Power Dressed as Righteousness: A Note on the recent Rallies, Selective Accountability, and the False Martyrdom of Bloc Politics

Power Dressed as Righteousness: A Note on the recent Rallies,

Selective Accountability, and the False Martyrdom of Bloc Politics

By Morteza Farhadi

There are moments when a political movement must be judged not by the beauty of its words, but by the direction in which those words are pointed. “Transparency,” “accountability,” “justice,” and “peace” are noble words. No republic can live without them. No people can remain free if corruption is allowed to become ordinary, if public money is treated as private inheritance, if contractors and politicians can steal from flood-control funds while the poor wade through water, if prosecutors move only against enemies, and if courts are feared only by those without blocs, lawyers, dynasties, churches, or money. Yet noble words can be turned into a curtain. They can be used not to expose power, but to protect it. They can be made to sound like the voice of the oppressed while serving as the shield of an adherent facing serious charges.

This is the central problem with the Iglesia ni Cristo rally in support of Senator Rodante Marcoleta. Originally meant to follow the earlier marches demanding for accountability and against corruption, at first glance it sounds "just" that these people also trying to express the same sentiment as those in white shirts or ribbons the earlier day, but, to think that the following protest has a particular motive, then it was not wrong for citizens to demand fair process. It was not wrong to ask whether the Ombudsman’s action was selective. It was not wrong to question whether the legal theory behind a possible plunder case over election-related donations is sound. But the political meaning of the rally cannot be separated from its object. It was not simply an abstract demand for clean government. It was a mass religious-political action in defense of a named man, an INC adherent and political ally, who was facing serious allegations. When a movement says “accountability” while organizing around the defense of one of its own, the public has the right to ask whether accountability has become protection.

The INC’s own statement made this tension visible. In its June 30, 2026 statement, delivered by spokesperson Edwil Zabala, the church said it was not opposed to law enforcement but opposed the “distortion or bending of the law,” especially when allegedly done to cover corruption. It said the church supported Marcoleta’s advocacy and called for “transparency, accountability, justice, and peace.” Most revealingly, it said that even if Marcoleta were imprisoned, INC would not stop demanding justice for Filipinos whose money had been stolen; it also declared that “selective justice is an injustice.” The statement therefore bound one man’s legal fate to the suffering of the nation and turned a possible case against a senator into a public drama of wounded justice. 

This is where rhetoric begins to darken. A man may expose corruption and still be answerable to the law. A senator may lead an investigation and still face his own charges. A political figure may be useful to a cause and still be subject to evidence. The error of political religion is to imagine that usefulness purifies a man from scrutiny. If Marcoleta is innocent, let the court acquit him. If the plunder theory is weak, let the court reject it. If the prosecution is politically timed, let the defense expose that timing. But a rally should not be used to make the legal process feel illegitimate before the evidence is heard.

The state’s response, as reported, was cautious. Police officials said they recognized the constitutional right to peaceful assembly, while PNP chief Gen. Jose Melencio Nartatez Jr. placed units on full alert and ordered personnel to exercise maximum tolerance, remain impartial, uphold human rights, and perform professionally. Daily Tribune reported that 5,936 police and security personnel were deployed to key sites such as the EDSA Shrine, Mendiola, Liwasang Bonifacio, Ayala Bridge, the U.S. Embassy, and the Senate. That was the language of a state trying not to create martyrs. It recognized that a careless dispersal could turn an already charged political event into a persecution narrative. Yet that same caution showed the power of the mobilization. A religious organization had filled strategic public space, and the state was forced to treat it not as a routine rally but as a major political-security event.

That scale matters because mass is a form of speech, but it is also a form of pressure. A crowd along EDSA does not merely express opinion. It occupies space, disrupts movement, absorbs police attention, and sends a message to institutions. Philippine Star reported that thousands of INC members gathered at the People Power Monument in an unannounced rally supporting Marcoleta, that major EDSA routes were closed, and that MMDA Chairman Don Artes said there had been no advisory or coordination from the group. Artes appealed to protesters to respect workers, especially daily wage earners whose pay could be deducted if they arrived late. 

Here lies one of the oldest tricks of political power: make the public pay for the drama of the powerful, then call the payment democracy. A daily wage worker delayed on EDSA did not draft the plunder complaint. A nurse on the way to duty did not sit in the Ombudsman’s office. A student trapped in traffic did not decide whether campaign donations can become the basis of a plunder case. Yet the ordinary public was made to absorb the first cost of a senator’s defense. A movement that claims to speak for the people must be judged by how it treats those people who are not part of its mobilization.

“Selective Justice Is Injustice” — A True Sentence Used Crookedly

The phrase “selective justice is injustice” deserves careful treatment because it is true. Selective justice is injustice. If prosecutors move against enemies but spare allies, law becomes factional. If the state uses criminal cases only when a politician becomes inconvenient, law becomes a weapon. No serious observer should pretend Philippine institutions are immune from this danger. The country has long known the pattern of cases filed, delayed, revived, or buried depending on political weather. Therefore, a public demand against selective justice is legitimate in principle.

But a true sentence can be used falsely. If “selective justice is injustice” means that all implicated officials must be investigated and prosecuted, then it is a democratic demand. If it means one’s own adherent should not be touched until every other guilty person is charged first, then it becomes a doctrine of delay and exemption. If it widens accountability, it is justice. If it blocks accountability, it is protection. In that distinction lies the moral problem of the INC rally.

The corrupt order always survives through comparison. Every accused man points to a bigger thief. Every faction says the other faction stole more. Every politician says the case against him is political. Every patron says he is being targeted because he exposed someone else. If this logic is allowed to stop prosecution, no one powerful will ever answer. The proper response to selective justice is not selective immunity. It is wider justice: charge this man if evidence supports it, charge others too, and expose any prosecutorial favoritism. Do not stop one case merely because ten other cases remain.

This is precisely where the INC rally becomes vulnerable. Its public language sounded universal, but its immediate function was particular. It did not arise because a broad national commission had named all contractors and officials. It did not arise simply to demand the return of stolen flood-control funds. It arose because Marcoleta, an INC adherent, was facing a looming serious case. Daily Tribune reported that INC members staged a surprise rally over Marcoleta’s looming arrest and what church leaders described as selective justice around the flood-control scandal investigation. The same report said the Ombudsman had announced that plunder charges were set to be filed against Marcoleta over alleged failure to declare ₱75 million in unused campaign contributions. 

The INC statement tried to solve the contradiction by portraying Marcoleta as the one exposing corruption. In that framing, defending him becomes equivalent to defending accountability. If he is jailed, the exposé is silenced. If the case proceeds, the investigation is buried. If the Ombudsman acts, the state is not enforcing law but bending it. This is a clever argument, but it is also dangerous. Any politician can say the same. Every accused official can claim the case against him was designed to stop his exposé. Sometimes that claim may be true, but truth must be proven, not dramatized by crowd power.

The proper demand should have been simple: let the Ombudsman file if there is evidence, let the Sandiganbayan hear the case, let Marcoleta answer, let the defense challenge the theory, let the court decide, and let all other corrupt actors be charged too. If the case is weak, let it fail. If it is abusive, expose it. If it is strong, no crowd should stop it. If the Ombudsman is selective, widen accountability rather than blocking accountability.

The Bayan Critique and the Problem of Sectarian Hostage-Taking

Bayan’s critique of the INC surprise protest strikes directly at this contradiction between universal accountability and sectarian protection. In the statement supplied for this essay and publicly circulated, Bayan argued that INC’s demand to hold all corrupt officials accountable is legitimate, but that the organization refuses to apply the same standard to Marcoleta, who faces graft and plunder allegations over an election-related offense. Bayan said INC’s condemnation of selective justice “smacks of hypocrisy” because, in its view, the immediate motive of the protest is to preempt Marcoleta’s looming arrest. Bayan also accused INC of distorting the clamor for justice by invoking it to negotiate concessions from the Marcos Jr. administration while calling for transparency despite an agenda allegedly shrouded in secrecy and transactional politics. 

In this reading, Bayan’s statement matters because it names the masked function of the rally. It does not deny that accountability is needed. It does not deny that corruption must be punished. Rather, it says the INC protest risks hijacking the anti-corruption demand by narrowing it around one adherent. Bayan’s position is not that Marcoleta must be denied due process. Its sharper point is that due process should not be transformed into sectarian immunity. If INC demands accountability for all corrupt officials, then the demand must pass through Marcoleta’s door as well. If the church demands transparency from the state, then its own political bargaining cannot remain hidden behind bloc discipline. If it condemns selective justice, then it must not practice selective outrage.

Bayan also linked the INC leadership to a longer history of siding with powerful dynasties, including the Marcoses and the Marcos-Duterte UniTeam. This is not a marginal point. In 2022, the Philippine News Agency reported that INC officially endorsed Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte, describing INC as an influential organization with about 2.5 million members worldwide. That endorsement does not permanently forbid INC from criticizing corruption. No political organization should be imprisoned forever by its past. But if a bloc helped legitimate the ruling settlement that later produced crisis, then it cannot speak as if it stood above that settlement from the beginning. Political correction is possible; political amnesia is not.

This history makes the church’s later posture vulnerable to the charge of pretension. It supported the Marcos-Duterte electoral architecture, then later participated in anti-corruption mobilizations as that architecture fractured into hostile blocs. If it now demands accountability most loudly when useful to the defense of one adherent, its moral voice appears less prophetic than transactional. A church cannot bless the chariot and then denounce only the wheel that runs over its own foot. It cannot help legitimate a coalition, watch that coalition produce scandal, and then declare itself the pure tribune of justice without accounting for its own role in the political order.

Bayan’s final call is therefore the more republican one: the struggle for genuine accountability and justice should not be held hostage to parochial or sectarian interests. This is not only an anti-INC line; it is a democratic principle. A republic cannot allow any organized bloc, whether religious, dynastic, military, corporate, or partisan, to turn justice into bargaining power. The people must not be forced to choose between Marcos corruption and Duterte corruption, between one dynasty and another, between one religious patron and another political machine. The public demand must be wider: hold both blocs accountable, charge all plunderers, open the books, return the money, and let no adherent be sacred before the law.

