To Restore All Things in Christ: Political Reflections on the Solemnity of the Nativity of Our Lord

At first, it seems that the Christian message of the Nativity of Christ bears close resemblance with the political slogans and propaganda that we find intruding into our lived consciousness at almost each moment of our lives today, especially among Filipinos who are now daily bombarded by campaign materials as national elections draw nearer. Is not Emmanuel – God-with-us – so similar with: the State-with-us, history-on-our-side, truth-is-with-us or you-are-not-alone? Is not the appearance of the hosts of heavenly beings on the skies of Bethlehem proclaiming, “Glory to God in the highest and peace to men of goodwill” commemorated during the midnight vigil of the nativity so closely similar to the television advertisements, the banners, posters and paraphernalia that announce the messianic visions of those who claim to be the redeemers of this country’s abject socio-political conditions? And just like the political advertisements, after the liturgical celebrations, the parties and the merrymaking of Christmas, we look around and find our joy, excitement or enthusiasm so misplaced in a world that appears to be deserted by God. Confused, saddened, bewildered, we silently ask: “What, if any, did the birth of Christ contribute to the world and to human history that it demands celebration today?”
What, if any, would the celebration of the birth of Christ mean for our political consciousness?

The ancient and popular Christmas hymn invites us today: Venite adoremus! O come let us adore Him! O come let us adore him! At the recitation of the Credo in the Catholic liturgy of the day, the congregation is invited to kneel and pause in adoration at the words – et homo factum est – and God became Man. And at the end of the Catholic liturgy of today, we line up and kiss in silent adoration the image of the infant Jesus.

Why adore this powerless Christ who in the next couple of months we shall adore again not anymore as a baby but as a beaten, bloody and dead body hanging on the Cross?

It is here that we recognize the fundamental difference between the messianism of our political leaders and the Messianic message of the baby on the crib who is also the same man on the cross: both instances in the life of the same person point not just to himself, not because the self is of utter insignificance but because it is God who gives meaning to an otherwise meaningless event. Hence, unlike the political messiahs whose referential point is their ideological construct and vision of the world, the helpless and powerless Christ points to the graciousness and loving embrace of the Father.

An easy and conventional interpretation of this fundamental difference between our politics and the religious order is tempting to adhere to, that is to make a clear delineation between two co-existing spheres of human life: that of the secular and that of the sacred that do not communicate with each other. That is, if in fact, the political realm is radically different from the religious realm then it demands its autonomous set of values, goals and dispositions that cannot be inflected with any religious voice or undertone. Radical democratic theorists, in their attempt to save religion from its transmogrification into state-led projects of modernity or Enlightenment, offer a rather delicious solution – to insist on a God-abandoned political realm and to subject everything in politics to the contingency and indecisiveness of compromises or games of power relations. Simply put, radical political theorists argue that if God has been paradoxically purged out of modernity by transporting His divine will into the collective will of the people embodied by the institutions of politics, making such institutions inscrutable from criticism, then, political relations have no meaning in them except as markers of the victory of one hegemonic power over other competing and similarly hegemonizing bearers of power. While radical theorists resist the arrogance of their liberal rivals who by claiming moral ascendancy through the forging of a social consciousness deny us the restlessness of the heart and the uncertainty of the mind through which a divinely-ordained plan could unfold, the radical compromise with God and religion is achieved at the expense of legitimizing difference for the sake of difference. It is true, however, that the de-deification by radical philosophy of certain human constructs open such to Divine authority and make them accountable to the public. Yet in doing so is the tendency to provide no opportunity for politics to become a space which could be claimed by actors as a space for the Divine to unfold its plan. Religion is transformed into either or both ideology – a secret whose logic remains hidden – and/or ritual – a purely exterior manifestation but can not claim to substantive and demanding meaning. Here, religion, in the guise of allowing it a public character, is, in a more creative manner than the earlier projects of modernity, pushed once more into the private affairs of human life, making no space for it in the public affairs of society.

On the other hand, the arrival, the incarnation of God vis-à-vis the infant child and made possible by the cooperation of Mary and Joseph, demands that we recognize its definitive and determined occurrence in history. The Gospels are united in proclaiming “the appointed time”, “the fullness of time” in which this occasion transpired. This leads us to the recognition of the incarnation as a gift, as an act of love and condescension on the part of a Divine Being who was faithful despite our infidelity. As such, the marvelous story of the nativity is something that was caused into fulfillment by God. Christian theology teaches us that this causative nature of God is no other than His Word, that same Word that caused creation. And because it is Word – Logos – it is not a secret, it is on the contrary, visibly manifested and draws people to it, just as the angels in the nativity story invited the shepherds and the star drew the magi from the orient. Also, because it is Word, it is not meaningless but in fact meaning itself. It is reasonable, not in the sense of reason as rational, but as the prophesies of the Old Testament announced, it is articulated and not simply felt. This visibilized and reasonable figure of the Word is Christ himself. It transcends the political demarcation of what constitutes the public and the private.

Hence, unlike political propaganda, the Kalenda – the Christmas proclamation – acknowledges that Christ is the Lord of history. This is a rather radical yet very humbling proclamation. To celebrate the nativity of Christ can therefore only mean our submission and surrender not to history as dialecticians would put it, nor of the submission of history to our making as materialists would claim, but rather, our recognition that Christ has claimed history and that He is the only way, the truth and the life as His public ministry and Christological teachings would later on make more manifest. This, unlike political propaganda is something that we know: it is not a secret that underpins history nor is it an appeal to the emotional stirrings of the heart. Lest, we misinterpret Mary’s silence in all these events, it is she and Joseph who embody how to be knowing subjects of the Lord of history.

