What is the consequence of a political regime’s “high moral ground” posturing to the strengthening of democratic institutions and the struggles of democratic agents in their engagements with fellow social forces and State apparatuses?
In this presentation, I situate the Aquino government’s emergent practices and understanding of democratic politics during its first year in office within the shifting terrains and character of global neoliberal capitalism and the corresponding socio-cultural shifts instantiated and demanded by its deepening and hegemonic resilience.
In contrast with a number of observations that lament the ineffectiveness and bemoan the lack of concrete and coherent policy direction of Aquino’s “matuwid na daan” program of government which finds expression in Paul Hutchcroft’s inquiry – “but are good intentions enough?” – I suggest that the complains are missing out the more disturbing implications of a government that claims to embody a simultaneously localized and globalized form of moral political subjectivity through which manifold cultural practices on the level of civil society and individual affairs can be folded and harnessed for the purpose of reproducing relations of exploitation and oppression generated by the dominant system of global economic accumulation and production. As a preliminary aside, that the most intense public sphere debates generated during Aquino’s first year in office focused on what appears to be “wars of culture” is, I read, indicative of how such moral posturing has been capable of reducing political subjects (or producing political subjects) who are either consciously or unconsciously bearers and either aggressive or passive promoters of transcendental yet at once, territorialized markers of a particular cultural configuration or self and collective identification.
Instead of rehearsing and giving credence to this multipartisan and multisectoral observation, I would like here to take stock of Aquino’s high moral ground politics and the cultural practices as well as discourses (or even counter discourses) it enables by recognizing it as a powerful and fascinating new modality of soliciting social consent and creating political subjects willing – consciously or unconsciously – to accept the bitter pill of the country’s participation and integration into the global neoliberal system. In short, Aquino’s “matuwid na daan” is for me, sufficient, coherent and systematic a political program that has far reaching consequences that we can, given our naturalized visions of what democratic politics is, imagine and at present comprehend. Only by acknowledging this coherence, I suppose, can we begin to identify its contradictory deployments and the spaces engendered by these contradictions for pushing a more radical democratic alternative. Simply put, in my view, for the purposes of Aquino’s administration and the political projects it seeks to accomplish within the ambit of deepening our democracy’s subjection to the rules of the global market, “good intentions” are more than enough. The more relevant political question for democratic theorizing and practice is, “for whom?”
To begin answering this, we need first to describe the global and local infrastructural terrain upon which this claim to moral governance is situated. Foremost, the mystical and seductive power of such a brand of politics derives from the evident need to dismantle the capture of key democratic institutions that occurred during the preceding Arroyo regime. But to view Arroyo’s regime as a mere consequence of her personal or subjectivist evil inclinations and the set of social relations that supported such a condition is to fail to recognize her government’s participation in the global, rather, imperial assemblage of militarization and its associated market disciplines of consumerism, financial speculation and unreined corporate driven development . State and regime character, writes Charles Tilly, is defined less by their internal dynamics than by the global and international dynamics that perpetuate latent domestic conditions. States and the character of democracy they engender are more than domestic creatures, “international” actors embedded in a world system of capitalist modernity and inter-state competition. With the explosion of financial markets around the world in the past couple of years and the state-initiated market reforms and rhetoric that ensued in its continuing aftermath, the perpetuation of the logic of neoliberalism appears now to be possible only by expanding the discourse on leanness and austerity – what Thomas Friedman has called, “the golden straitjacket” of neoliberal reforms – beyond what used to be simply within the scope of state institutions and structural adjustment. This of course, has been ongoing in the past few decades with the transformation of discourses of citizenship across the world into consuming clients of political parties and electoral institutions, which Wendy Brown has described as signaling the end of “liberal democracy” as we know it. But if the idealized consumerist subject of the 90s to the early 2000s was guided by unhampered freedom of Adam Smith’s laissez faire economic logic and even hedonistic enjoyment of self-choice and uninhibited self-affirmation (which quite interestingly, Jean Elshtaine observes, paralleled and to a certain extent legitimized, rather than contested by the rise, multiplication and proliferation of multiculturalist politics of identity, race, gender and religion), the emergent privileged political subject today given the persistence of economic crises across the world is one characterized by sobriety and humbled by the demand for it to transcend personal desires and interests and think of collective goods. The renewed vigilance of states in the global north to curtail market excesses and to reintroduce social welfare policies are thus to be read not quite as a move away from capital but as the present moment through which capital and its social relations are today being reproduced. Capitalist states, wrote Nicos Poulantzas in the 1970s, must indeed remain relatively autonomous from capital if they are to sustain the capitalist mode of accumulation. In the same manner, the growing clamor for formal and liberal democracy among countries in the Middle East and North Africa are pointing towards the seeming revenge of Kant’s categorical imperative – represented by the discursive construction of democracy as a “universal good” residing in the constitution of the “People-as-One” – a universalization if you wish, of the Cory People Power Principle, which makes the son’s appeal to it quite scary. Rather than democratic, this is quite fascistic if you think about it. And Aquino’s appeal to moral leadership – founded on “national”, “cultural” and “Christian” values of hope, truth and collective good – participates in the attempt to impose a paradoxically transcendent yet territorial set of values meant to establish a level of control to neoliberal capitalism gone wayward.