An example of a Continuing Past: Bureaucrat Capitalism,

the recent Flood-Control Corruption and the Unsalvagable State Machinery

The INC rally cannot be understood apart from the larger flood-control corruption scandal, because that scandal gave the rally its moral vocabulary. The country had already been convulsed by accusations that public funds for flood-control projects were diverted, wasted, stolen, or buried under layers of contractor privilege. Reuters reported that an alliance of business and civic organizations demanded an independent investigation into what it described as “excessive corruption” in government infrastructure projects. The call followed President Marcos Jr.’s disclosure of audit findings showing that, out of ₱545 billion in flood-control spending since 2022, thousands of projects were allegedly substandard, poorly documented, or nonexistent, while only 15 of more than 2,000 accredited contractors cornered 20 percent of the budget.

Reuters later reported that more than 200,000 protesters turned out for the second day of an anti-graft rally in November 2025, part of a broader wave of demonstrations since August demanding accountability for suspected corruption in flood-control projects. The same report said the scandal had implicated officials and lawmakers, damaged public confidence, and led authorities to freeze more than ₱6 billion in assets linked to those implicated. This was no ordinary procurement issue. It was a national wound, made more bitter by floods that repeatedly punish the poor while public funds vanish into ghost projects, identical-cost contracts, substandard works, and networks of favored contractors.

This is one of the attributes of the country's “continuing past.” Philippine corruption is not merely a list of separate scandals. It is an enduring arrangement among dynasties, contractors, legislators, bureaucrats, police networks, religious blocs, media patrons, campaign financiers, and fixers. It is the old order learning new words. It calls patronage “public service,” dynastic succession “continuity,” pork “development,” political revenge “accountability,” and impunity “due process.” It can even call bloc pressure “democracy” when convenient.

A truly radical demand for accountability would attack that whole machinery. It would demand campaign finance transparency, contractor disclosure, beneficial ownership records, lifestyle checks, procurement audits, and accountability across factional lines. It would scrutinize not only Marcos allies or Duterte allies but the entire system through which both houses, both coalitions, and both patronage networks profited. It would also ask how religious blocs influence elections, what politicians receive from bloc support, and what religious organizations expect in return for political endorsements.

By that measure, the INC rally was not radical enough. It was radical in scale but not in principle. It was radical in discipline but not in self-critique. It was radical in pressure but not in accountability. It did not break the continuing past. It acted within it. It used the language of accountability while defending someone who had become part of the political machinery around which factional conflict was being fought.

The flood-control scandal demanded a movement larger than Marcos, larger than Duterte, larger than one senator, larger than one religious bloc. It demanded a reckoning with a state in which public works can become private wealth and where anti-corruption itself can be weaponized by rival factions. Time reported that September 21, 2025 protests invoked EDSA’s symbolism and martial law’s anniversary, while protesters demanded prison for those guilty of stealing flood-control funds. The same report quoted President Marcos Jr.’s own SONA admission that such projects invite rackets, kickbacks, and “for the boys” arrangements. 

The irony is severe. Marcos spoke of corruption, anti-Marcos protesters spoke of corruption, Duterte-aligned figures spoke of corruption, INC spoke of corruption, and civil society spoke of corruption. Everyone learned the language. The question is who allowed that language to pass through their own door.

The White Ribbon, Black Shirts, and Black Friday Contrast

The contrast with the White Ribbon March is important because it shows what an accountability call sounds like when it is broader than the protection of one adherent. Philippine Star reported that the White Ribbon March was organized by Catholic, Muslim, evangelical, and Protestant leaders, with Bishop Efraim Tendero saying the rally aimed to unite Filipinos against corruption. Tendero said the Ombudsman should investigate with “no discrimination,” and that the impeachment trial and Senate Blue Ribbon investigation should continue fairly. Bayan’s Raymond Palatino said the march reflected public clamor to hold corrupt officials and their cohorts accountable, including those involved in the flood-control scandal. 

That posture is not beyond criticism, but its moral direction is broader. It points toward institutions and wider corruption structures, rather than making one accused ally the center of public righteousness. It says the Ombudsman must act without discrimination. It says proceedings must continue fairly. It says the Senate and Congress must not bury inquiries. That is different from saying one senator must be protected because his prosecution would stop an exposé.

The black-shirt actions sharpen the contrast further. In Davao, elderly women wore black shirts carrying messages such as “Stop flooding us with corruption” and “Marcos-Duterte panagutin.” When asked why the shirt named both Marcos and Duterte, one participant answered that they were “the same,” while another explained that corruption had happened under both administrations and ordinary people suffered the consequences. This small action carried a moral clarity that a massive rally can lack. It did not make one politician sacred. It did not ask for exemption. It named the system.

Black Friday protests likewise carried an anti-systemic register. GMA News reported that progressive groups and students held protest actions dubbed the “Black Friday Protest” as they continued calling for action against corruption in government. These actions may be militant and imperfect, but their moral object is not the protection of one adherent. Their demand is that the corrupt answer as a class, across factions, rather than that one favored figure be treated as indispensable to truth.

The September 2025 mass protests also demonstrate the breadth of public anger that preceded INC’s later posturing. Time reported that Filipinos massed on EDSA and elsewhere against alleged flood-control corruption, with September 21 carrying symbolic weight because it marked the anniversary of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s martial law declaration. This matters because the flood-control scandal did not belong to one faction’s propaganda. It touched the memory of dictatorship, the anger over dynasties, the resentment toward contractor wealth, and the lived experience of floods in poor communities.

This is why the White Ribbon, black-shirt, and Black Friday protests provide a better measure of public conscience. Their strongest slogans pointed outward and structurally: investigate without discrimination, Marcos-Duterte panagutin, hold all corrupt accountable, return stolen money, jail the guilty. These slogans did not revolve around saving one man. They did not require treating a defendant as a sacred vessel. They did not turn prosecution into persecution before trial.

The INC rally used similar words but bent them toward a narrower object. It said transparency, accountability, justice, and peace, but the immediate occasion was Marcoleta’s legal vulnerability. It said selective justice is injustice, but its most urgent political energy was the defense of its own. That is the difference between public conscience and bloc protection.

The November Rally and the Shift from Universal to Particular

The June 2026 rally also must be read against INC’s earlier anti-corruption mobilizations. In November 2025, INC presented itself as part of the demand for transparency and better democracy amid the flood-control scandal. Publicly, the rhetoric was broad: accountability, transparency, justice, peace. Reports and public descriptions framed the event as an anti-corruption mobilization, and Marcoleta himself appeared as a figure connected to that anti-corruption posture. 

The shift in June 2026 is therefore revealing. When the language of accountability was pointed outward, INC could present itself as a moral actor demanding that corrupt officials answer. But when Marcoleta himself faced a case, the same vocabulary was redeployed defensively. The universal became particular. The call for justice became a shield. The movement against corruption became a protest against the prosecution of an adherent.

This does not mean ordinary INC members were insincere in either event. Many may genuinely hate corruption. Many may believe Marcoleta is being targeted. Many may sincerely want stolen public funds returned. But sincerity does not settle political function. A crowd can be sincere and still be used. A slogan can be true and still be deployed selectively. A protest can be peaceful and still exert coercive pressure. The question is not merely whether participants believed the words. The question is what the words did in that moment.

In this case, the words protected power. They did not simply expose corruption; they recoded a legal proceeding as persecution. They did not merely defend due process; they suggested that the process itself was part of a cover-up. They did not merely say the accused deserves fairness; they made him appear necessary to the nation’s fight against theft.

This is the anatomy of pretension. Pretension is not always pure lying. Often it is the use of true words in a crooked direction. There is corruption. True. There is selective justice. Often true. The Ombudsman must be scrutinized. True. Marcoleta deserves due process. True. The people deserve stolen funds returned. True. But from these truths, the rally moved toward a more doubtful implication: that proceeding against Marcoleta was already a distortion of justice and perhaps even persecution. That leap is where the political mask appears.

Of Persecution, Endurance, and the Birth of False Martyrdom

The language of persecution and endurance is especially dangerous because it belongs to sacred memory. Every religious community has stories of suffering. Christianity has martyrs. Islam has exile, struggle, and sacrifice. Judaism has exile and survival. Secular movements have prisoners, martyrs, and fallen comrades. Such memories can create courage and moral seriousness. But they can also intoxicate a community. Once a group believes it is persecuted, criticism becomes attack, investigation becomes oppression, prosecution becomes conspiracy, and legal procedure becomes a weapon. The member is no longer simply a citizen. He becomes part of a wounded body under trial.

This is the passage from civic accountability to sacred protection. The ordinary democratic demand would be: charge all corrupt officials, including Marcoleta if evidence warrants, and acquit him if the evidence fails. The rally’s moral pressure instead moved toward the claim that Marcoleta must be protected because he is the investigator, the exposer, the man whose prosecution would kill the truth. This is not yet a formal doctrine of martyrdom, but it prepares the emotional ground for martyrdom. If he is charged, he is persecuted. If he is detained, he is silenced. If the court proceeds, the system is bent. If critics object to the rally, they misunderstand the suffering of the righteous.

Philippine Star reported that Zabala confirmed the rallies supported Marcoleta and said, in Filipino, that jailing him would prevent him from continuing to expose alleged plunder. Daily Tribune reported that Marcoleta said his arrest would derail the flood-control investigation and bury it in oblivion. These statements show the transformation: Marcoleta is no longer only a defendant; he is framed as the bearer of the exposé. His possible detention becomes not merely a legal event but a national danger. That is how false martyrdom is prepared.

A true martyr suffers for truth without using truth as a shield against scrutiny. A false martyr is manufactured when a powerful network transforms legal accountability into persecution. The distinction is essential. A person may be unfairly prosecuted; history is full of such cases. But unfairness must be shown by evidence, not assumed because the accused belongs to a disciplined religious bloc. If the mere fact of prosecution becomes proof of persecution, then accountability becomes impossible.

This is why the INC rally’s emotional architecture matters. Its words of accountability belonged to civic discourse, but its deeper emotional force came from persecution and endurance. It was not simply saying, “Let the case be fair.” It was saying, “Our man is being attacked because he exposes corruption.” It was not merely asking for transparency. It was framing the law’s movement toward a favored adherent as an attack on truth.

Why the Movement Appears Qutbian in Character?

Sayyid Qutb is useful here not as an example, but also as a warning. He was one of the leading Islamist ideological thinkers of the twentieth century, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes his mature Islamist position as one in which all aspects of society should be conducted according to Shari‘a, the law of God as derived from the Qur’an and the Prophet’s practice. In his book "Milestones", Qutb’s radical structure is the division between a corrupt jahili order and a righteous movement that refuses to accept that order’s legitimacy. One version of the text describes the movement as using preaching and persuasion to reform ideas, and “physical power and Jihad” to abolish the authorities of the jahili system. 