In our contemporary freedom-obsessed, liberty-possessed political imaginary and vocabulary, the condition of subjection would always be antithetical to emancipation. While it is true that political affairs must always strive for equality in conditions among members of a political community, the extension of this equality into the nature of what it means to be human bears fundamental obstacles to our recognition of Christ as the Lord of history. This utter politicization of the entirety of human life has already been achieved by the emergence of a security and police state, a governmentalized political structure and quite ironically, even by the vanguards of the post-modern agenda. The consequence of this ceaseless yearning for equalization forgets the most basic nature of what it means to be human: that is to be a created reality. The subjection of man to the Lord of history means, however, not to become unthinking pawns but to always unite one’s thoughts into the will of the same Lord. That the Word incarnate was made flesh only through this process, that the birth of Christ only occurred because one woman’s ascent to the will of the Father, to be repeated later on in the garden of Gethsemane in the penultimate moment of the history of human salvation points only to the extreme trust and love that the Creator has bestowed upon His created being. That God himself became fully man, though in the process did not relinquish His divinity, should only point to an extremely gratuitous consciousness that we as humans should develop in relation to God. Today’s world, however, forbids us from nurturing a sense of gratuitousness. Today’s world is driven by a sense of entitlement: that man is fully entitled to certain privileges that he must get, a theory of rights, if you wish. The recognition of our nature as subjects of the Lord of history is therefore not one characterized by movement of despair or nihilism or fatalism or evolutionism. It is a movement of reasoned faith, that same movement that stirred within the heart of Mary the powerful song – Magnificat anima mea Deus – my soul magnifies the Lord.

Nowhere in Mary’s canticle do we hear her disparaging her status as a servant, as a handmaid of God. That she has allowed herself to be in the service of God is in fact the very source of her pride, joy, strength and courage. Unlike ideologies which put man in the service of history and therefore render man a sacrificial lamb of the unfolding of the logic of history, man in the service of God is not sacrificed. Ideologies do not explain the martyrdom of so many of their warriors except as a necessity in the realization of the anticipated utopia, except perhaps by tricking man through scientifically contrived propaganda of various sorts. In contrast to this perversion, the nativity of Christ has in fact simultaneously exalted and humbled humanity. Forgetting one of the other misconstrues the reality of man as a created being. That God was not ashamed to take upon human form, to experience the frailty of humanity compels us to defend the dignity of humanity in all fronts, to resist the transformation of man into mere utility for this and that notion of progress. God did not make man his utility, God in fact became man and did not abandon His divinity in the process. Hence, the story of Christmas, the adoration that we are invited today to take upon ourselves, will always be confounding for the world whose primal desire is to live on its own without God.

So what in fact is the cause of our celebration? Pope Benedict XVI puts it beautifully in his book Jesus of Nazareth: God. It is God that the birth of Christ contributes to our history, such that through His birth, God entered history in the most final, definitive and complete way, so that as Pope Benedict XVI puts it, we now know the face of God – Jesus.

The characters surrounding the nativity story would not have encountered Jesus Christ without God’s grace. From Mary who “has found favor in God”, to Joseph who was visited by the angel in his dream, to the shepherds who were heralded by angels into the manger, to the magi who were drawn by the star of Bethlehem – all of these participants in the nativity story needed God to realize the economy of salvation. In his excursus on the temptations of Jesus in the desert, Pope Benedict XVI argued that the devil was not as vulgar as to tell Jesus to abandon God. The devil only tempted Jesus to follow the designs of the world, that as the Messiah he must command the empires of the world, its riches and its honor. The devil only tempted Jesus to follow a well-organized, systematic structure of the world and in the process to not need God anymore.

The story of Christmas for me is a story of our need for God and God’s assurance that He-is-with-us. This need for God, however is a moment of grace, thus these two for me are inseparable and imply each other all the time: one needs God because He has created us, He-is-with-us because of our reality as created beings who have been unfaithful to him and as a testament of His fidelity to us. This is the joy of Christmas for me: the joy that one finds in the need for God and the recognition of the realization of that joy through Christ – the God-made-man.

What do these imply for politics?

A lot of times in our political engagement we are tempted to follow templates, blueprints and systems of progress or ways of critique or of doing things. In some occasions, we reject these templates and blueprints, mostly because they have become meaningless mantras repeatedly imposed by societal institutions. Both of these tendencies are however two sides of the same coin: blind obedience to ideology which leaves no room for the plan of God to unfold.

The joy of Christmas – a joy beyond feelings or sentiments, a conviction of faith – must possess our tasks for political transformation. Our political endeavors must be open to the grace of God. They must not reduce God into a private affair or entirely shun Him from the picture by pre-determining the effects and the consequence of human activity. Of course to realize this we must as individuals become signs of the human need for God. Only those who do not need God will not need others in this task. Radical political practice already contains some of these elements. What radical theorists and practitioners of political philosophy need to do is to move beyond their obsession with the indeterminacy of political life: if Christ is Lord of history and therefore of politics, then political life rests upon the same certitude, the same fidelity of God’s salvific plan for us. In politics then, we may not always be certain of what our actions may bring, but we of course as political actors are certain of our joy in the truth of God. We do not plunge into a nihilistic world in which values are merely decisions of shifting alliances of relations of power, or where values are those which we simply construct or create of our autonomous selves, rather we plunge into a world which has known the Word, in which the Word has been born and which points to the Word Incarnate as the guide and standard of human striving.

A Blessed Celebration of the Solemnity of the Nativity to everyone!

Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word

“If we practice an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,
soon the whole world will be blind and toothless.”
– Mahatma Gandhi

In the wake of the massacre of 57 (as of recent count of retrieved bodies) individuals in Maguindanao province and the scramble of government institutions under pressure from outraged civil society groups and the general public to investigate and to hold accountable perpetrators of the brutal crime, the national gover5ment has yet to issue a formal public apology. Of course, candidates who are posturing for national positions were quick to condemn the massacre and demanded that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo – a close and intimate ally of the Ampatuan clan widely believed to have ordered the mass killing – be held accountable as well for manipulating inter-clan and ethnic tensions for regime survival. But these candidates too fell short of admitting dirty hands.

In the past week, several critical essays have been published by respected journalists, op-ed writers and academic scholars tracing the historical, socio-economic, cultural and political underpinnings of the Maguindanao Massacre. Most of them agree that past and present policies of national political elites and government bureaucratic institutions on Mindanao have perpetuated a culture of impunity among warlords in the region in exchange for their support of national utilitarian projects such as the electoral prospects of political elites and the neutralization of latent ethnic tensions. This means that while Arroyo is ultimately responsible, an apology is warranted not just from the incumbent administration but from all elected national officials.

With legal processes underway, the media now more interested in the coming 2010 elections, and the public now more engrossed with Christmas shopping, the Maguindanao issue is not far from becoming a boring topic and gradually becoming another just one of those issues that the public will get tired of talking about. The threat here is that unless a public apology on the part of national political elites is made, a post mortem massacre may yet happen: the de-politicization (once more, again, as usual) of the event.