On the one hand, we can thus be contented by treating Aquino’s government as merely responding to the needs of holding Arroyo accountable for her crimes, or on the other hand, we can also speculate and treat his discourse of political moralism as a cultural practice that sustains the very system of accumulation and production that legitimated the preceding Arroyo government. For the purpose of emancipatory democratic politics, I propose we consider the second argumentative track.
But first, let me clarify what kind of democracy I am referring to here that is threatened by this politics of hope and morality. Certainly, I am not portraying democracy in its minimalistic sense – that is as a rights-based system of political competition or its “pluralistic” sense – that is as a neutral political space devoid of any metaphysical or ontological claims. Neither am I harking for a democracy of mere communicative rationality or a vibrant public space populated by the most varied political voices recognizing a commonly constituted system of rules and procedures. All three shares in what Chantal Mouffe calls the enactment of a politics without adversaries – a politics without enemies, a politics without antagonisms. Instead, by democracy I understand what Jacques Ranciere refers to as “…neither a form of government that enables oligarchies to rule in the name of the people, nor is it a form of society that governs the power of commodities. It is the action that constantly wrestles the monopoly of public life from oligarchic governments and the omnipotence over lives from the power of wealth.” All three proceed from an implicit moralism as well: the identification of justice with politics. In contrast, central to the agonistic pluralism conceptualization of democratic life is the irreducibility and ineliminability of conflict and social antagonisms and the disavowal of a fully moral public life yet at the same time, of a fully power-driven social order.
From the vantage point of this kind of democracy – which has gained currency among democratic theorists under the label of “radical agonistic pluralism” – conflicts and antagonisms can be reduced through any or all of the following ways: first, by pre-constituting political subjects prior to their engagement thus allowing the theorist or institutional vanguards of the democratic public space to delineate what forms of political subjectivity and voices can and cannot participate in public life; second, by assuming the possibility and desirability of a full consensus without exclusions; and third, by refusing and predetermining confrontations between social actors in favor of process-oriented and goal-oriented aggregation of these actors’s supposed interests and competing claims to truth and values.
This is where a politics of morality becomes a threatening form of political leadership and participation in democratic life. The penchant of Aquino to naturalize the values that he holds on to and its deployment via images and markers of institutional and official state memory and social history is involved in what Slavoj Zizek calls in “The Sublime Object of Ideology” as the practice of “symbolic identification” – a condition in which one does not simply desire the represented symbols of power and its articulating agents but an identification with the very gaze itself that produces the idealized subject. Quite simplistically, this entails idealization and romanticization of one’s very articulation as the subject of the gaze of power and one’s participation in the very process. Implicit in this idealization is the invocation of the violence of State power – in this case, Aquino’s normalized and naturalized visions of social order, development and progress – in punishing or inscribing into normalizing processes and strategies deviants of the idealized image and the consequent blindness to the material and historical sources of these values. In my view, this intensifies what already exists today as “holier-than-thou” modalities of engaging contemporary social issues and as such vitiates the work of politics as manipulating social forces and images to arrive at some provisional outcome.
In this view, potential adversaries to democratic debate are inhibited from becoming adversaries as one already casts against them a suspicious gaze reflective of the normalizing gaze of state power. Counter-discourses are easily subsumed into its logic by seeking to participate in redistributive tactics rather than reconstituting the very political order through which democratic life is sustained.
I would also like to think that the economy of “good intentions” is irredeemably oligarchic and is in fact a trope that legitimizes the character of Aquino’s assemblage of political allies and preferred strategies of governance – one united by a supposedly self-transparent conviction to save the Philippines from evil. It is grossly Manichean at worst – one that posits a stark contrast between good and evil. By extension, civil society and public debate are demanded to asunder to a logic of “evenness and smoothness” rather than the thickness and density that democratic theorists see as essential to democratic politics. This is most clearly seen in the intensity by which claims to “rights” today have become fields of incommensurability and uncompromising politics of convictions that resist dialogue precisely because of the naturalization of the claim to possessing “good intentions”. Debates are transformed into debates of who really possess the better intention or the most authentic intention rather than which aspects of each side can be pursued and harmonized to sustain a common objective. Is this not precisely what Plato understood as the characteristic form of oligarchic societies – societies divided rather than conversant, societies alienated and indifferent rather than agonizing over each other’s claims in the public space.
By a politics of moralism then, I am not just referring to a myth or a fiction on the part of Aquino, not even to some sort of bourgeois false consciousness. Rather, I would like to propose that we consider the space of Aquino’s moralistic claims as the exemplary space for emancipatory struggles – rather than put it aside and focus on the policy aspects of his regimes. Both fields I suppose need to be seen as connected with the ongoing shifts in the global division of labor and reconfiguration of transnational class power. The challenge for democratizing forces, I suppose is not to be seduced by this – either by seeking to clarify it or concretize it or live up to it – but to resist being captured by its signifiying practices.