The INC rally, however, was not Qutbism. It was not Islamic to begin with nor did not call for armed struggle. It did not call the Philippine republic jahili. It did not demand the abolition of the Constitution. To say that would be false. But it looked unconsciously Qutbian in character because it reproduced, in softened Philippine form, the structure of sacred struggle: a corrupted order, a righteous community, a threatened representative, a language of endurance, and suspicion toward institutions when they move against the movement’s figure.

The Qutbian echo is structural, not doctrinal. In Qutb’s world, the jahili order is morally illegitimate because it rejects divine sovereignty. In the INC protest’s political mood, the legal order becomes morally suspect because it touches the one presented as exposing corruption. In Qutb, the vanguard confronts a system that blocks divine truth. In the INC rally’s emotional logic, the bloc confronts a state that supposedly bends law to silence an exposer. The theology is different. The danger lies in the same habit of mind: the movement’s moral certainty begins to outrank public process.

This is why “Qutbian” must be used carefully but not abandoned. It does not mean Islamic-like. It does not mean violent. It does not mean the INC has adopted Islamic doctrine. It means a political character marked by sacred grievance, collective discipline, moral absolutism, persecution language, and distrust of ordinary institutions when those institutions threaten the movement’s chosen figure. A movement does not need to quote Qutb to resemble his structure. It only needs to transform politics into sacred struggle, law into enemy action, and group loyalty into moral truth.

The public language of the rally was democratic, but the deeper mood was siege. It spoke of accountability, but it moved as if the accused was already morally vindicated. It spoke of justice, but it pre-judged legal action as distortion. It spoke of transparency, but it left its own pressure machinery opaque. It spoke of peace, but peace was accompanied by a mass pressure action that forced the public to adjust around it.

Why the Spokesmen Tries to Sound Khomeinian in Tone

The comparison to Imam Ruhollah Khomeini operates differently. In "Islamic Government", Khomeini wrote that Islamic government is a “government of law,” but that in such a government “sovereignty belongs to God alone and law is His decree and command.” He argued that the divine command has absolute authority over individuals and government. The point is not that INC teaches Khomeini’s doctrine of guardianship of the jurist. It does not. The point is that religious-political movements can speak in the language of law while relocating legitimacy toward sacred certainty.

When an INC spokesman says the movement is not against law enforcement but against the bending of law, the sentence can be civic and reasonable. But when that sentence is spoken by a disciplined religious bloc defending one of its own, it begins to sound unconsciously Khomeinian in tone: law is respected, but the movement reserves for itself the higher moral authority to declare when law has become injustice. The issue is not the formal doctrine but the posture. Public law becomes acceptable only when it aligns with the movement’s moral reading.

This is not formal theocracy. It is not theocracy by constitution. It is not clerics occupying state office. It is something softer and therefore easier to excuse: theocracy by pressure, or sacred politics by mobilization. It occurs when a religious organization does not need to rule the state directly because it can pressure the state from outside, discipline its members, signal to politicians, and transform legal accountability into persecution whenever the law reaches one of its own. Such pressure does not abolish the courtroom, but it tries to surround it with moral force.

A Revolutionary paper in Tehran during the time of the Revolution would understand the power of crowds. It would know that people can break fear. It would know that corrupt orders often present themselves as legal and modern while stealing from the people. But an honest revolutionary paper would also know that sacred movements can become new machines of obedience. A movement that denounces tyranny can build a new authority around its own certainty. A party that speaks of justice can become the gatekeeper of truth. A religious leadership that speaks of law can sanctify political pressure.

This is the ironic lesson of revolution: the language of justice is never enough. It must be tested against power. The question is not whether a movement says “law.” The question is whether it submits its own people to law. The question is not whether it says “accountability.” The question is whether accountability reaches its own adherents. The question is not whether it says “peace.” The question is whether its method respects those outside its ranks.

Of "Bloc Democracy" and the Problem of Organized Obedience

Bloc democracy is a contradiction if it reduces citizens to disciplined instruments. Democracy requires citizens who deliberate, dissent, judge, and change their minds. Bloc politics prefers bodies that move together, vote together, and defend together. Democracy requires open persuasion. Bloc politics often operates through internal authority. Democracy requires accountability for all. Bloc politics protects the bargaining power of the group.

This does not mean every INC member lacks agency. That would be unfair. Members are citizens with conscience, and many may sincerely believe the protest was justified. But the structure matters. When a religious institution mobilizes as an institution, the act is not merely individual citizenship. It becomes collective discipline. The public has the right to ask who decided the action, who coordinated transportation, who set the message, who chose the location, who bore the cost, who negotiated with officials, who benefited politically, and what the boundaries are between worship, political lobbying, and coercive mobilization.

Transparency must begin at home. If a group demands that the state show its books, it must also be willing to explain how it wields its power. If it demands accountability from officials, it must accept accountability for its public actions. If it demands democracy, it must show that its members act as citizens rather than merely as a bloc under command. Otherwise democracy becomes a mask for organized obedience.

The Philippine sociopolitical system has long understood the usefulness of religious blocs. Politicians court them not only for votes but for legitimacy. A church endorsement can make a candidate appear moral. A religious crowd can make a political cause appear righteous. A pulpit can give a faction the aura of conscience. People even saw the idea of bloc politics as a form of promoting discipline the way that group presents itself as orderly. That is why religious power in politics must be scrutinized as carefully as that of military power, business power, dynastic power, or media power.

The issue, therefore, is not religion in politics. Religion can enrich public life. It can feed the poor, shelter dissenters, oppose dictatorship, defend communities, and discipline greed. The issue is impunitarian religion: religious language used to shield power from accountability if not a form of misunderstood power wrapped in the verse of faith. Religion that demands justice for all is public conscience. Religion that shields its own is patronage. Religion that humbles rulers is prophetic. Religion that sanctifies bloc power is dangerous.

Democracy Is More Than Assembly

Democracy is not only the right to assemble. It is also equal process. It is not only the right to speak. It is also the discipline to let institutions hear evidence. It is not only filling EDSA. It is also respecting those who did not join one’s cause. A rally can be democratic in form and coercive in effect. It can invoke constitutional rights while pressuring constitutional institutions. It can speak of justice while making daily life unjust for those trapped outside its cause.

This does not mean all disruptive protest is wrong. Anti-dictatorship movements disrupt. Labor strikes disrupt. Anti-corruption mobilizations disrupt. Student walkouts disrupt. But disruption must be morally proportionate and politically honest. A protest against dictatorship may need to seize the street because ordinary institutions have collapsed. A protest against stolen public funds may disrupt routine because the public has been robbed. A labor strike may disrupt business because workers have no other leverage. But when a protest is triggered by the possible prosecution of a powerful political ally who still has legal remedies, the moral justification becomes less obvious.

The INC rally’s disruption was therefore not morally neutral. It was not simply inconvenience in the service of broad public accountability. It was inconvenience in the service of a pressure campaign around Marcoleta. Philippine Star reported that MMDA officials closed major routes and noted no prior coordination, while Artes appealed to protesters to respect the rights of workers trying to reach their jobs. That appeal should not be treated as mere administrative complaint. It is a democratic claim. Nonparticipants have rights too.

A republic must protect peaceful assembly, but it must not confuse crowd size with moral legitimacy. People Power is not merely bodies on EDSA. It is bodies on EDSA animated by a public cause larger than factional protection. When bodies are mobilized to shield a political adherent from legal exposure, the moral status of the crowd becomes ambiguous. The crowd may be sincere, but sincerity does not answer the question of function.

The Marcos-Duterte System and the Church’s Place Within It

The most devastating critique of INC’s posture is that it speaks against a system it helped legitimate. INC’s 2022 endorsement of Marcos and Duterte was a public act of political force, not a private theological opinion. PNA reported that INC officially endorsed Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte during the 2022 campaign. Inquirer likewise reported the endorsement of the Marcos-Duterte tandem. 

This matters because the current crisis cannot be separated from the Marcos-Duterte settlement. The flood-control scandal, confidential funds controversies, impeachment fights, Senate realignments, Ombudsman cases, and mass protests are not disconnected episodes. They are symptoms of a political system in which factions share power until the sharing collapses, then accuse one another of theft. Those who helped legitimate the coalition must reckon with what the coalition produced.

This does not mean INC members cannot change their minds. They can. It does not mean the church can never criticize those it once supported. It can. Political repentance is possible. Institutional correction is possible. But correction requires honesty. A group that helped power must admit its role in power. A bloc that endorsed the winners must reckon with what those winners did.

Without that reckoning, the demand for accountability sounds performative. It says: hold them accountable, but forget how we helped them rise. It says: condemn corruption, but do not examine our political endorsements. It says: expose the system, but not the religious bloc’s role inside the system.

That is why the anti-corruption language becomes pretentious. It pretends to stand above faction when it has participated in faction. It pretends to speak for the nation when it is defending an adherent. It pretends to demand a radical break while protecting one of the instruments through which bloc politics survives.

The Radicalism That Was Needed, and the Radicalism That Appeared

The Philippines needs radical accountability. It needs accountability radical enough to pass through every political house, every contractor network, every dynasty, every budget office, every Senate committee, every local government, every donor network, every campaign ledger, and every religious endorsement. It needs accountability that asks who stole, who looked away, who benefited, who funded whom, who inserted what, who approved which project, who covered up, who coordinated, and who now pretends innocence.

But the radicalism displayed by the INC rally was not radical accountability. It was radical mobilization. It was radical pressure. It was radical discipline. It was not radical self-critique. It did not attack the system deeply enough because to do so would require asking uncomfortable questions about INC’s own political role. It would require asking why the church supported dynastic candidates. It would require asking why its anti-corruption line became most emotionally intense when one of its adherents faced legal peril. It would require asking why its rhetoric was louder against selective justice in Marcoleta’s case than against the wider corruption issues hounding multiple blocs.

A radical accountability movement would not make Marcoleta indispensable. It would not say or imply that imprisoning him would stop the truth. It would not convert one senator into the hinge of national justice. True radicalism does not protect the hero from scrutiny. It destroys the need for heroes by building institutions strong enough to continue without them.

If the investigation dies because one senator is detained, then the investigation was already too weak. If truth depends on one politician, then truth has already been captured by faction. If accountability depends on a church-backed adherent, then accountability has already been subordinated to bloc power.

The radical demand should be this: charge every guilty official, including those close to Marcos; charge every guilty official, including those close to Duterte; charge every guilty official, including those endorsed or defended by religious blocs; freeze stolen assets; blacklist corrupt contractors; expose campaign finance; prosecute plunder; return the money; and protect whistleblowers without making them immune from scrutiny.

