There are more than a few similarities between US President Donald J. Trump and former President Rodrigo Roa Duterte.
Both can be jarring by flouting conventional rules. Trump has threatened to pressure Canada to become the 51st US State, to take over Panama Canal, to buy Greenland from the Danes, and to suggest that Ukraine, not Russia, was the aggressor in the Ukraine war. Former President Duterte swore at the oligarchs and unilaterally canceled the government contract with the private water concessionaires.
Both have had a checkered history with the opposite sex. Trump lost a sexual abuse case filed by journalist E.J. Caroll who said Trump raped her in a department store. He has been accused of paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep silent over a one-night encounter. Trump has had multiple partners, starting with Ivana and Marla Maples, divorcing them, and ending up with the current First Lady, Melania.
Duterte’s interactions with the female sex haven’t been less controversial. He’s known to make frequent sexist jokes, and he even kissed a married female supporter once in public. He talked about shooting female rebels in the genitals. He reportedly said he sexually assaulted a maid when he was a teenager. Duterte has been separated from his wife, the mother of his daughter Sara, for many years now and has been living with partner Honeylet Avancena, a former beauty queen, with whom he has a daughter.
Both are known to make shocking, norm-busting statements. Trump spoke of mass deportations of illegal immigrants, of turning Gaza into the Riviera of the Middle East by the mass deportation of its population to Egypt and Jordan, and of declaring martial law in the United States.
During his presidency, Duterte made many expletive-ridden speeches and once showed a middle finger at the EU over the latter’s demands for respect for human rights. He has expressed admiration for Hitler and insulted Obama and the Pope. He boasted about killing thousands of drug criminals.
However, they share similarities not just in style but also in their representation of a break from the past, a historic shift in the political and social paradigm of the past.
Trumpism represents a break from the post-World War II liberal democratic order. It’s the order in which the United States took on the leadership of the “free world” after World War II. In this order, the US acted as the global policeman, supported NATO and multilateral institutions like the United Nations, and assumed the security of Japan and South Korea. In economics, the US facilitated free trade among nations and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, promoted globalization, established NAFTA (North Atlantic Free Trade Association with Canada and Mexico), and eased the entry of China into the World Trade Organization.
Trumpism is the political reaction to the dark side of this liberal democratic order. The post-World War II order has led to the deindustrialization of the US Midwest and evisceration of high-paying manufacturing jobs, the enrichment of coastal elites, the rise of China as a competing power with a substantial balance of trade surplus over the US, and depletion of US resources on “forever wars.”
Dutertismo, on the other hand, is a reaction to the failures of the so-called “Yellow” order, the one established by the 1987 Constitution after the People Power Revolution. The 1987 Constitution expanded the Filipino First and Filipino Only provisions in the Constitution. This has led to the monopolization of key industries (the most concentrated economy in Asia, according to the World Bank) in the absence of foreign competition, and a rent-seeking economy. Market concentration has led to high prices, bad service, and the absence of innovation from monopolistic firms, which has made the economy uncompetitive and inhospitable to foreign investments.
Reflecting the ideas of the coalition behind the People Power Revolution – the anti-Marcos oligarchy, the Catholic Church, social democratic elements, and the communist rebels – the 1987 Constitution also embraced social justice through redistribution. Equalization was to be achieved through agrarian reform. This was codified in the 1988 Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL).
However, Philippine-style agrarian reform replaced the landlord with an inefficient and corrupt government, burdened the Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries (ARBs) with 30-year amortizations, restricted the land market, prevented successful farmers from expanding, created property rights uncertainty, and saved the big landlords at the expense of middle-class landlords. The result after 38 years is land fragmentation and a decline in agricultural productivity. Food prices are high relative to incomes, and the country is increasingly dependent on food imports.
Meanwhile, the leftist and pro-labor elements of the coalition, combined with the populist dictates of an electoral democracy, drove out labor-intensive industries with high minimum wages (relative to productivity), rigid labor security regulations and labor laws, and 26 paid holidays. The monopolists didn’t care about opposing high minimum wages as they could afford high minimum wages due to the high monopoly rents they were making. The result has been deindustrialization and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs, from garments to shoemaking, to countries like Bangladesh and Vietnam. The exodus of Filipino labor to find jobs abroad accelerated, leading to high social costs and even broken families.
The 22,000-word Constitution, one of the longest and most detailed in the world, embedded statism in the quest for “social justice.” The result is a regulatory and protectionist state rife with corruption and government inefficiencies, from the allocation of quotas on corn imports to permits and licenses to put up power plants.
Against this backdrop, the expletive-spouting, tough-talking provincial mayor won by promising that “change was coming” and a brutal war against criminality. While Duterte initially used the communist Left to win an electoral victory, even giving them two seats in his Cabinet, he later turned against them. He launched a successful high-budget anti-Communist campaign, the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) and saw the communist fronts dissolving to a mere three at the end of his term.
There was a method in his madness. Duterte systematically went after the political foundations of the “Yellow” order. He attacked the Catholic Church and even said he was a victim of clerical abuse. He disenfranchised ABS-CBN and attacked the owners of the Philippine Daily Inquirer. He encouraged his business crony, Dennis Uy, to challenge the telco duopoly.
Just as the re-election of Trump reflected a hard shift to the Right, so did the reign of Duterte. The election of President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr. is an extension of Dutertismo, the shift to the Right and the reaction against the “Yellow” order. Who can be more un-Yellow than the son of the leader whom the “Yellow” and leftist forces deposed? He was also elected under the theme of “Unity,” or the unification of the anti-Yellow, rightist forces.
The split between him and Sara Duterte is a conflict between the two main factions along the same political spectrum. Marcos Jr. is close to the Manila-based, corporate elite while Duterte reflects the provincial-based and non-traditional (some say pro-Chinese and criminal) Rightist sentiments. However, both show a fundamental shift of the political order — a decline of the forces associated with the 1986 People Power Revolution, which include the “Yellow” oligarchy, the Catholic Church, and the Communist left.
There has been a fundamental political shift in the global order by the rise of Trumpism and in the local order, by the rise of Dutertismo. We must recognize this shift if we are to understand our politics and our world.
Calixto V. Chikiamco is a member of the board of IDEA (Institute for Development and Econometric Analysis).