Forgiveness is an essential component of politics. For the political theorist Hannah Arendt, the ability to forgive releases human action from “the predicament of irreversibility – of being unable to undo what one has done” (1958, 237) and allows men to come together anew and begin, because “without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever” (ibid). The human faculty to forgive then makes it possible for political actors not to be enslaved to the past and consequently makes sure that the task of politics is not abandoned.

In the absence of a public apology and a movement towards forgiveness, discussions about the Maguindanao can lead to some sense of withdrawal or disinterest or even cynicism, resulting to a kind of political disengagement. This leads to the destruction of an intersubjective space among citizens which following Arendt is the sine qua non of political action. Rituals of repentance/apology and forgiveness are a step towards bringing people back into conversation again.

The justification for the necessity of forgiveness rests on two Arendtian accounts of human life: 1) her characterization of political action as unpredictable; and 2) her understanding of history as irreversible. Central to Arendt’s political theory is the capacity of man for action which she likens to a miraculous disruption of natural processes. For Arendt, it is action and its disruptive nature that engenders the political space. Action transcends the futile “natural rhythm of coming to be and passing away” of human biological processes by disclosing not just the what-ness but more importantly the who-ness that distinguishes man from animals acting merely out of instinct. The novelty in Arendt’s conception of action is that for her, it is a beginning that has no end in sight – existing outside the established categories of means/ends and exhausted by the unique and multiple forms of its sheer performance. Arendt’s theory of action can therefore be frustrating and vulnerable to moral haphazardness (Weiner 2005, 154). According to Arendt,

Men have known that he who acts never quite knows what he is doing, that he always becomes guilty of consequences he never intended or even foresaw, that no matter how disastrous and unexpected the consequences of his deed he can never undo it, that the process he starts is never consummated unequivocally in one single deed or event, and that its very meaning never discloses itself to the actor but only to the backward glance of the historian who himself does not act.

It is only by forgiving, if we follow Arendt’s thought, that man can be redeemed from the moral and tragic consequences of human political action. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt argues that what was unforgivable in the Nazi official, Eichmann and his contemporaries was not their commission of a crime against humanity – genocide – but their inability to take full responsibility for their action by appealing to the private, hidden, and concealed righteous motivations.

Rituals of public apology and forgiveness on the other hand force political actors to publicize their political decisions. They establish a public record of what has been done and what have been committed and reclaim a relationality that has been broken by violent acts and remember the context in which such violence has been perpetuated. If anything, politics for Arendt is contextual and relational. This is what allows her to secularize and find political value in forgiveness which is often associated with religious demands of morality. While Arendt recognizes the genesis of forgiveness in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, her work rescues the practice from its religious underpinnings by situating it within universal human practices to restore relationships with each other after a past damaging deed.

Here the work of philosopher J.L. Austin on performative utterances is significantly insightful. According to Austin, performative utterances are those utterances whose object is “not to describe or express nor to make a true or false statement. Rather their point is to do something” (Finnegan 1967). Examples of performative utterances include saying “I do” during a marriage ceremony or naming something (a ship for instance). Jacques Derrida celebrates Austin’s theory because it “produces or transforms a situation” and draws our attention to the other-than-referential character of language, to its extra-communicative power, to its creation, in effect of “new relations and realities” to its constitution of speaking subjects who are not quite present to themselves, not quite in control of the language games in which they are both players and playthings” (Honig). According to the theorist Bonnie Honig, performative utterances then are politicizing utterances: “they cannot make sense in isolation and necessarily take place in concert and require spectators for their success: they must be witness, judged and remembered if they are to bring something into being that did not exist before”.

One of the strongest objections to a defense of forgiveness in politics comes from the question of justice. Does forgiveness do away with justice? Does forgiveness entail forgetting? Does it foreclose institutional punishment?

One, forgiveness or apologizing is not denying or negating the mistake that has been done nor forgetting it. According to Donald Shriver (1995), forgiveness calls for a collective turning from the past that neither ignores past evil nor excuses it, that neither overlooks justice nor reduces justice to revenge, that insist on the humanity of enemies even in their commission of dehumanizing deeds.” Indeed, acts of repentance/forgiveness and official apologies even allow publics to hold a mistake by its head and call it a mistake.

Second, forgiveness as a memory is not a vindictive, vengeful or obsessive one. Forgiveness is a free memory. In this sense, it is not always obsessive, repetitive remembering; it can sometimes, somehow be “forgotten”. Arendt argues that this does not mean that forgiving or apologizing undoes any wrong or mistake but that it ties a mistake to a new fixity in the past so that “a serial sense of time eventually replaces the nightmare.” In this way, apology allows the emergence of a past memory, a present, and a future from which efforts to rebuild and rehabilitate political relationships can take off.

Three, forgiveness is not to renounce the right to be recognized where the right was not respected. Rather, forgiveness is to recognize the right to inviolability at any level of human rights and to go beyond justice when justice cannot give back, for example, a dear person who was killed (i.e., going beyond justice but without neglecting it). As Shriver puts it, forgiveness generates empathy (a faculty that is distinct from sympathy) so that “even in the midst of war, enemies need understanding of each other’s humanity and that for the lack of it, some great military mistakes have been made: Hitler’s stereotypes of the English as a society of shopkeepers and Russians as racially unfit for war” and so on.

Four, forgiveness is not to renounce in advance to the punishment or the reparation. Rather, forgiveness is to focus on healing the relations as a first goal, the re-humanization of both sides; pain and reparations are side effects in the process of healing. Forgiveness in a way postpones a violent fight – in the Hegelian sense – and yet maintains antagonistic forces in recognition of each other’s positions. Thus, forgiveness puts priority on the future hope of reconciliation while acknowledging the wrongs of the past, even by the very act of not seeking full retribution for them. Amstutz and Shriver both see forgiveness dwelling in the middle of a continuum between vengeance and forgetting. Amstutz notes that forgiveness is a balanced perspective that seeks to “reconcile the demands for backward looking justice with the quest for forward looking healing and reconciliation” (2005:18). Amstutuz sees forgiveness as a better strategy of accountability than revenge or avoidance/denial. Whereas, avoidance and revenge can lead to the perpetuation f conflict and breed greater injustices, forgiveness and its first step, apologies, sets into motion a strategy of accountability driven by the “discovery, disclosure and acknowledgment of truth” because “there can be no reckoning with past regime offenses if there is no knowledge of wrongdoing.” Shriver sees forgiveness as “thriving in the tension between justice as punishment and justice as restoration” (Shriver 1995: 32).