The Danger of Sacred Impunity

Sacred impunity is more dangerous than ordinary impunity. Ordinary impunity says: I am powerful, so I cannot be touched. Sacred impunity says: I am righteous, so touching me is persecution. Ordinary impunity bribes. Sacred impunity mobilizes. Ordinary impunity hides. Sacred impunity preaches. Ordinary impunity fears exposure. Sacred impunity converts exposure into martyrdom.

The INC rally risked sacralizing impunity. It did not explicitly say Marcoleta was above the law. But it framed legal action against him as part of a larger distortion of justice. It did not openly demand that the court stop. But it moved bodies into the street before the court could decide. It did not openly say he must be exempt. But it made his prosecution feel like an attack on the struggle.

This is precisely how sacred impunity functions. It rarely announces itself as exemption. It announces itself as justice. It rarely says “protect power.” It says “defend truth.” It rarely says “obey the bloc.” It says “stand with the persecuted.” It rarely says “pressure the state.” It says “exercise democratic rights.” Each statement may contain truth, but the total function may still be coercive.

The republic must therefore be vigilant. When the powerful say justice, ask: for whom? When the bloc says accountability, ask: including yours? When the spokesman says peace, ask: why the pressure? When the movement says persecution, ask: or prosecution? When the crowd says democracy, ask: where is the court?

The Court, Not the "Crowd" (for now)

One would say that the court is imperfect. That the Ombudsman can be selective. That the Judges can be pressured. And Prosecutors can be timid. Legal proceedings can be slow and expensive. And no revolutionary should romanticize the Philippine legal system. But what is the alternative? A court of crowds? A tribunal of churches? A republic of blockades? A legal order where every organized group surrounds its accused and declares prosecution persecution?

If that becomes the rule, no one powerful will ever answer. A dynasty will fill the capitol. A church will fill EDSA. A business bloc will threaten capital. A police faction will leak files. A military clique will whisper intervention. A media network will manufacture outrage. Each will say justice. Each will protect its own. That is not democracy. That is factional siege.

For now the Sandiganbayan exists for a reason. The Ombudsman exists for a reason. Rules of evidence exist for a reason. Defense pleadings exist for a reason. Appeals exist for a reason. These institutions are imperfect, but they remain the alternative to mob adjudication. If they are corrupt, reform them. If they are selective, expose the selectivity. If they are slow, demand speed. But do not replace them with the moral pressure of a religious bloc.

The proper demand is not “do not touch Marcoleta.” The proper demand is: file the case properly, disclose the basis, respect due process, proceed against everyone implicated, and let the court decide. If the case is weak, let it fail. If it is strong, let it proceed. If the Ombudsman is selective, expose him. If the prosecution is abusive, defeat it in court- for no crowd should be large enough to make a senator untouchable.

What Their Members Themselves Must Ask?

The hardest audience for this critique is not INC leadership but also its ordinary members. They are citizens. They are workers, students, parents, professionals, vendors, drivers, teachers, and believers. Many may have joined the rally sincerely. Many may believe they were defending fairness. Many may hate corruption. Many may see Marcoleta as a man who exposed thieves. Therefore, the criticism must not treat them as mindless. It must speak to them as citizens.

The question they must ask is not whether Marcoleta deserves due process. He does. The question is whether due process means protection from prosecution. The question is not whether the Ombudsman may be selective. It may be. The question is whether selectivity should stop a case against an adherent or widen cases against everyone. The question is not whether the church may speak. It may. The question is whether the church should make legal accountability feel like persecution whenever it reaches one of its own.

Bayan’s appeal to INC members, as supplied in the text to be inserted, is therefore crucial: reject both sides and condemn public officials who steal with impunity, even those who share one’s religious beliefs. That line is not merely partisan. It is republican. A citizen must be able to say: even if he is ours, let him answer. Even if we like him, let evidence decide. Even if he exposed others, let him be scrutinized too. Even if the case is political, let the defense prove it under law.

That is the moral test of citizenship against bloc obedience. A church member can remain faithful while refusing to sanctify a politician. A believer can defend due process without turning an accused ally into a martyr. A citizen can oppose selective justice without practicing selective outrage.

Ending the Pretension

The strongest version of the INC argument would sound like this: the Ombudsman may be selective; the case may be politically timed; Marcoleta has the right to defend himself; campaign-donation law must be properly interpreted; all corrupt actors in flood-control scandals must be charged; and no politician, including Marcoleta, should be above evidence and trial. That argument is legitimate. It belongs in public debate.

The weaker and more dangerous version sounds like this: Marcoleta is ours; he is exposing corruption; therefore charging him is persecution; therefore we will mobilize until authorities feel our force. That argument is not accountability. It is protection.

The White Ribbon March, the black-shirt actions, and the Black Friday protests offer a sharper standard. They may differ in ideology and method, but at their strongest they named the system: investigate without discrimination, "Marcos-Duterte panagutin", stop flooding us with corruption, hold all corrupt accountable. Those words aimed at that one attribute of a continuing, corrupted past. They did not revolve around one adherent’s defense.

The INC rally borrowed similar language but bent it toward a narrower purpose. That is why it sounded pretentious. It used the vocabulary of those who marched against the system while defending someone who operated inside the system. It sounded Qutb-like in its persecution narrative and Khomeinian in its moral-legal certainty, yet it did not admit the sacred pressure beneath its civic language.

The republic must draw the line clearly. Faith may speak. Citizens may gather. Churches may criticize government. Religious members may defend their own. But no religious organization should be allowed to turn public roads into leverage, legal cases into persecution narratives, and defendants into sacred symbols.

The real demand should be simple: let the Ombudsman file, let the Sandiganbayan hear, let the defense answer, let evidence decide- and if he is guilty, convict him. If others are guilty, charge them too. If the Ombudsman is selective, expose him. If the prosecution is abusive, defeat it in court.

Anything less is not accountability. It is their fanaticism in the street trying to overrule the courtroom if not ruining the demand of those who truly express. It is sacred grievance pretending to be democracy. It is the old politics wearing the mask of justice.

***

References

Arguillas, C. O. (2025, September 20). From the streets to the malls, women in their 70s and 80s call for an end to corruption. MindaNews. (MindaNews)

Bayan. (2026, July 1). On the “surprise protest” of Iglesia ni Cristo. Statement circulated by Bayan and reported in Philippine media. (Balita)

Cariaso, B. (2026, June 27). All set for June 28 White Ribbon March. The Philippine Star. (Philstar)

De Guzman, C. (2025, September 21). Filipinos call for “radical change” in mass protests over flood money corruption. Time. (Time)

GMA News. (2025, October 24). Protests, walkouts vs. corruption continue. GMA News Online. (GMA Network)

Iglesia ni Cristo. (2026, June 30). INC releases statement on the ongoing protest rally. Official INC statement. (Inquirer.net)

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (n.d.). Sayyid Qutb. (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Khomeini, R. M. (2002). Islamic government: Governance of the jurist (H. Algar, Trans.). Original work published 1970. (ICIT Digital Library)

Laqui, I. (2026, June 30). Participants in INC’s no-permit rally urged to cooperate with authorities. Philstar.com. (Philstar)

Patinio, F. (2022, May 3). 2-M strong INC officially endorses Marcos-Duterte. Philippine News Agency. (pna.gov.ph)

Qutb, S. (1964/2006). Milestones. English translation. (Internet Archive)

Ramirez, R. (2026, June 30). Major EDSA routes blocked due to Iglesia ni Cristo rally. Philstar.com. (Philstar)

Reuters. (2025, September 4). Philippine groups demand independent investigation of “excessive corruption” in government projects. (Reuters)

Reuters. (2025, November 17). What’s fuelling anti-graft protests in the Philippines? (Reuters)

Villamente, J., Orcullo, J., Murcia, A., Santos, P. C., & Echeminada, P. (2026, July 1). INC floods EDSA; hits selective justice. Daily Tribune. (Daily Tribune) 

Of PDP–Laban and the Exhaustion of its own quest for Filipino Democratic Socialism: From Pimentel’s Ideological Promise to Duterte-Era Practicalism

Of PDP–Laban and the Exhaustion of its own quest for Filipino Democratic Socialism:

From Pimentel’s Ideological Promise to Duterte-Era Practicalism

By: Kat Ulrike

There are political parties that die by defeat, and there are political parties that die by success. The "Pilipino Democratic Party- Lakas ng Bayan" or PDP–Laban increasingly belongs to the second category. Its tragedy is not that it failed to enter power, nor that it lacked historical opportunity. Its tragedy is that, upon entering the machinery of state power, it became nearly indistinguishable from the very tradition of patronage politics it once claimed to resist. What began as a party that advertised itself as ideological, nationalist, democratic, and socialist has steadily deteriorated into a shell of practical alliances, personality worship, factional convenience, and populist mobilization. In that sense, PDP–Laban did not merely betray its own program. It revealed the familiar Philippine pattern in which ideology is often useful before power, embarrassing during power, and disposable after power.

The historical irony is severe because PDP–Laban was not founded as a neutral electoral vehicle. It was not supposed to be another loose federation of local bosses, provincial clans, opportunistic legislators, and presidential aspirants. It presented itself as something rarer in Philippine politics: a party anchored in principles. Its old language was not merely reformist but structural. It spoke of the masses, the grassroots, the people, national sovereignty, economic democracy, and the moral limits of private ownership. It sought to distinguish itself from parties that changed color depending on who controlled Malacañang. Yet under succeeding standard bearers, certain personalities, including Rodrigo Duterte, and even after him, PDP–Laban became absorbed into the same political logic it had once condemned. Its democratic socialism became ceremonial. Its nationalism became selective. Its participatory democracy became loyalty politics. Its human-rights doctrine became politically inconvenient.

Aquilino “Nene” Pimentel Jr.’s 1982 articulation of the party’s direction remains the most useful standard by which to judge its decline. Pimentel did not speak like a conventional traditional politician seeking mere coalition arithmetic. He spoke as though Philippine society required transformation at the level of structure. He described reform as nothing less than: “The uprooting of the power structure that has been built into our system over no less than 350 years of Spanish domination, about 50 years of American colonization, and 36 years of tumultuous domestic rule will be a tedious protracted process.”

