When the Men of Order Cry Nationalism:
Accountability, Scandal, and the Cracking Center
There are moments when a political class mistakes public patience for public consent. It hears silence and assumes resignation. It sees people going to work, lining up for transport, paying inflated prices, enduring poor services, and surviving another week, and it concludes that the center still holds. But beneath that daily endurance is a different mood. It is not pluralist enthusiasm. It is not a polite request for better representation among competing factions. It is not simply a wish for balance between Marcos and Duterte, or for a calmer arrangement among elite camps. It is a demand for accountability.
That is what makes the present crisis more serious than another episode of dynastic rivalry. The ruling blocs may still imagine that the public is merely choosing between them. They may still think that the country can be sorted into camps: pro-Marcos, pro-Duterte, opposition, loyalist, reformist, radical, undecided. But that reading misses the sharper force growing beneath the surface. Many Filipinos are no longer asking which faction should manage the system. They are asking why the system keeps producing the same burnt record of scandal, impunity, misuse of public funds, corruption allegations, neglected public needs, and political survival dressed up as patriotism.
Sen. Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa’s appeal to his fellow Philippine Military Academy alumni, made under the shadow of an International Criminal Court warrant tied to the Duterte drug war, is important because it exposed the instinct of the men of order when accountability comes near. They do not begin with the dead. They do not begin with the families. They do not begin with command responsibility, public trust, or the limits of state violence. They begin with nation, sovereignty, loyalty, fraternity, and institutional pride. They reach for the hymn, the flag, the oath, the academy, the old sentimental grammar of service, and they ask that these symbols be made to stand between them and consequence.
That is why the backlash from Frank Cimatu, Gary Alejano, and others carried more weight than an ordinary social-media scolding. Their criticism was not merely that Dela Rosa had used the PMA hymn in bad taste. Their deeper charge was that he had tried to convert an institutional song into political armor. An alma mater song, especially one tied to the academy that produces many of the country’s military and police leaders, is not a personal distress signal. It is not a shield for legal exposure. It is not a campaign jingle. It is not a plea for uniformed sympathy. If it stands for courage, integrity, and loyalty, then those values must be measured against accountability, not invoked to avoid it.
The larger scandal is that this maneuver is not new. Philippine politics has long allowed powerful men to borrow the moral capital of institutions they have weakened. They speak in the name of the Constitution after bending public office to factional needs. They speak in the name of the people after neglecting the people’s most basic demands. They speak in the name of sovereignty after failing to make domestic justice credible. They speak in the name of order after presiding over disorder in public finance, public services, and public morality. When pressure arrives, the first instinct is not confession, reform, or submission to process. It is symbolic mobilization.
That is why this cannot be treated as a simple matter of pluralist competition. The point is not that the Marcos camp and the Duterte camp are merely two legitimate poles in a normal democratic marketplace, each representing a different constituency and policy preference. That frame is too soft for the depth of the crisis. The two wings of the present ruling order carry their own burdens of shame. They carry the odor of scandal, impunity, family power, discretionary funds, coercive politics, and selective morality. Their quarrel may be real, but it does not cleanse either side. Their conflict may expose crimes and abuses, but exposure by one compromised faction does not automatically produce justice.
The public demand, therefore, is not simply for alternation. It is for accountability that does not stop at factional convenience. It is for a reckoning that does not merely punish one camp so another camp can inherit the center. It is for a political order in which the law does not move only when elite alliances collapse. It is for a public finance system where funds cannot be hidden behind vague security justifications while schools, hospitals, transport, agriculture, wages, and disaster response remain inadequate. It is for a state that does not remember sovereignty only when the powerful are threatened, and does not remember the poor only during campaigns, relief operations, or police raids.
This is where the phrase “bombard the headquarters” becomes politically meaningful, not as a literal call to violence, but as an old revolutionary metaphor for exposing and challenging the command centers of power. The people’s anger is not satisfied by watching one wing of the elite bombard the other while preserving its own headquarters intact. The demand is wider. It is to bombard the headquarters of impunity itself: the dynastic headquarters, the budgetary headquarters, the police headquarters, the propaganda headquarters, the confidential-fund headquarters, the patronage headquarters, and the ideological headquarters that keeps telling citizens to choose between rival managers of the same decay.
The danger for the ruling center is that many people already understand this. They know the Marcos and Duterte camps are not clean opposites. They know that one side’s corruption charge does not erase the other side’s historical baggage. They know that one side’s invocation of sovereignty does not erase the victims of state violence. They know that one side’s appeal to institutional order does not erase the possibility that institutions are being used selectively. They know that when dynasties fight, the truth may surface, but truth is not the same as justice unless it is followed through without fear or favor.
