Challenge and opportunity
Challenge and opportunity
“Defending democracy” and “upholding the rule of law” have long been in the United States of America’s ideological arsenal of justification for its intervention in the affairs of other nations. But if we are to believe its own President, his political party, and much of its media, the country Filipinos trust the most is in crisis because both are under threat at home. Rather than the foreign foes the US has waged multiple wars against, it is its own citizens who have made that danger imminent.
Fueled both by malice as well as disinformation, that crisis, because occurring in one of world’s supposedly “most mature democracies,” nevertheless has an upside to it. It underscores how even more fragile democracy can be in such countries as the Philippines once lies, because repeated so often, assume the appearance of truths.
In the United States it has alerted those who take democratic rights for granted to the perils to those rights that lurk in the economic and political establishment from which they choose their leaders. For the first time in US history, a sitting President not only described his 2020 rival for the White House as a liar and as “a threat to democracy” but also as “a defeated former President” who refused to respect the peaceful transfer of power and who instead “held a dagger at the throat of American democracy.”
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