This was not ordinary campaign language. It was a diagnosis of historical domination. Pimentel located Philippine poverty and political weakness not merely in bad leadership, but in inherited structures: colonial dependency, oligarchic control, feudal habits, and a state captured by narrow interests. In this sense, PDP–Laban’s original claim to democratic socialism was not ornamental. It was a claim that political democracy must be accompanied by social and economic restructuring. The old party seemed to understand that elections alone would not liberate the Filipino if economic power remained concentrated, if the state remained dependent, and if the people remained spectators in their own republic.

This is why Pimentel’s nationalist statements matter. He declared that the party would: “It never allow itself to be dictated to by foreigners.”

He further insisted that it would: “Limit the availability of domestic credit resources only to Filipinos.”

And that it would: “Allow only Filipinos to utilize and develop the country’s natural resources.”

These claims sound radical today because Philippine politics has grown accustomed to treating nationalism as either nostalgia or slogan. Yet in the old PDP–Laban formulation, nationalism was not simply flag-waving. It was political economy. It asked who controls credit, who extracts resources, who owns productive capacity, who benefits from development, and who commands the state. The party’s nationalism was therefore inseparable from its socialism. A nation could not be politically free while economically subordinated. A people could not be sovereign while their resources, industries, and credit systems were organized primarily for elite or foreign benefit.

The same logic appears in the party’s treatment of ownership. Pimentel’s speech declared that the party: “Considers ownership only as a stewardship for the wellbeing of the owner, of society, and of the state.”

And in it, it would also: “Encourage efficient small and medium enterprises, preferably as cooperatives, as a counterfoil to the power of big business.”

This is among the most important forgotten elements of PDP–Laban’s ideological identity. The party did not merely promise ayuda, relief goods, or occasional subsidies. It spoke of changing the relationship between property and society. Ownership was not presented as an unlimited private right but as a social trust. Business was not condemned as inherently immoral, but neither was profit elevated above the public good. Small enterprises and cooperatives were imagined as counterweights to big capital. This was a democratic-socialist instinct: not necessarily statist, not necessarily communist, but deeply suspicious of concentrated economic power.

That is precisely why the party’s later transformation into a populist presidential machine is so striking. The Duterte-era PDP–Laban did not build a cooperative economy. It did not democratize ownership. It did not systematically transfer economic power from oligarchic concentration to popular institutions. It did not make the Filipino masses owners of development. It mobilized them as voters, audiences, defenders, and recipients of state assistance. That is a fundamentally different relationship. Democratic socialism organizes the people as participants in power. Populism organizes the people as a moral audience behind a leader.

To be fair, the Binay experience may have stood closer to the older spirit of PDP–Laban than the later Duterte formation ever did. Jejomar Binay, and the Binay political network more broadly, attempted to present local governance in social-democratic terms: welfare-oriented, urban-poor conscious, service-heavy, and attentive to the practical needs of ordinary constituents. Makati’s model of benefits, subsidies, health services, and local redistribution was, at least in form, nearer to the party’s promise of government as social stewardship. Yet this experience was also riddled with the familiar Philippine contradiction: welfare politics operating within a system accused of corruption, dynasty, and patronage. It was social democracy filtered through machine politics. Still, compared with Duterteism’s punitive populism, the Binay model at least understood that mass politics could not survive on rage alone; it had to deliver services, material relief, and some recognizable form of social protection.

This leads to the unavoidable question of populism itself. Reality admits that populism will always be present in democratic politics, especially in a society where inequality is severe, institutions are distrusted, and the poor are repeatedly spoken for but rarely listened to. The issue is not whether populist sentiment should exist. It already exists because social pain exists. The real question is whether populist energy will remain a useful idiotic tool for elites, a mechanism for translating public noise into votes, or whether it can be organized into a national program of action. People have had enough of jargon, white papers, seminar-room reformism, and think-tank language that mistakes abstraction for listening. A democratic-socialist party should not despise populist anger. It should discipline it, educate it, and convert it into policy, organization, and collective power rooted in the grassroots.

The phrase “woke wing of the Liberal Party” is rhetorically sharp, but it must be used carefully. In its original sense, “woke” refers to political consciousness, especially alertness to injustice, domination, and social inequality. In that older meaning, PDP–Laban could indeed be read as the more awakened, nationalist, grassroots-conscious wing of liberal reform politics, especially when Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino formed LABAN and its influence becomes left-liberal as opposed to the classical liberal conservatism of his contemporaries. It wanted democracy to mean more than elections. It wanted nationalism to mean more than ceremony. It wanted social justice to mean more than charity.

Yet the term also carries a conservative misimpression, especially in contemporary debate, where “woke” is often used dismissively to mean performative moralism, elite virtue-signaling, or fashionable radical language detached from material reality. In that second sense, the comparison becomes more dangerous but also more revealing. PDP–Laban’s democratic socialism sometimes risked becoming exactly that: a morally elevated language that sounded radical, but which could be absorbed into ordinary elite politics once power became available. It was conscious enough to criticize the system, but not disciplined enough to escape it.

Thus, if one calls PDP–Laban a “left-wing KBL” or the “woke wing of the Liberal Party,” the point should not be mere insult. The point is structural. The party occupied a reformist center-left space within Philippine elite democracy. It spoke in the language of the masses, nationalism, social justice, and participatory democracy, but it remained trapped inside the same electoral and patronage structures that governed mainstream parties. Its radicalism was real as aspiration, but limited as organization.

If one is to be brutally honest, PDP–Laban’s historical position was perhaps less revolutionary than its rhetoric suggested. Despite its democratic-socialist declarations, the party often functioned as a reformist rather than transformative force. Its objective was not the abolition of capitalism, nor the socialization of the means of production, nor the construction of a workers’ state. Rather, it sought to humanize Philippine capitalism through appeals to nationalism, social welfare, political participation, decentralization, and limitations on oligarchic excess.

In this respect, PDP–Laban occupied a position comparable to what might be described as a left-wing version of the old KBL tradition or a more nationalist and socially conscious variant of liberal reformism. It accepted electoral democracy, private property, market activity, and existing constitutional institutions while demanding that these serve broader social purposes. Its "socialism" was therefore closer to European social democracy, Christian democracy’s social justice traditions, or at some extent, Third World developmental nationalism than to revolutionary socialism.

This distinction is important because it reveals the source of the party’s eventual ideological exhaustion. A movement founded upon reform rather than transformation is especially vulnerable to co-optation by the existing system. Since it seeks to improve institutions rather than replace them, it can gradually become absorbed into the very structures it originally sought to reform. The language of social justice remains, but the urgency diminishes. The rhetoric survives, but the program weakens. Eventually, what remains is a party that continues to invoke the masses while being increasingly managed by political professionals, dynasties, and electoral strategists.

Indeed, one may argue that PDP–Laban’s greatest historical weakness was that it attempted to reconcile two contradictory ambitions. On one hand, it wished to challenge entrenched oligarchic power. On the other hand, it sought to do so through the same electoral and patronage structures that oligarchic power had long mastered. The result was predictable. Rather than transforming Philippine politics, Philippine politics gradually transformed the party.

The contradiction becomes sharper when one revisits PDP–Laban’s fundamental principles. The party declared: “All human beings are entitled to dignity, worth, freedom, and brotherhood. Human rights are sacred and cannot be transgressed even by the state. The state should create conditions in which the person may develop one’s whole being, responsible to one’s self and to society.”

This principle is impossible to reconcile comfortably with the moral atmosphere of the Duterte drug war. Duterte and his supporters framed the campaign as a necessary war against criminality, disorder, and narco-politics. Yet the international controversy surrounding the drug war has become one of the defining legacies of his presidency. Duterte now faces proceedings before the International Criminal Court concerning allegations connected to the killings attributed to his anti-drug campaign. Duterte’s defenders insist that the campaign was a legitimate law-enforcement response to criminality, while critics argue that it normalized state violence against the poor. Whatever one’s position on jurisdiction or legal guilt, the ideological contradiction remains grave. A party that once proclaimed that human rights “cannot be transgressed even by the state” became internationally associated with a government whose most controversial policy was precisely the expansion of coercive state power in the name of order.

For PDP–Laban, this is not a minor reputational issue. It strikes at the core of its founding doctrine. A party that once proclaimed human rights inviolable became identified with a political order that treated security, discipline, and fear as central instruments of governance. Even if one accepts the argument that the state had a duty to confront crime, democratic socialism cannot treat the poor as disposable material in a campaign of discipline. The socialist claim collapses when the urban poor become the primary terrain upon which state violence is normalized. A democratic-socialist party may believe in law enforcement, but it cannot sanctify fear as social policy.

PDP–Laban’s nationalist principle is also worth revisiting. It stated: “The interest of our country and our people take precedence over foreign interests. All vestiges of foreign control must be eliminated and the interest of the Filipino must be supreme. Love of country should permeate through our culture particularly in value-formation institutions like the family, media, and education.”

This statement contains both economic nationalism and cultural nationalism. Yet under Duterte, nationalism became selective and often rhetorical. His administration spoke fiercely against Western criticism, especially on human rights, while also pursuing a pragmatic and often conciliatory posture toward China. Defenders called this independent foreign policy. Critics called it accommodation or worse and apathy-driven diplomacy. The point is not that diplomacy must always be confrontational. A sovereign state may negotiate, balance, and maneuver. But when a party claims that Filipino interest must be supreme, it must also show a clear doctrine for defending national resources, maritime rights, local production, and economic autonomy. Without that, nationalism becomes another performance: loud against some foreigners, quiet before others, and useful mainly as a shield against accountability.

The party’s economic principle is even more damning: “All economic power must rest in the hands of the people. Talents and ownership are merely stewards for the wellbeing of society and the state. They may, therefore, be regulated so that the concentration of wealth and resources in the hands of the few is prevented. The goals of economic policy are the total development of human person, societal property, and equitable share for all in the national wealth. Profit in any form is subservient to these goals.”

If this principle were taken seriously, PDP–Laban would have become the most serious anti-oligarchic party in the country. It would have built a program around cooperative finance, worker participation, land reform, regional industrialization, public banking, domestic credit reform, and anti-monopoly policy. It would have made “inclusive growth” more than a technocratic phrase. It would have challenged not only individual oligarchs disliked by the president but the structural conditions that produce oligarchy itself. Instead, the party’s anti-elite language often appeared selective and personalized. Some oligarchs were attacked, others accommodated. Some business interests were demonized, others integrated into the ruling coalition. This is not socialism. It is factional anti-oligarchism, where the moral status of capital depends less on its social function than on its relationship to power.