The Jesuit sociologist Fr. John Carroll has always argued that the cultural penchant of Filipinos to be forgiving has often led to the foregoing of the pursuit of justice and the damaging of political and legal institutions. Thus, for Caroll, forgiveness as a political strategy may be less helpful in nation-building and state-making as it perpetuates the structure of the weak Philippine state and its capture by particularistic interests. The relentless pursuit of justice, the strengthening of the state are more worthy endeavors than developing and cultivating an ethic of political forgiveness, following Carroll’s argument.

During a conference on the legacies of the Marcos authoritarian regime, Maria Serena Diokno and Luis Teodoro respectively argued that in order for the country to take full account of the crimes committed during the Martial Law years, a collective memory of these transgressions must always be kept alive. Diokno and Teodoro shared the same sentiment that while forgiveness must take place, this must not mean the abandonment of justice and restitution. Both lamented the failure of the post-Marcos regime to keep the memory of the martial law years deeply ingrained in the public’s imagination and consciousness. Diokno noted that despite the circumstances, no truth commission was established to facilitate the truth-telling that may aid the healing of the nation and provide a record for future generations. Without these, forgiveness for both Diokno and Teodoro, does not have any meaning and value for the country’s state-making and nation-building project.

In the case of the Maguindanao Massacre, framing the thirst for justice within another state-making and nation-building project may tend to de-emphasize and de-focus more radical ways of political action embodied in more localized forms of everyday-lives of Filipinos. Analysis of power relations will remain on the level of instrumentalism or utilitarianism, precluding transformational questions that can only be addressed by alternative conceptions of politics, power and the state.

Where is the place of apology and forgiveness conceptualized in the preceding discussion in these concrete circumstances and challenges?

From the perspective of a politics of performativity, those who are skeptical of a public apology from the national government overdetermine and underestimate the unpredictability that ambiguity can bring to the politics of state-making and nation-building. In contrast, as Michael Freeden puts it, ‘ambiguity…is a recipe for political coexistence’ since it enables support to be mobilised for a shared enterprise among plural constituencies. Moreover, since its allows reconciliation to be a contestable project from the outset, the ambiguity of the concept can be understood as an enabling condition for politics among people in a divided society. This condition departs from modern liberal frameworks of Rawlsian overlapping consensus to what may be called overlapping dissensus.

In contrast, an overlapping dissensus would refer to the bringing into view of the fundamental wrong that would unite the parties to reconciliation as members of the same political unity in the first place, which would be disclosed through an agonistic politics (Rancière’s democracy). In this way, the contestability of the concept of reconciliation enables an agonistic politics that is potentially constitutive of political community: in contesting the significance of the social world according to the conflicting perspectives brought to bear on it, that world might become more common to those engaged in struggle.

The value in the apology is therefore in its ability for publics to constitute and reconstitute themselves in such a way that it lays down the possibility for future political action to find a common table for discussion. Public apologies shape the public imagination by making references to cultural values and rehearsing or appealing to social solidarity. Put this way, public apologies enact a political space where agonistic and antagonistic characterizations can be organized around and therefore provide the public with a symbolic thread for organizing.

Contrary to the objective of forgiveness as a return to normalcy, I argue that rituals of repentance maintain a sense of agonism and continue a spirit of contestation that can rescue the political from the liberalizing tendencies of completely forgiving a wrongdoing or taking the political action to the courts of law where it will remain hidden from the purview of public scrutiny. This is especially important in cases where the institutional forms of political participation are in many ways limited or taken over by particularistic interests. While the non-consummation public apologies can mean a failure of the institutional ways of holding political actors completely and fully accountable, the continuing and persistent imagery of apologizing to the public sustain antagonistic politics.

On the other hand, unfinished or uncompleted public apologies do pose real dangers to institutional politics. But I think that coming from the definition of politics in the Arendtian sense, the institutionalization of these political acts are by themselves the danger to politics. What I think needs to be done is to reconstitute the very meaning of how we analyze and characterize state-making projects and therefore come out of the very rigid way of constituting a political public space. Arendt warns us that the danger in modern times is our desire to rid ourselves of the very unpredictability that the political space demands from its participants.

Public apologies, because of their open-ended nature establish a political world that goes beyond institutionalized politics. They also pave the way for promise-making.

Political Faggots

If there is anything genuinely political and democratic with Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s brand of leadership it is that she was not afraid to reward her friends and punish her enemies. The problem is she befriended thieves and made enemies with the people.

Democratic politics however in the classical sense of the regime is about the people and cultivating friendships with them. But the totalitarian, fascist and corporatist experiments of the past century have made democratic theory suspicious and distrustful of the people. Such suspicions are not without basis, though. Propagandistic claims of embodying the will, the spirit or the voice of the people lie at the heart of the past century’s horrors and mistakes. Nonetheless, what replaced the people – procedural arrangements in which competition for the people’s votes in order to decide on issues concerning the people vis-à-vis the election of representatives – has completely eradicated the traditional and central activity of politics as the process of distinguishing between enemies and friends.

Arroyo’s choice of friends says less really about her personal virtue or character than of the condition in which contemporary democratic politics is embedded historically and ideologically: the loss of that political capacity to choose the right friends and punish the right enemies. Minimum procedural definitions of democracy (or what political scientists call, the Schumpeterian definition) take the political process as a competition of group interests advancing their goods in the electoral terrain. The notion that whoever wins this contest carries the prerogative to determine the structure of political affairs fails to provide ethical guidelines with which to evaluate political choices beyond the numbers game. Deliberative theorists – led by American political theorist John Rawls and German philosopher Jurgen Habermas – meanwhile, define democracy as the legitimation of political processes based on the rational disagreement among participants but ultimately towards the generation of broadly shared consensus. Theorists of democracy as deliberation claim that the enactment of procedures that allows participants in political debates the privilege to speak out their opinions, provided they do not come from dogmatic sources, corrects the majoritarian bias of Schumpeterian definitions of democracy. Both accounts however, according to radical democratic theorist Chantal Mouffe, still envision a form of politics that has no adversaries and therefore does not distinguish friends from enemies in the course of their privileged space of democratic practice.