This is why the current cries of nationalism sound so thin. Nationalism, if serious, should begin with the people’s condition. It should begin with whether citizens can eat, work, study, travel, heal, farm, fish, organize, speak, and live without fear. It should begin with whether public funds are used for public needs. It should begin with whether the law can reach the powerful. It should begin with whether state violence can be investigated honestly. It should begin with whether the poor are treated as citizens rather than as suspects, clients, labor reserves, voters, or scenery.
But the nationalism now being performed by the men of order begins somewhere else. It begins with the predicament of the powerful. It begins when an ally faces arrest, when a patron faces investigation, when a confidential fund is questioned, when a political family faces impeachment, when an international court asks for answers, or when a ruling coalition breaks apart. The nation is invoked not as a community of suffering and entitlement, but as a shield for those already protected by office, wealth, surname, rank, or machinery.
That is not nationalism. It is reaction. It is the old center trying to save itself by dressing up self-preservation as patriotic resistance.
The Duterte wing reacts to accountability by calling it persecution, foreign interference, elite conspiracy, or betrayal. It asks its followers to see legal scrutiny as an attack on the nation. It treats loyalty to Duterte as though it were loyalty to the republic. It treats the drug war not as a field of unresolved deaths and command questions, but as a badge of political authenticity. In that story, Bato is not a former police chief facing grave accusations. He is a symbol of a besieged movement. The warrant becomes a weapon of outsiders. The hymn becomes a call to comrades. Sovereignty becomes the last refuge of those who once demanded obedience from the weak.
The Marcos wing counterreacts by presenting itself as the guardian of institutions, order, and lawful procedure. It wants to look like the adult restoration after Duterte’s disorder. It wants to occupy the center as the camp of stability, diplomacy, and legality. But this posture cannot be accepted without scrutiny. Institutional language does not erase the unresolved moral history attached to the Marcos name. Nor does it erase present questions about public funds, elite privilege, patronage, and selective justice. The camp that claims to defend institutions must prove that it is not merely using institutions to discipline its rival while insulating itself.
Both wings therefore carry the same burnt mark of scandal: the belief that the state can be held as a family asset, a factional weapon, or a protective wall. The forms differ. The rhetoric differs. The enemies differ. But the underlying practice is familiar. Public office becomes a fortress. Public money becomes leverage. Public outrage becomes something to be managed. Public memory becomes something to be manipulated. National language becomes a costume for factional survival.
That is why the people’s demand for accountability must be broader than the immediate legal case against Dela Rosa, broader than the impeachment drama around Sara Duterte, broader than the Marcos-Duterte split, and broader than any one corruption controversy. These are openings, but they are not the whole field. The question is whether the country will use this rupture to interrogate the structure that made such abuses ordinary. The question is whether accountability will climb upward, sideways, and backward, or whether it will stop at the boundary of political usefulness.
A true accountability politics would not ask first whether the accused belongs to one faction or another. It would ask what was done, who authorized it, who benefited, who paid, who died, who was silenced, who received funds, who approved releases, who falsified justifications, who protected the chain, and who now invokes the nation to avoid answering. It would not permit the drug war to be treated as merely a Duterte issue while ignoring the state machinery that carried it out. It would not permit corruption to be treated as merely a Duterte issue or a Marcos issue while ignoring the budgetary culture that makes discretion, secrecy, and patronage normal. It would not permit the security establishment to wrap itself in honor while refusing scrutiny over the uses of force and loyalty.
This is the business significance of the crisis. A country cannot build durable confidence when accountability depends on factional timing. Investors, workers, taxpayers, and citizens all need a predictable state. They need to know that public funds are not political loot. They need to know that law enforcement is not selective. They need to know that courts are not merely instruments in elite conflict. They need to know that national policy is not held hostage by dynastic rivalry. They need to know that the state can survive the fall of any patron because its institutions are stronger than the men occupying them.
When that confidence disappears, the cost is not only moral. It becomes economic. Public projects become suspect. Procurement becomes a site of distrust. Regulatory decisions are read as factional moves. Fiscal priorities are questioned. Reform promises lose force. Citizens become less willing to comply because they no longer believe sacrifice is shared. Businesses price in instability. Public servants lose morale. Social anger becomes harder to contain. The state may still function, but it functions with a legitimacy deficit.
The misuse of public funds is central because it translates elite abuse into daily hardship. A questionable allocation is not just a line item. A confidential fund is not just a bureaucratic phrase. A diverted peso is a classroom not repaired, a medicine not bought, a farmer not supported, a road not built properly, a flood response delayed, a health worker unpaid, a commuter left stranded, a public system weakened. Corruption is not only theft from the treasury. It is theft from the future capacity of the state.
That is why the people are right to be angry. They are not angry in the abstract. They are angry because they experience the consequences of public failure every day. They are asked to understand why budgets are constrained while political offices find money for discretionary spending. They are asked to accept poor services while officials move in convoys. They are asked to trust institutions that move slowly against the powerful and swiftly against the poor. They are asked to believe in nationalism from politicians who remember the nation most loudly when their own camp is endangered.