A business-society critique must insist on this distinction. Democratic Socialism is not hostility to enterprise. It is hostility to economic domination. It does not require the destruction of markets, but it does require that markets be subordinated to social purposes. It recognizes that when credit, land, utilities, media, infrastructure, and natural resources are concentrated in the hands of a few, formal democracy becomes shallow. Citizens may vote, but economic life remains governed by private empires. The old PDP–Laban seemed to understand this. The Duterte-era PDP–Laban largely converted it into rhetoric. Welfare programs and cash transfers may relieve suffering, but they do not automatically democratize power. The Cash Subsidy scheme can be humane, but it can also become the soft currency of patronage when detached from structural reform.

The final quoted principle brings the political betrayal into full view: “All decision making power must rest in the hands of the people. A structure of political plurality should make possible participatory democracy and democratic collective leadership. Totalitarianism and dictatorship in any form must be resisted as violation of human dignity.”

This is perhaps the most painful passage to read in retrospect. PDP–Laban was supposed to embody participatory democracy and democratic collective leadership. Yet the party under Duterte became overwhelmingly associated with the authority of one man and his circle. The party’s internal conflicts did not mature into programmatic debates over socialism, federalism, nationalism, or economic democracy. They became factional struggles over recognition, leadership, nomination, and proximity to Duterte. What was once supposed to be a vehicle of democratic transformation became another battlefield of elite recognition.

This is not unique to PDP–Laban. Philippine parties are notoriously weak as ideological institutions. They are often vehicles for candidacies rather than schools of political thought. Politicians move across parties with little ideological cost because parties themselves impose little ideological discipline, worse, they happened to be rephrasing ideas for the sake of idea itself- in a way economic policies from the Aquino administration was as same as Arroyo's, what more both policies even crept further during Duterte's. But PDP–Laban deserves harsher judgment precisely because it claimed to be different. It cannot invoke democratic socialism as heritage while behaving like a conventional patronage organization. The more noble the founding language, the more severe the later hypocrisy.

Duterte’s own claim to socialism must therefore be interpreted carefully. When he said he was socialist, the statement resonated with some because he spoke in the language of the masses. He cursed elites, criticized imperial arrogance, talked with rebels, promised welfare, and projected himself as a leader closer to ordinary people than to Manila’s polite establishment. Yet socialism is not merely tone. It is not anger at elites. It is not distribution without democratization. It is not a president’s personal sympathy for the poor. Socialism, if democratic, requires institutions that transfer power downward and outward. It requires people’s organizations, accountable parties, empowered localities, cooperative ownership, labor rights, social protection, and human dignity guarded against both market abuse and state abuse.

What Duterte offered was closer to punitive populism with welfare characteristics. It combined social assistance with discipline, anti-elite rhetoric with elite alliances, nationalist language with pragmatic or practicalist accommodation, and mass appeal with centralized command. It was effective politics, but effective politics is not the same as democratic socialism. Estrada had his own populism. The Liberal Party also used populist language when convenient. Duterte’s difference was stylistic intensity, not necessarily structural transformation. He made the old order sound afraid, but he did not uproot it.

This is where PDP–Laban’s degeneration becomes a business issue, not merely a partisan one. A country’s political parties shape the investment climate, regulatory priorities, institutional trust, and the moral language of development. When parties lack ideological seriousness, economic policy becomes unstable and personality-driven. Business groups learn to adapt not to principles but to patrons. Local governments learn that alignment matters more than policy coherence. Citizens learn that politics is not a contest of programs but a contest of camps. In such an environment, even pro-poor policies risk becoming transactional, because the state distributes relief without building durable economic citizenship.

The old PDP–Laban language of stewardship could have provided a serious framework for Philippine business. It could have argued that enterprise must be productive rather than extractive, nationalist rather than comprador, socially responsible rather than merely compliant, and cooperative rather than monopolistic. It could have developed a politics in which small and medium enterprises, farmers’ cooperatives, labor groups, local producers, and regional industries became the backbone of national development. Instead, its governing identity became absorbed by the spectacle of Dutertism: the clenched fist, the strongman tone, the anti-drug crusade, the attacks on critics, the factional quarrels, the loyalty tests.

The tragedy, then, is not that PDP–Laban failed to sound socialist. It sounded socialist when useful. It sounded nationalist when useful. It sounded democratic when useful. The tragedy is that these principles were not allowed to discipline power. They became decorations attached to power after the fact. The party did not ask whether Dutertism conformed to democratic socialism. It often behaved as though democratic socialism meant whatever Dutertism required at the moment.

In the end, PDP–Laban’s founding documents now read less like a living program than an indictment. They remind us that the party once knew the right questions. Who owns the economy? Who controls credit? Who benefits from natural resources? Can human rights be violated by the state in the name of order? Can democracy survive without participation? Can nationalism exist without economic sovereignty? Can a party of the masses remain a party of the masses once it becomes the vehicle of ambitious politicians?

Measured against these questions, PDP–Laban’s contemporary answer is weak. It may still claim democratic socialism as part of its institutional memory. It may still display principles on official platforms. It may still speak of prosperity, peace, inclusive development, and participatory democracy. But a political party is not judged by the nobility of its archived speeches. It is judged by what it defends when power tempts it to forget.

PDP–Laban once promised to challenge the unchallengeable. Under Duterte, it learned instead how to manage the existing order with harsher language, stronger spectacle, and wider mass appeal. That is not democratic socialism. That is practicalism dressed in radical memory. It is populism wearing the old clothes of principle. And for a party born from resistance to dictatorship, nationalism, and the dream of social justice, that may be the deepest betrayal of all.

A Sovereign Republic or a Platform? The Philippines in the Shadow of U.S.–China Rivalry

A Sovereign Republic or a Platform? 

The Philippines in the Shadow of U.S.–China Rivalry

Or: "The Philippines, Cold War Hysteria, 

and the Poverty of Borrowed Sovereignty"

It is not surprising that, amid the sharpening tensions between the United States and China, the Philippines has again found comfort in the vocabulary of a previous age. The Cold War has ended in chronology, but not in the Filipino political imagination. The Soviet Union has vanished. Mao’s China has long since been replaced by a China of industrial parks, container ports, corporate giants, investment banks, export surpluses, surveillance systems, party-supervised billionaires, and state-directed capital. Yet in Manila’s public speech, China is still made to appear as the old red specter: a communist menace marching across the map, not merely a rival claimant in the West Philippine Sea, not merely an expansionist maritime power, not merely a party-state capitalist empire, but the revived devil of the ideological catechism. 

This is convenient. It simplifies what should be a difficult national question. It allows the Philippine elite to avoid the labor of thinking. If China is merely “communist,” then the solution appears easy: summon the “free world,” embrace the Stars and Stripes, wave the treaty, reopen the gates, call every access point a partnership, and present military dependency as patriotism. But if China is understood more accurately as a party-state capitalist power—authoritarian, expansionist, mercantile, technologically ambitious, and deeply integrated into global capitalism—then the problem becomes more complex. It is no longer a morality play between capitalism and communism. It becomes a question of sovereignty, capacity, industry, diplomacy, maritime power, and the Filipino state’s long failure to build the material foundations of independence. 

China today is not the China of the Little Red Book. It is not the guerrilla romance once feared by landlords and generals. Since 1978, China’s reform and opening-up period has produced decades of market-led growth, export industrialization, private accumulation, and global integration. The World Bank notes that since reform began, China’s GDP growth averaged over 9 percent annually and nearly 800 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty (World Bank, 2022). Scholars increasingly describe China not as classical socialism, but as “party-state capitalism,” a political economy in which market competition and private capital operate under the commanding authority of the Chinese Communist Party (Pearson, Rithmire, & Tsai, 2022). The party remains Leninist. The economy, however, speaks the language of accumulation, export, technology, property, finance, logistics, and strategic capital. 

This is precisely why the old Cold War description is inadequate. It is not that China has become harmless. On the contrary, it may be more formidable because it no longer advances under the old banners of world revolution. It advances through ships, reefs, ports, credit lines, coast guard patrols, supply chains, artificial islands, industrial subsidies, maritime gray-zone pressure, and the brute confidence of a continental power that has found wealth and discipline at the same time. The Philippines must oppose Chinese encroachment where Philippine rights are violated. It must insist on its maritime entitlements. It must defend its fishermen, its coast guard, its continental shelf, and its sovereign rights under international law. But this cannot be done intelligently if the country mistakes propaganda for strategy. 

The 2016 South China Sea arbitral award gave the Philippines a legal weapon of great importance. The tribunal concluded that there was “no legal basis” for China to claim historic rights within the nine-dash line beyond what UNCLOS allows (Permanent Court of Arbitration, 2016). This was not an American gift. It was not a Japanese favor. It was a Philippine legal victory. It should have become the foundation of a sober, sustained, independent maritime policy: coast guard modernization, naval construction, fisheries protection, regional diplomacy, national industrial planning, and the education of citizens in the law of the sea. Instead, too often, it has been converted into a stage prop for alliance theater. 

The tragedy is not that Manila invokes international law. It should. The tragedy is that Manila often invokes international law while behaving as if its enforcement must come from foreign guns. The Filipino is asked to believe that sovereignty is defended by inviting another power to secure the archipelago’s strategic geography. He is told that dependence is deterrence, that access sites are not bases, that interoperability is modernization, that foreign troops rotating through Philippine facilities are signs of maturity, and that a nation unable to build enough ships, factories, fuel reserves, steel capacity, and disciplined institutions can nevertheless be safe because a treaty exists. 

But a treaty is not a substitute for state capacity. The 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty is important, but it is not magic. Article IV does not say that the United States automatically goes to war at Manila’s command. It says that each party would “act to meet the common dangers in accordance with its constitutional processes” (United States & Republic of the Philippines, 1951). That phrase matters. It means Congress, the President, calculations of interest, domestic politics, military readiness, and the changing mood of Washington. It means that alliance commitments are always filtered through the interests of the stronger party. 

This is the sentence that many Filipino Atlanticists prefer not to read aloud. They prefer the emotional version of the treaty, not the legal one. They prefer the mythology of rescue, not the grammar of obligation. They prefer to imagine the United States as an eternal liberator, rather than as a great power that acts when its own interests are served. The old colonial schoolroom still speaks: America as freedom, America as democracy, America as benevolent protector. Renato Constantino warned long ago that education must become “a vital weapon” for political independence and cultural renewal (Constantino, 1970). Yet the old miseducation persists in foreign policy. The flag changed, but the reflex remained. 

