking oil.