This anger is not a polite pluralist sentiment. It is not simply a call for more voices around the table. It is an indictment. It is a demand that the headquarters be opened, searched, audited, questioned, and stripped of its sacred immunity. It is the demand that the public be allowed to see what was done in its name and with its money. It is the demand that oaths, hymns, flags, and offices stop being used as curtains.
The PMA hymn episode remains powerful because it dramatizes this curtain. A man facing grave accusations reached for a sacred institutional song and asked it to carry his case into the emotional realm of loyalty. But the public has become less willing to accept such transfers. It has heard too many slogans. It has watched too many officials speak of service while securing privilege. It has watched too many scandals disappear into committees, technicalities, settlements, alliances, and distractions. It has watched too many powerful figures discover law only when they can use it and discover nationalism only when they need cover.
The academy’s ideals, if taken seriously, do not support this evasion. Courage means facing accountability even when it is humiliating. Integrity means not hiding behind fraternity. Loyalty means fidelity to the Constitution and the people, not to a patron. If the PMA hymn is to mean anything, it must not be available as an emergency shelter for alumni in political distress. Its dignity depends on refusing that use.
The same principle applies to the entire state. Congress should not be a shelter. The police should not be a shelter. The military should not be a shelter. The budget should not be a shelter. The courts should not be a shelter. Sovereignty should not be a shelter. The presidency should not be a shelter. The republic should not be turned into a bunker for men and families who have exhausted public trust.
What makes the present moment dangerous for the center is that the old method of containment is losing power. The elite can still mobilize loyalists. It can still dominate media cycles. It can still turn scandal into spectacle. It can still frame every issue as a binary conflict between camps. But the public’s resentment is no longer easily confined inside those binaries. Many Filipinos may dislike Duterte without trusting Marcos. They may distrust Marcos without absolving Duterte. They may support accountability at The Hague while demanding accountability at home. They may reject foreign interference while also rejecting domestic impunity. They may understand that two things can be true: sovereignty matters, and sovereignty has been abused by those who use it to hide from justice.
This complexity is not pluralist softness. It is sharper than partisanship. It is the refusal to let any camp monopolize the language of the people. It is the refusal to let one scandal erase another. It is the refusal to let counterreaction pose as justice. It is the refusal to let reaction pose as nationalism. It is the insistence that both wings of the ruling order answer for what they have done, what they have enabled, and what they have neglected.
The Marcos-Duterte split may therefore become useful only if it breaks open the sealed rooms of power. If it merely rearranges control, it will deepen cynicism. If it exposes wrongdoing only to punish enemies, it will fail. If it produces investigations that stop at political convenience, it will confirm the public’s worst suspicion. But if it widens into a genuine demand for accountability across camps, offices, budgets, police chains, and dynastic networks, then it may become more than an elite rupture. It may become an opening.
The ruling center fears that possibility. It prefers a manageable fight. It prefers Marcos versus Duterte, not people versus impunity. It prefers hearings that wound rivals, not audits that threaten the whole patronage system. It prefers legal action that disciplines one camp, not structural accountability that changes how public power is used. It prefers nationalism as a slogan, not nationalism as the people’s claim over the state.
That is why the language must be corrected. This is not a crisis of civility between political factions. It is not merely a crisis of polarization. It is not simply a problem of institutional balance. It is a crisis of accountability. It is a crisis created by years of public money treated casually, violence justified politically, offices inherited dynastically, institutions used selectively, and citizens told to wait.
The people are not asking merely for better manners among elites. They are asking why the headquarters still stands untouched after so much burning. They are asking why the same wings of power, though now attacking each other, still carry the same smoke of scandal. They are asking why those who neglected public needs now speak as though they alone can save the republic. They are asking why every powerful man becomes the nation when he is threatened, while ordinary citizens remain statistics when they suffer.
In the end, Bato’s use of the PMA hymn will be remembered not because it was the largest scandal, but because it captured the moral posture of a class under pressure. It showed a man of order reaching for nationalism at the moment accountability approached. It showed how quickly fraternity can be summoned when law becomes inconvenient. It showed how institutions are asked to lend dignity to those whose public record demands scrutiny.
But the country’s deeper judgment will not stop with him. It will extend to both wings of the ruling order. It will ask what the Dutertes did with power and violence. It will ask what the Marcoses do with institutions and public funds. It will ask why corruption keeps returning under different names. It will ask why the poor are always told to obey while the powerful are allowed to negotiate consequence. It will ask why the center calls itself stability when, for so many citizens, it has meant only managed decay.
The men of order are crying nationalism because they can hear the demand growing louder. It is not a request for inclusion in their drama. It is not applause for one dynasty against another. It is the demand to bombard the headquarters of impunity, to expose the burnt foundations beneath both wings, and to insist that the republic belongs neither to the family in power nor to the family out of favor.
It belongs to the people who have paid for every scandal.