One sees this in the renewed celebration of the so-called “free world.” The phrase has returned, polished and modernized, under the language of a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” The United States’ Indo-Pacific Strategy speaks of a region that is “free and open, connected, prosperous, secure, and resilient” (White House, 2022). On paper, the words are pleasant. Who can oppose freedom? Who can oppose openness? But in the language of great powers, “free” often means free for their ships, their capital, their military architecture, their preferred rules, and their strategic corridors. “Open” often means open to access, open to positioning, open to logistics, open to surveillance, open to forward deployment. 

For the Philippines, the phrase must therefore be interrogated. Free for whom? Open to what? Secure for whose supply chain? Resilient for whose war plan? 

The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, or EDCA, shows the transformation of language. The United States and the Philippines announced four additional EDCA sites in 2023: Naval Base Camilo Osias and Lal-lo Airport in Cagayan, Camp Melchor Dela Cruz in Isabela, and Balabac Island in Palawan (U.S. Department of Defense, 2023). Official statements describe EDCA as supporting humanitarian assistance, disaster response, training, interoperability, and modernization. These phrases are not false, but they are incomplete. Cagayan faces Taiwan. Balabac faces the maritime approaches of the South China Sea. Palawan is not merely a province; it is a strategic platform. Northern Luzon is not merely a disaster-response zone; it is geography in the shadow of a Taiwan contingency. 

The old bases have not returned in the old form. There is no need for the old form. Empire has learned better grammar. Where once there was a base with a fence and a neon city beside it, now there is access, rotation, interoperability, prepositioning, joint use, capability enhancement, and disaster response. The flag may remain Philippine. The land may remain Philippine. The constitutional language may remain intact. Yet the strategic function is unmistakable: the archipelago is being inserted more deeply into the U.S. Indo-Pacific military framework. 

Japan’s role also deserves a sober eye. The Japan–Philippines Reciprocal Access Agreement, signed in 2024, establishes procedures for cooperative activities between Japanese and Philippine forces when one country’s forces visit the other (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 2024). Japan has every reason to worry about China. It has its own East China Sea disputes, its own Taiwan anxieties, its own energy vulnerabilities, its own constitutional debates, and its own alliance dependence on Washington. But Filipino policymakers should not confuse Japan’s strategic interest with Filipino salvation. Tokyo is not returning to Southeast Asia as a charity. It is returning as a state that has read the map and understood that the first island chain is no longer an abstraction. 

Thus the Philippines now finds itself praised, courted, armed, visited, photographed, and congratulated. It is told that it is strategically important. It is told that it stands at the front line of democracy. It is told that the world admires its courage. But poor countries should beware the compliments of great powers. A frontier is rarely prosperous. A tripwire is rarely sovereign. A strategic hub is often a polite name for a place whose geography is more valuable than its people. 

The defenders of this policy will ask: what is the alternative? Should the Philippines simply surrender to China? Should it abandon the West Philippine Sea? Should it trust Beijing? These questions are meant to end the discussion by reducing all choices to two: Washington or Beijing, the eagle or the dragon, the old patron or the new bully. But this is the poverty of dependent thinking. To reject Chinese expansion is not to embrace American militarism. To criticize U.S. strategic use of the Philippines is not to excuse Chinese coercion. The Filipino nationalist position is not pro-China. It is pro-Philippines. 

The problem is that by clinging to the Cold War narrative, the idea of defending the country becomes less about defending sovereignty and more about consolidating interests. The rhetoric of anti-communism becomes useful to those who want foreign military access without calling it dependency, alignment without calling it subordination, and strategic obedience without calling it obedience. The red bogeyman becomes a convenient figure. Under its shadow, every question is silenced: Who benefits? Who decides? Who pays? Who becomes the target? Who receives the contracts? Who is photographed beside the visiting admiral? Who gets the illusion of importance while the country remains poor, exposed, and structurally weak? 

Here, too, the Cold War narrative reveals its own poverty. Filipinos speak of China as if the matter were simple: there is China, there is Taiwan, and there is the United States standing nobly in between. But the matter is not simple. It is made simple only by those who prefer slogans to history. 

For if one wishes to speak in the language of the old Cold War, then one must at least remember the old Cold War’s own confusion: there were, in fact, two Chinas claiming legitimacy. There was the People’s Republic of China in Beijing, born of the communist victory of 1949. There was also the Republic of China, which withdrew to Taiwan and continued to exist there—not as a ghost, not as a mere province with a flag, but as a government with institutions, elections, courts, armed forces, currency, passports, and a constitutional name. The Republic of China did not disappear simply because Filipino textbooks forgot it. It did not cease to exist simply because Manila transferred diplomatic recognition to Beijing. It did not vanish merely because popular speech now says “Taiwan” as if Taiwan were born outside the Chinese civil war. 

This is the irony. Filipinos who accuse others of misunderstanding China often misunderstand the China question themselves. They speak of Taiwan as if it were naturally and permanently separate from China, while also accepting a Philippine One China Policy that officially recognizes the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal government of China. They condemn Beijing’s claim over Taiwan, yet do not ask what the Republic of China itself means. They say “Taiwan” when the legal and historical residue still says “Republic of China.” They say “China” when they mean only the People’s Republic. They say “One China” without asking the most dangerous question: whose China? 

This is not an academic quibble. It goes to the heart of policy. In 1975, the Philippines recognized the Government of the People’s Republic of China as “the sole legal government of China,” and at the same time stated that it “fully understands and respects” Beijing’s position that there is but one China and that Taiwan is an integral part of Chinese territory (Government of the Republic of the Philippines & Government of the People’s Republic of China, 1975). That was not merely a diplomatic courtesy. It was a strategic repositioning. Manila accepted Beijing, removed official representations from Taiwan, and adjusted itself to the geopolitical reality that the United Nations and most of the world had already accepted. 

Yet the older China did not die. The Republic of China remained in Taipei. Its constitution still speaks in the name of the Republic of China. Its president is still President of the Republic of China. Its state still functions, whatever the limits of recognition may be. The everyday world calls it Taiwan because that is its political reality; its formal name remains Republic of China because history did not close neatly in 1949. This contradiction is precisely why the Taiwan question cannot be reduced to a childish slogan of democracy versus communism. 

Beijing says there is one China, and that Taiwan is part of it. Taipei, depending on who governs and which political tradition speaks, has moved between inherited Chinese legitimacy, Taiwanese identity, and the practical defense of its existing democratic state. Washington says it has a One China policy, but that policy is not identical to Beijing’s One China principle. Manila says it follows the One China Policy, but keeps unofficial economic and cultural relations with Taiwan through the Manila Economic and Cultural Office. Thus everyone says “One China,” but not everyone means the same China. 

This is where Filipino discourse becomes embarrassingly shallow. It wants Taiwan to be treated as a democratic outpost against communist China, yet the same discourse often ignores that Taiwan’s state is the Republic of China—the very anti-communist China of the old Cold War. If the Filipino right wishes to revive Cold War language, then it should at least face its own contradiction. Which China is it defending? The China seated in Beijing, which Manila officially recognizes? The China in Taipei, whose formal name many Filipinos no longer even remember? Or the American version of the Taiwan question, where Taiwan becomes less a China and more an unsinkable strategic asset in the first island chain? 

The ordinary Filipino is then pushed into a dangerous confusion. He is told that Taiwan is separate from China, yet his government does not recognize Taiwan as a sovereign state. He is told that Beijing is communist, yet Beijing trades, invests, lends, manufactures, exports, and accumulates like a ruthless capitalist power. He is told that Washington defends democracy, yet Washington itself maintains ambiguity because certainty might require war. He is told that the Philippines must prepare for a Taiwan contingency, yet the Filipino worker in Taipei, Taichung, Kaohsiung, and Hsinchu becomes a footnote in someone else’s strategic map. 

This is why the question must be asked plainly: if both Beijing and Taipei are trapped in the long shadow of the China question, why must the Philippines behave as if its role is already assigned? Why must Northern Luzon become a waiting room for a war over Taiwan? Why must the Bashi Channel become the geography through which Filipino sovereignty is again militarized by other states? Why must the Filipino be educated to panic before he is educated to think? 

None of this excuses Beijing. The People’s Republic has no right to impose its will by force, intimidation, blockade, missile threat, or coercion. No people should be absorbed by decree. No society should be handed over because an empire has a historical theory. But neither should the Philippines allow the Taiwan question to be narrated entirely by Washington. The danger is not only that China may act aggressively. The danger is also that the United States may define the crisis in such a way that Philippine territory, Philippine workers, Philippine ports, Philippine airfields, and Philippine lives are treated as natural accessories of American strategy. 

Nor can the Filipino Cold Warrior explain Vietnam. For if China is to be treated as the eternal enemy because it is “communist,” then what shall be done with Vietnam? Shall Hanoi also be dismissed as an enemy of the Filipino people? Shall the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, led by the Communist Party of Vietnam, be placed in the same ideological basket as Beijing simply because both states carry red flags, party congresses, Marxist vocabulary, and socialist constitutions? If this is the logic, then the Philippines should not cooperate with Vietnam at all. It should not speak of common maritime interests. It should not praise Vietnam’s firmness in the South China Sea. It should not see in Vietnam a useful regional partner. It should simply shout “communist” and close the door. 

But reality refuses such childishness. Vietnam is communist in party form, nationalist in instinct, market-oriented in economic practice, and fiercely sovereign in foreign policy. It does not fit neatly into the Filipino anti-communist imagination. It is not the China of Beijing, though it shares an ideological language with Beijing. It is not the old South Vietnam of Saigon, though some Filipinos may still imagine Vietnam through the vanished yellow flag of the Republic of Vietnam. It is not an American outpost, though it now cooperates with Washington. It is not a Chinese satellite, though it trades heavily with China. It is a state that learned, through suffering, invasion, poverty, siege, reform, and war, that ideology is not a substitute for independence. 

This is what Filipino Cold War nostalgia cannot understand. The Saigon-based government is gone. The Republic of Vietnam fell in 1975. The reunified Socialist Republic of Vietnam was proclaimed in 1976. One may remember the old flag, one may sympathize with refugees, one may study the tragedy of South Vietnam, but no serious state policy can be built on pretending that Hanoi is illegitimate because Saigon once stood. That is exile politics, not foreign policy. It is memory without power. It is nostalgia elevated into strategy. 