Arroyo must have learned her comparative politics well: stable regimes around the world, be it authoritarian, democratic or hybrid, rest on the proper deployment of incentives and disincentives that raise the stakes for politicians to abandon the regime. Institutionalized policy concessions, spoils redistribution, inclusivist populism and manipulative elite-constituency relations all contribute to the strength of leaders and sustain rule. The success of semi-democratic regimes in Southeast Asia – Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia – for instance depends on the exclusionary measures that core elites utilize to maintain loyal constituencies and at the same time ease inter-elite and inter-constituency tensions. The careful manipulation of tensions and societal conflicts such that at the end of the day, ruling elites still maintain power – or what Benedict Anderson portrayed as “politics in a well-run casino” that mixes American electorialism with Spanish caciquism reveals one important insight, however: a politics in which enemies are transformed into friends or co-players in a game is the perfect ingredient for political stability, otherwise known as stagnation.

Testosterone Shots for Political Effeminates

Reformist politicians must learn a thing or two from Arroyo’s impressive grasp of power politics. The phenomenal rise in Benigno “Noy-Noy” Aquino III’s popularity ratings – sixty percent according to the recent Social Weather Stations survey – is out to become a complete waste of public approval if his campaign team will continue practicing a politics of effeminacy.

Aquino’s stock of charismatic and traditional legitimacy as well as his nascent popularity is more than capable of transcending the patronage-based, clientelistic and patrimonial politics that have since independence characterized electoral democracy in the country. In a context of state capture by dominant elites and restrictive institutions for democratic participation, popular expressions of support can be exploited to generate cross-cutting societal consensus on key issues for political and economic reform which can be utilized against established interests. By hedging on and continuing to develop his popularity with the masses, Aquino can transgress his oligarchic background and use the image and the votes it can carry to resist the urge of organizing the campaign into a catch-all, free-for-all ride towards victory.

Myth-making – an important aspect of establishing political manhood and identity – is something that Aquino will not find hard to accomplish. Myths as foundational moments of community building must necessarily establish inclusions and exclusions. Founding myths are never all-inclusive. The significance of myth-making in politics has however declined since Enlightenment thinkers preferred the grand narrative of universal rationality and human solidarity over community-based stories of political genesis. The seemingly indestructible magic of Joseph Estrada and the middle-class, reasonable and educated voter’s antipathy to him highlights this reality. Political reformers and institution fetishists are therefore wrong: the point is not to educate the masses, the point is for the masses to educate the middle-class voter.

Why Aquino seems to be out to make friends with everybody, even those allied with the present regime is therefore not just a result of political expediency but a manifestation of this modern allergy towards anything that is not rational. However, “Anyone who thinks that a man will forget past grievances,” the Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli wrote, “just because he’s received some new promotion must think again.” In the same vein, anyone who thinks that a man will forget the glorious spoils of the past just because he’s been accepted into a more popular front must think again. In not making enemies and maintaining a political campaign that is friendly to all, Aquino is more effeminate than any screaming faggot in the Philippines today.

A political campaign driven by sincerity alone cannot command the reorganization of Philippine politics. Academic intellectuals and professional institutional reformers do not get the point, however. “Critical” activists who condemn Aquino for being part of the oligarchic structure of politics in the country don’t get it either. Machiavelli put it in a very beautiful way: in politics, what matters is how you appear to the public. “It is better to be feared than to be loved” as the (in)famous quotation is well remembered. If politics is about appearances, then all Aquino needs to do is to appear that he is befriending the people and punishing the enemies of the people, namely, his own economic class. To put it in a very blunt way, why will Aquino need his class base if he is now on the way to the topmost position in the country with the capacity to reorganize and resist pressures from the dominant class structure? Arroyo’s extractive incumbent policies highlight not anymore a captive state but a state that can be highly autonomous from societal pressures. It pays to learn even from the most evil genius in Philippines politics. But Aquino won’t even “appear” this way. He is too effeminate for that.

Radical democrats call this an exercise of articulation – the composition of not necessarily true and real elements in order to portray the political situation in such a way that change-movers could steer it in their direction. What makes this possible is the deconstruction of the relationship between language, reality and meaning. This is the long and short of the concept of hegemony. This is the revolutionary task that intellectuals must commit today. It requires a lot of daring and a sizeable strength of one’s balls (pardon my French). But the rewards are high and Machiavelli writes, “it’s better to be impulsive than cautious; fortune is female and if you want to stay on top of her you have to slap and thrust. You’ll see she’s more likely to yield that way than to men who go about her coldly. And being a woman she likes her men young, because they’re not so cagey, they’re wilder and more daring when they master her.”

My political theory students easily get excited when I compare political change to wild, raucous sexual activity – notice Machiavelli’s “slap and thrust” or the orgiastic backdrop of the setting of Plato’s The Republic. Sex is like war or politics, whatever the difference is. One needs to subjugate the sexual partner to maximum pleasure to simultaneously experience the sexual activity. The enemy is easy to identify: boredom and lousily done fake orgasm (there’s nothing wrong with fake orgasms, really, only those executed badly). Maybe Noy-Noy Aquino’s politics (or that of his campaign team) is reflective of his and their sex lives – boring, filled with unsuccessfully executed fake orgasms, totally unexciting.

Historicizing the Enemy/ The Enemy is History

It only takes a class in basic Philippine history to know that the American-style electoral democracy and the oligarchic structure of the political economy are the real enemies of people in the country. Electoral democracy is as boring as a fake orgasm and oligarchic economic politics is like sex without the foreplay. The coming elections is one opportunity in which the enemy could finally be vanquished. Sulking Leftists can eat their hearts out of fear of reifying and reinforcing established constructs. One has to start somewhere and the energy generated by the electoral discourse is one such space. As in any sexual act, something is reified and reinforced but that’s the pleasure of it, right?
The discourse, however, is in desperate need of reshaping and the material barriers to change are deeply entrenched. It would do well for Aquino’s campaign to use their candidate’s current popularity to start erecting fences and guarding them heavily. As of present, electoral education campaigns are still enraptured by the flawed logic of “the more the merrier”, that is, this frenzy over registration campaigns. But simply voting does not mean anything. The magic of US President Barrack Obama’s campaign in the last US elections is that the vote suddenly meant something for the voters. It was a rejection of something and an approval of another thing – a distinction between friends and enemies. For the Democrats it was – another round of Bush or a new system of doing things. For the Republicans it was – the old American way of equal opportunity for advancement or the socialist way of privileging certain societal sectors. Whether one agreed or disagreed with either of these dichotomizations is beside the point. The past American elections gave the voters the chance to define who their friends are and who their enemies are, realizing in the process, in the most cliché way, who they are.

