On May 9th, voters in the Philippines elected Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the disgraced former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, as the successor to current president Rodrigo Duterte. Many in the Philippines were disappointed to see the Marcos family back in power after spending nearly 40 years in the shadows because of the popular uprising that led to the removal of Marcos Sr. from power in 1986. Western media outlets were, as usual, at a loss for words. In order to explain the landslide victory of a direct descendant of a brutal ex-president, the media could only point to one thing: the massive spread of disinformation. But is social media really to blame for a candidate receiving over 16 million more votes than the closest runner up?
Maria Ressa seems to think so. The Filipino journalist, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, appeared on Democracy Now on May 11th to give her thoughts on the election. The former CNN journalist expressed frustration with the fact that the campaign of Marcos Jr. was able to erase the collective memory of the horrors of his father’s regime through the highly-coordinated dissemination of disinformation on social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. According to Ressa, social media has become a “behavior modification system” and that what has transpired in the Philippines is a “case study” of its “impact on elections.” In support of this claim, she cites the fact that the Philippines was second only to the United States in the number of compromised accounts associated with the Cambridge Analytica election manipulation scandal. Unfortunately, this is about as far as Ressa goes with her analysis of the situation. Like the rest of her peers at media outlets like CNN, MSNBC, and The New York Times, Ressa can only muster an inadequate explanation that is rife with technological determinism.
The logic of Ressa (and many others) presupposes the existence of a “pure” democracy that existed before the rise of social media, a democracy now at risk of falling apart due to the rapid spread of disinformation and fake news. The only way to “save” democracy, in their view, is for tech companies to step in and do a better job of moderating the content on their platforms. If this were to happen, everything would supposedly go back to normal, and authoritarian presidents would become a thing of the past. But this logic cannot adequately explain the recent success of right-wing, authoritarian candidates. It falls short by misinterpreting the popularity of these candidates as simple “manipulation” and neglecting the increasing repressiveness of democratic politics as a whole.
Ressa completely ignores the immense popularity of the current authoritarian president Rodrigo Duterte, and the overall unpopularity of presidents before him, who were all run-of-the-mill liberals. Recent polling has shown that Duterte has an approval rating of 67.1%, making him the first president in Philippine history to leave office with over a 50% approval rating. Not only is Marcos Jr. running a similar “personality-based” campaign as Duterte did, but he also added Duterte’s daughter Sara to his ticket as Vice President. Despite launching a drug war that has killed thousands, Filipino voters credit Duterte with “reviving the economy and making the Philippines more competitive and investor-friendly.” It should therefore come as no surprise that Filipinos elected someone with a similar persona who, as an added bonus, had direct ties to the current popular administration. But how, liberals ask, could people support a politician with such a strong authoritarian aura?
The same question was asked when Trump won in 2016, and the same answer was given back then: mass manipulation. For the liberal conscious, that is the only possible explanation. These poor, innocent people are simply being manipulated by shady forces with tons of money. If only they had the “right” facts, or access to “real” information, surely they wouldn’t vote for such deplorable characters! Such are the illusions of modern liberal thought. Unaware of the “repressive core” of democracy and the effects of incessant competition on the psyche of the subjects of capitalism, liberal thought is left completely speechless when it comes to explaining the results of recent democratic elections. “Not our democracy!” they cry, as yet another right-wing populist comes into power. But it is precisely their democracy that is at the heart of this development, a conclusion made clear by analyses from thinkers like Robert Kurz and Thomas Meyer.
According to them, in the face of capitalism’s existential crisis, the ability of democratic politics to affect any sort of change on the capitalist mode of production (that it is inseparable from) has been severely diminished. Although politics has never been able to fully control the economy, gone are the days when mass social movements could effectively petition for a larger share of the wealth produced by capitalist society. Now that automation is increasingly undermining the process of capital accumulation, the only thing left for the state to do is manage the crisis by brutally repressing every expression of dissent and systematically eliminating all the millions who have been made superfluous by widespread automation. As a result, there has been a generalized shift to the right among all political parties. While this is often interpreted as an “erosion of democracy,” Kurz and Meyer would argue that this is just democracy showing its true colors, as it did so infamously in the early 20th century.
For the first time in the history of capitalism, workers are confronted with the possibility of running out of work. In a neoliberal global society that has never been more atomized, this confrontation inevitably leads to the sorting of the population into “winners” and losers.” Since there is no insight into this dynamic whatsoever among the public, the “losers” appear not as victims of a blind, irrational system, but as “failures” who only have themselves to blame. Criminals are simply “bad” people, the unemployed simply “lazy.” Such simple explanations lead to a similarly simple solution: eliminate them. That is exactly what Duterte did, and the fact that his popularity didn’t suffer as a result only shows how irredeemable the capitalist subject in crisis is.
Liberal thought is totally incapable of grasping these dynamics. As Robert Kurz showed in his book Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus, liberals prefer to project democracy’s authoritarian tendencies onto some foreign “other,” and insist on the eternal sanctity of democracy as a mode of political organization. In the case of Ressa, the problem lies in the shadowy groups behind the spread of disinformation that “corrupt” democracy from the outside, and not democracy itself. But even access to “perfect” information, which is not even possible, would not ensure the downfall of right-wing movements, because these movements are deeply appealing to broad sectors of the population during times of capitalist crisis. Without understanding this, and realizing that democracy is not something to appeal to, but rather something to critique, adequately explaining the victory of someone like Marcos Jr. remains totally impossible.
Oliver Blackwell 