Vietnam, unlike the Philippines, has not allowed anti-communist sentiment to dictate its national interest. Indeed, Vietnam’s most dramatic modern lesson came not from surrendering to China, but from resisting it. In 1979, China invaded Vietnam in what Beijing called a punitive war. The Chinese forces withdrew after heavy fighting, and the war exposed the depth of Sino-Vietnamese hostility despite shared communist labels. Here was the great contradiction: one communist state attacked another communist state; one socialist neighbor punished another socialist neighbor; one revolutionary regime bled another revolutionary regime. The Cold War slogan collapsed at the border. 

If communism alone determines friendship or enmity, then Vietnam and China should have been natural brothers. They were not. If anti-communism alone determines patriotism, then Vietnam should have been dismissed forever by Filipinos as hostile. It should not be. The real question was never ideology alone. The real question was power, territory, memory, sovereignty, geography, and national will. 

This is why Vietnam can speak with China, trade with China, sign agreements with China, receive Chinese leaders, discuss railways, supply chains, artificial intelligence, green development, and border cooperation—and still remain wary of China. Hanoi can accept economic agreements without surrendering its maritime claims. It can allow diplomacy without forgetting history. It can talk of socialist friendship while preparing for strategic mistrust. It can sign documents in the morning and protest Chinese actions at sea in the afternoon. Such is the discipline of a state that knows how to separate ceremony from survival. 

There lies the lesson Manila refuses to learn. The Philippines keeps reaching for an ideological grammar because it has failed to build a sovereign one. It calls China communist because “communist” is easier to say than “a party-state capitalist power with maritime ambitions, industrial capacity, military reach, and coercive gray-zone instruments.” It calls America the free world because “free world” is easier to say than “a treaty ally with its own constitutional processes, commercial interests, military priorities, and great-power calculations.” It calls Taiwan democratic because “democratic Taiwan” is easier to say than “the Republic of China on Taiwan, historically tied to the unfinished Chinese civil war, unofficially engaged by Manila under a One China Policy.” It forgets Vietnam because Vietnam ruins the sermon. 

For Vietnam proves that a communist-led state can oppose China. Vietnam proves that national interest can override ideological kinship. Vietnam proves that one can trade with Beijing without kneeling to Beijing. Vietnam proves that one can cooperate with Washington without becoming Washington’s barracks. Vietnam proves that history can be remembered without being turned into colonial nostalgia. Vietnam proves that sovereignty is not a speech; it is a habit of statecraft. 

The Filipino, however, too often remains trapped between two ghosts: the ghost of American liberation and the ghost of anti-communist panic. He sees the old flag of Saigon and imagines that Vietnam’s legitimacy ended with it. He sees the red flag of Hanoi and imagines that Vietnam must be the same as China. He sees the red flag of Beijing and imagines Mao still marching, even as Chinese capital buys, lends, builds, exports, speculates, and accumulates in the language of global capitalism. He sees the Stars and Stripes and still imagines democracy descending from an aircraft carrier. 

So much for Cold War hysteria revived in the name of sovereignty. It cannot even explain the neighborhood. 

A serious Filipino foreign policy would learn from Vietnam without romanticizing it. Vietnam is not a liberal model. It is not a democratic paradise. It is not a country whose political system Filipinos should copy. But it is a country whose geopolitical discipline deserves study. It knows that China can be both trading partner and threat. It knows that America can be both useful and dangerous. It knows that ideology may decorate diplomacy, but geography governs survival. It knows that a country must talk to many powers while belonging to none. 

The regional data itself should caution Manila against hysteria. The State of Southeast Asia 2026 Survey Report found that, if ASEAN respondents were forced to choose between China and the United States, 52.0 percent selected China and 48.0 percent selected the United States; the Philippines, however, remained strongly aligned with Washington, with 76.8 percent preferring the United States in that forced-choice scenario (Lin et al., 2026). This is revealing. Much of Southeast Asia hedges. The Philippines sentimentalizes. Others calculate economic proximity, geographic reality, and strategic uncertainty. Filipinos, conditioned by history, still reach instinctively for America. 

Even distrust of the United States in the region is changing. The same survey found that among respondents who distrust the United States, the largest share believed that U.S. economic and military power could be used to threaten their countries’ interests and sovereignty (Lin et al., 2026). This is not communist propaganda. It is regional memory speaking. Southeast Asia knows that great powers do not arrive innocent. It knows that military power, once welcomed, develops habits. It knows that promises of protection can become forms of discipline. It knows that one can be saved into subordination. 

The Philippines seems determined to learn this lesson repeatedly and forget it repeatedly. It remembers Balangiga as tragedy but forgets it in diplomacy. It remembers Subic and Clark as sovereignty issues but returns to their logic by another route. It remembers the Senate vote of 1991 as a nationalist moment but treats it today as an inconvenience from a less “realistic” age. It remembers American colonial education as benevolent modernization and forgets that colonial benevolence always has a military budget. 

The Cold War rhetoric is therefore useful because it suppresses memory. Once China is reduced to “Red China,” America becomes “the free world” by default. The moral account is settled before the policy begins. The Philippine public is then asked to accept the strategic conversion of the country as a patriotic duty. Northern Luzon becomes a shield. Palawan becomes a hinge. The seas become corridors. The republic becomes terrain. 

Yet one must ask: what kind of independence survives if the national imagination cannot distinguish alliance from dependence? What kind of sovereignty exists if every crisis requires foreign reassurance? What kind of republic celebrates itself each June only to outsource its security by July? 

The Philippine problem is not that it has allies. Small and middle powers often need partners. The problem is the absence of an autonomous national strategy beneath the partnership. Alliances can supplement strength; they cannot replace it. Diplomacy can widen options; it cannot compensate for industrial weakness. International law can clarify rights; it cannot patrol waters. Public outrage can dramatize violations; it cannot build ships. The flag can be raised over reefs in rhetoric, but without capacity, it is the coast guard crew and the fisherman who bear the insult. 

A serious Philippine policy would begin by abandoning childish binaries. It would say plainly: China is an expansionist party-state capitalist power whose maritime claims threaten Philippine rights. It would also say: the United States is a treaty ally whose commitments are shaped by its own constitutional processes and strategic interests. It would say: Japan is a valuable partner, but not a redeemer. It would say: Taiwan is not merely a democratic island but the Republic of China on Taiwan, caught in the unresolved legacy of the Chinese civil war. It would say: Vietnam is communist but not therefore an enemy. It would say: ASEAN is weak, but regional diplomacy remains necessary. It would say: the 2016 award is law, not a talisman. It would say: the Filipino people must not be asked to choose between humiliation by Beijing and dependency on Washington. 

Such a policy would require discipline. It would require long-term investment in shipbuilding, coastal radar, drones, maritime law enforcement, cyber defense, fuel storage, merchant marine capacity, fisheries protection, and domestic industry. It would require a real reserve system, civil defense, ports that serve national logistics, and railways that serve national integration rather than merely real estate speculation. It would require schools that teach geopolitics without colonial romance. It would require leaders who do not confuse a photo in Washington or Tokyo with a national strategy. 

It would also require economic nationalism. The West Philippine Sea cannot be defended by press releases while the domestic economy remains import-dependent, deindustrialized, and oligarchic. Sovereignty is not only a flag at sea. It is steel, food, energy, ships, cables, satellites, engineers, disciplined institutions, and a population that knows why the country must stand on its own feet. A nation that cannot produce enough of what it needs will eventually be forced to accept the terms of those who can. 

This is where the “free world” slogan becomes especially hollow. The Philippines is told that it belongs to the democratic camp. But democracy without economic sovereignty becomes a ceremony. Elections occur, speeches are delivered, flags are waved, and yet policy is constrained by creditors, patrons, military donors, import dependence, and elite families whose idea of nationalism ends at the port gate. The people are invited to cheer for freedom while the structure of dependency remains untouched. 

The proper answer to China, then, is not hysteria. It is construction. The proper answer to coercion is capacity. The proper answer to the red bogeyman is not the whitewashing of another power’s agenda, but the recovery of Filipino seriousness. The country must oppose China where China violates Philippine rights; it must cooperate with China where cooperation serves Philippine interests; it must work with the United States, Japan, Australia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and others where such cooperation strengthens Philippine capacity; and it must refuse any arrangement that converts the archipelago into a convenient forward operating geography for wars Filipinos did not choose. 

The old Cold War taught many Filipinos to think of sovereignty as alignment. The new century demands that sovereignty be understood as capability. In the old script, the Philippines stands with the “free world.” In a mature script, the Philippines stands first with itself. 

This is not anti-Americanism. It is adulthood. This is not pro-China sentiment. It is memory. This is not neutrality in the face of aggression. It is the insistence that resistance to one power must not become submission to another. 

For too long, the Filipino elite has mistaken proximity to great powers for greatness. It has mistaken access for respect, aid for friendship, and strategic usefulness for national strength. Now, as U.S.–China rivalry hardens and the Philippines is once again praised for its location, the old question returns with a sharper edge: will the republic be a nation, or will it be a platform? 

The answer cannot be supplied by Washington. It cannot be supplied by Tokyo. It certainly cannot be supplied by Beijing. It must be supplied by Filipinos willing to think beyond the hysteria of borrowed wars and the nostalgia of borrowed flags. The Philippines need not kneel before China. But neither should it stand at attention every time America calls the formation. 

A sovereign people does not merely choose a protector. It builds a state. 

*** 

References 

Constantino, R. (1970). The mis-education of the Filipino. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 1(1), 20–36. 

Government of the Republic of the Philippines & Government of the People’s Republic of China. (1975, June 9). Joint Communiqué of the Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Government of the Republic of the Philippines. 

Lin, J., Martinus, M., Fong, K., Pham Thi Phuong Thao, Aridati, I. Z., & Gauri, S. (2026). The State of Southeast Asia: 2026 survey report. ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute. 

Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan. (2024, July 8). Signing of the Japan–Philippines Reciprocal Access Agreement. Government of Japan. 

Pearson, M. M., Rithmire, M., & Tsai, K. S. (2022). China’s party-state capitalism and international backlash: From interdependence to insecurity. International Security, 47(2), 135–176. 

Permanent Court of Arbitration. (2016, July 12). The South China Sea Arbitration: The Republic of the Philippines v. The People’s Republic of China. Press release. 

Socialist Republic of Viet Nam. (2013). Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam. 

United States & Republic of the Philippines. (1951). Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States of America and the Republic of the Philippines. 

U.S. Department of Defense. (2023, April 3). Philippines, U.S. announce locations of four new EDCA sites. 

White House. (2022). Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States. 

World Bank. (2022, April 1). Lifting 800 million people out of poverty: New report looks at lessons from China’s experience.