If Aquino is truly confident that the people will put him to power he has to use attachment to his name as a bargaining chip with traditional politicians, entrenched societal interests and his fellow oligarchs and even with members of his own political party. Unlike his mother who was confronted by the most unimaginable historical problems – debts, restless military, strong communist insurgency, factionalized politicians and fragmented societal cleavages – Noy-Noy today has the opportunity to sideline traditional structures and norms and develop a more intimate connection with the people. He has to learn from the mistake of his mother who wanted to go beyond the myth. Aquino, in short has to exploit the myth of his family name, rather than battle it out with jealous individuals who do not share the same pedigree with the hopes of proving himself worthy of such a myth. These are idiots who want myths to take a natural form.

What does a vote for Aquino mean today? What does a vote for Villar mean today or for Escudero or for Teodoro? The various campaign teams might want to start giving their future voters and constituencies an answer.

The act of distinguishing friends and enemies involves taking a step outside of history and transcending historical baggage. The ability to distinguish is the supreme capacity of the sovereign. That’s why the sovereign is both in history but suspends history. He or she who embodies the proper distinctions is the embodiment of the sovereign will of the people.

This is political manhood.

The Open Society and its Horrors (or Remembering 1989)

In October 18, 1989, Erich Honecker, then East Germany’s head of state resigned as an intensifying series of protests hounded officials of the communist regime with demands of freer cross-border travel controls with West Germany and other surrounding states. Succeeded by a more liberal head of state, the days following Honecker’s resignation intensified into what at that time seemed unthinkable – the peaceful collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 9 of the same year and the commencement of the end of the Cold War culminating in the election of Mikhail Gorbachev as the first USSR President in March 1990.

Much has been said about how the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago radically reshaped the terrain of international and domestic politics – the end of history, the end of ideology, the triumph of the liberal capitalist order and the emergence of a multipolar world order. These seemingly theologico-apocalyptic narratives all point, however to one perceived reality: the enemy – totalitarian communism – has been vanquished. Celebrate good times, come on!

In the Philippines, the worldwide jubilation infected a communist/socialist movement that was already being torn at the seams. Three years before the Fall, components and affiliates of the underground Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) embarked on a bitter identity struggle at the aftermath of the widely acclaimed popular uprising against the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. Party leaders debated on how to engage the emergent “pluralistic” society and how to recast the strategies of the struggle. The central force that animated the debates and that eventually led to the split and then scattering of leftist and socialist movements is the same spiritual fervor that continues to guide today’s unimaginative and simultaneously cynical and overly-optimistic generation of leaders and “progressive activists”: the wild abandon to the new ethos of the open society.

The invocation of this new open society has successfully served its ideological purpose for the past twenty years now. At its heart is the most beautifully crafted blackmail of all times: “if you dare challenge the plenitude of liberal capitalist democracy, can you seriously see yourself working in a labor camp or not possessing private property?” When I ask my students for instance if they can imagine life without shopping or business without profit, none of them raised even the slightest possibility (what more of the desirability) of such condition ever happening.

Asked why the old leftist strategy of revolutionary warfare or the orthodox communist utopian society could no longer be sustained in this era of late capitalist, multiculturalist and identity politics obsessed order, the 1969 and early 80’s generation of activists usually portray the open society as characterized by:

• The maintenance of regularly held competitive elections and the minimal requirements necessary for challenging elective posts through individual efforts or party structures.
• The wider space given to collective groups and agents to autonomously organize, mobilize and advance their creeds – political, moral, economic or religious – and their equal validity in the “market of human opinions.”
• The maximum liberty allowed for individuals to shape the direction of their individual life choices and preferences.
• The protection of certain ways of opposing and challenging norms and practices through the proliferation and intensification of consciousness of “rights” and “liberties”.
• The absence of any ultimate standard against which the functioning of human communal life could be set against.
• The recognition of new arenas for waging the political struggle and the imperative of specialized tactics of engagement that requires decentralized authority and organization.

Does Open Also Mean Free?

The Western totalitarian experience and in the Philippine’s case, the dictatorship of Marcos undoubtedly contain historical horrors that must be prevented from occurring again. But the triumphalism of many progressivists today prevents them from seeing how the very dynamics of the totalitarian experiment is happening right at their very midst, before their very own eyes. In the Philippines as elsewhere around the world, mass-based party politics and easy access to formal political offices conceal and legitimize the same propagandism of the Nazis and the Bolsheviks through the cycle of electoral campaigns. The fallacy of electoralism, the sanguine cheerfulness among middle-class voters who think that the singular act of casting the ballot embodies a universally experienced act of freedom blinds them from how voting for some people is actually fraught with all sorts of oppressive and life-threatening dangers. Meanwhile, neo-institutionalist reformers who genuinely and sincerely believe that “institutions change behavior” participate in the same Auschwitz style experiment lorded over by political psychologists and technicians. Hitler’s guards were also sincere in their tasks, lest these progressivists forget.

Those who argue that the terrain of civil society offers a multiplicity of ways in which new politics could be waged refuse to acknowledge how the logic of state power is not completely absent in various attempts to create counter-hegemonic practices. The constitution of the present order according to practices of surveillance sovereignty and disciplinary neoliberalism also negates any illusions that choice, autonomy, liberty and discursive concepts of rights are outside of ideological constructs. Progressivists forget how for instance the production of protection regimes requires an a priori rendering of unclarity and ambiguity which then enables practitioners of state power to define conditions in a simultaneously arbitrary but determined standpoint.

The consequence then of the redemption of the modern world from totalitarianism is not just the end of ideology or of history but the end of the human capacity to judge and to distinguish the variety of pressures – sometimes overlapping and cross-cutting – that undercut modern political life. This incapacity to judge which for the political theorist, Hannah Arendt is the logical result of ideological thinking which collapses the plurality of human action into half-truths and is the distinctive characteristic of modern neoliberal politics marks therefore the absence of freedom in the post-totalitarian open society of today.

The ultimate paradox, however, lies in the resistance of the open society and its defenders to open the field of political debate and deliberation to questions of Truth and therefore of authority while at the same time remaining anxious over the production and reproduction of multiple “regimes of truth” supposedly contained in specific practices or orientations of individuals. By internalizing truth, claims to truth can no longer be held accountable, except by the standards of the self. At least the pagans and the dogmatic Catholics have their gods and God to blame and at the end of the day perform practices of atonement for. The open society only has the sad self wallowing in its miserable mistake. At the point, Truth rather than something that guides, becomes an instrument of political (ir)rationality.

Freedom – in its original Greek sense according to Arendt, meant the ability to move and remove oneself from one position to another, which requires therefore that one be first established in relation to a position or a plurality of positions. The reduction of freedom into the language of individual choice, group interests, preferences and behavior substitutes relativism for relationality and leaves no room for the transcendental questioning of truth claims which are now taken to be universally valid and acceptable since the faculty of judgment is radically atomized and privatized. This inability to establish positions of relationality which is only possible within a universe in which Truth has not yet been politicized is the reason why the open society, while indeed open is not free. In this sense, the open society is simply another stage in the cyclical process of scientific historical cyclical motion which its protagonists thought they were able to wrestle from around twenty years ago.

Phantoms of Fantasies

What unites both communism and neoliberal capitalism is the desire to take people as they are and to prohibit them from aspiring for something beyond themselves. The concepts of labor and self-interest which are respectively the guiding ideas of both regimes share a desire for sincerity and absolute transparency, ultimately ridding human affairs of political activity and substituting for politics the vicious naturalness of human life.

In classical political theory, the political act resembles putting on masks and these masks are the virtues needed to traverse the non-political and routinary realm of the household into the surprise-filled and adventurous realm of the political. Both the open society and its totalitarian predecessor do away with this hypocrisy and instead idealize the naked drive for power and knavery as well as the sincere, even compassionate exposure of the raw rage of the deprived. But by taking away the hypocritical masks of politics, political activity is transformed from the thoughtfulness of navigating through what is real and unreal towards the acceptance of a populace obsessed with rage and vengeance. Sincerity is the antithesis of virtue. This is the long and short of the French Revolution – and its fantastic/phantasmic promise of liberty, equality, fraternity – to which both communists and liberals trace their origins.

The open/totalitarian society is a society built upon the wreckage of human aspirations. In the parlance of my students today – it is the emo society haunted by phantoms of a past that refuses to be reckoned with and by fantasies of an already foreclosed future. Fantasies, however, only germinate from conditions of absolute deprivation. Not simply in the sense that the nourishment deprived individual is susceptible to all sorts of fantasy formations but more importantly, only the isolated individual, deprived of a public audience is truly capable of fantasizing and at the same time elevating these fantasies to the real. This is what happens when processes of decision making are emblematized as acts of the individual choosing his or her preference (i.e. casting ballots). The uniqueness of human activity is never automatic. It needs a space to shine and be validated. But because the open/totalitarian society was organized around the principle that seeks to maximize the space of (de)privation and minimize the demands of political involvement, the public space in which human pathologies can be transcended (not cured or studied or documented) is extremely narrowed and replaced by an ethic of complete submission to the laws of progress and development. And just a reminder, God has died a long time ago.

Perpetual movement, ceaseless motion, endless accumulation, relentless consumption, permanent revolution, craze-filled non-stop innovation – the fundamental values of the open society that have tempted not a few from seeking one that is absolutely closed. What is the difference these days, anyway?

Tell Me Who Your Enemies Are

If freedom and politics then means the ability to move and remove oneself from an established position, then Arendt is right when she exclaimed that the political is enacted every time a revolution is staged. Revolutions invite and incite citizens to exercise their freedom to do politics and not that kind of freedom from politics that casting votes means for political organizers today. Now more than ever, the imperative of a revolution is at its strongest, especially in the Philippines. There is nothing original in this insight or radically controversial. Even hardline liberals would recognize that conditions for political existence today are no longer liberal or democratic. Not that a reform oriented politics does not offer any hope, it’s that they hope for too much.

If today’s open society or in Slavoj Zizek’s terms, “permissible society” allows so called progressivist projects to achieve their emancipatory objectives so that “we could all keep on changing things so that nothing changes at all” then the revolutionary task has to become primarily an intellectual task. An articulatory project, a hegemonic movement that will define the present as closed, resist the urge to celebrate any imminent redemption and identify what discursive regimes, practices and ways of thinking reinforce these closures. The task is no longer to predict or forecast in a Lenninist sense how a rupture will happen, but rather to analyze the coordinates that prevent this rupture from happening and to transform these practices such that the public will finally, like the prisoner in Plato’s allegory of the cave, turn around and face the light of day.

The lesson of 1989 proper is not to bring down more walls, but to re-establish walls and stay at their edges permanently. It is true that in 1989 people around the world imagined the possibility of another world. The mistake is that they believed that what was established after was already that world.

Or maybe they believed in the possibility of a wrong world?

Between Enlightened Oligarchs and Oligarchies of the Enlightened

Filipino voters will have to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea when they confront their ballots in the coming presidential elections on May 2010. It’s a tough choice, really. On the one hand is the maintenance of a century-old system of elite rule and domination, while on the other, the reproduction of the increasingly dominant global paradigm of transforming all aspects of political and social life into the model of the market. Both miss out the central problems of contemporary politics: the narrowing of avenues for democratic political engagement, the tendency to defuse political struggles and the insulation of political questions from public debates and deliberation. Unless these are addressed in a properly political manner, Philippine politics will see no significant changes in the next six years.

The first will simply reinforce patterns of state weakness and capture by dominant vested interests or endorse a statist discourse that nonetheless protects the transnational interests of dominant elites. The leading candidate, following results of recent opinion polls Benigno “Noy-Noy” Aquino III is avowedly a member of the country’s ruling class who is not exactly an avid supporter of progressive efforts to alter the class structure of Philippine society (i.e. comprehensive land reform). His political machinery – the Liberal Party – is as elitist and non-programmatic as other parties in the country and possesses no historical or institutional engagement with grassroots politics outside of the electoral cycle. Patronage and not ideology (despite being a problematic organizing principle for political life as well) remains its primary political strategy. And despite being called “inconsistent liberals” (and therefore perhaps, occasional socialists?) by a leading critical commentator, the party has not offered any clear strategies of developing an autonomous state apparatus that can withstand pressures from strong social forces.

Political experts and public intellectuals simply don’t get it. Democratic deepening and state building contain contrasting logics. Democracy involves the diffusion of political authority to the people or the people themselves exercising political authority embodied in conflicts and disagreements while state building involves the centralization of political authority towards a governmental apparatus that seeks to regulate societal conflicts. Only by realizing that these two projects are diametrically opposed yet simultaneously imperative and inseparable can any attempt to make sense of contemporary political realities in the country truly capture the big picture.

In a polity ridden by stark social inequalities and weak state apparatuses, oligarchic capture of state institutions are easily reinforced by electoral processes, often exacerbated by the lack of established party structures that will allow weaker sectors of the population access to formal power structures. Side by side this is the increasing tendency of incumbent officials to control even the access of competing societal groups to patrimonial rents.

The link between state building and the reorganization of class structure cannot be overemphasized here. But democratic utilitarian exchange and liberal institutional procedures do not guarantee and in fact mainly preclude the unsettling of social class structures. Historically, simultaneously strong and present vigorously democratic states developed by antagonizing and demobilizing entrenched interests of societal actors. The sociologist Charles Tilly’s association of state-making in Western Europe with the demands of war-making reveal how the extraction of resources, mobilization of private armies and enlistment of the nobility for the purposes of waging feudal and inter-state wars have strengthened the autonomy and capacity of states in Europe. The challenge is how to do such in a liberal democratic frame and in a global order no longer shaped by the regular occurrence and consequences of war-making. Developing postcolonial states as well as developmental states show the difficulty of this task: both sets of states have been able to achieve either or both political stability and economic growth vis-à-vis thoroughly or episodic authoritarian strategies. Further, in Southeast and East Asia, the appeal of “Asian values” or “Asian-style democracy” discourse masks an important reality for states experiencing what Tilly calls “late state building”, that is, the determining factor of the dominant international discursive regime which in today’s world order continues to cast the task of democratic deepening and state strengthening as two compatible processes. Nothing could be more different though under the present definitions of the two terms, unless perhaps some anthropological or historical data reveal otherwise and replace the dominant Weberian model of the state. Even so, this may prove to be difficult since political analysts remain stuck in their disciplinary frames, often unwilling to accept valuable insights from other fields of study.

Of course, the oligarchic power structure of Philippine politics cannot be taken as overly determining and constraining the spheres of political exercise. Local accounts of political life especially in the countryside show how the very metaphors and stories surrounding elites can create narratives of people from below and redefine the contours of meaning that symbolically constitute the oligarchic structure. These stories subvert established categories of political thinking including Western binarisms and dichotomies deepening what political scientist Nathan Quimpo has called “contested democracy” in the Philippines.

Yet something is still amiss. The laissez-faire expectation that unsettling is indeed bound to happen somewhere along the way reproduces the illusory trajectory of modernization hopes and the “communistic fiction” to use Hannah Arendt’s term of the invisible hand. Unless the lines are drawn neatly and the discourse takes a hegemonic character, the figure of the enlightened oligarch stands as the paradigmatic representation of the hedonistic character of contemporary politics and the foreclosure of the present crisis of the Philippine state from fully and radically exploding.

What this means for the coming 2010 elections is that the oligarchic structure of Philippine politics will remain entrenched if the construction of the electoral exercise is not articulated or redirected towards a new discourse. The first task however is clear: disentangle the concept of democratization from state-building but do not fall into the trap of separating the two tasks, (i.e. authoritarianism first before democracy). The supposedly enlightened oligarchs – Noy-Noy Aquino, Manuel Roxas, Gilbert Teodoro – cannot represent genuine change unless they utilize the coming elections as a field to deepen the crisis of class relations by expanding conflict nodes and sustaining antagonistic politics and subsequently promoting the transformation of the Philippine state using the electoral struggle to shore up political legitimacy beyond the usual traditional modes. The allergy to democratic populism represented by the general irritation of the middle-class sector towards Joseph Estrada has to stop.

But Estrada himself failed to use his popular legitimacy to challenge dominant power structures when he was still president. Nor did he use this to steer the country away from neoliberal doctrines of doing politics via markets which has increasingly been adopted, either consciously or not, by mainstream and even alternative political groups in the country. This is the second option in Philippine politics today, an increasingly popular one couched in terms like “good governance”, “corporatization” and “bureaucratization.”
Again, they misconstrue democratic politics and the project of state-building.

Instead of encouraging and pushing disaffected members of the population to collectively organize themselves around commonly shared issues and concerns and insist on wider spaces for political participation, the present discourse of good governance only serves to limit the political space by privileging a specific form of knowledge and sets of ideological practices defined as democratic. The turn to local governance, the champions of local administrative politics, the managerialization of political affairs represent this emerging trend. While these new breed of state managers are capable of crafting innovative plans to stimulate economic growth and provide social welfare, their deployment as the final and unquestioned authorities in development insulate these individuals and their institutions from public scrutiny. Public accountability while strengthened in some occasions is increasingly cast in terms that the general public does not understand.

A lot of these emerging leaders represent “new blood”. Many of them did not come from ruling oligarchic families and do not possess land-based or market-based power or violent private armies. They have been elected into political offices by virtue of their promise of efficient government service and their good track records in non-political fields. What unites them however with oligarchs, especially the enlightened ones, is their hatred and abhorrence for the chaotic and dirty world of political exercises. They like feeding the people, giving them houses and perhaps even jobs. But once these people start to organize into antagonistic forces and are able to challenge their authority, they label them as destabilizers – hindrances to their definition of progress. They call them anti-democratic because of the people’s tendency to subvert formal institutions and take grievances outside of the narrow spaces of deliberation preferred by these professional and expert leaders. What these professionals or “champions” as one organization labeled them miss out is the need in Philippine politics today for the collective organization of the Filipino people beyond the level of the soup kitchen or the relief operation evacuation center. They don’t like politics because politics exposes their ideological prejudices. And because the nature of ideology is characterized by irrationality, they are unable to engage in passionate debates with antagonistic forces.

Both sets of (anti)political actors – the enlightened oligarchs and these oligarchies of the enlightened will not do the country any good. They must be rejected. They don’t get politics. They don’t get democracy.