Philippine Elections: The Politics of Symbolism

From the Inquirer:

A day after unofficial election results showed her ahead in the Senate race, Grace Poe evaded a television reporter who wanted to shadow her, received business cards handed to her staff by strangers and had Pad Thai noodles for lunch…

Nalokah (crazed),” was how Poe described herself in a solicited text message upon learning that she was No. 1 in the partial and unofficial tallies aired on television hours after voting precincts closed on Monday.

“I was very surprised, I was blown away,” she said…

Poe realized during the campaign that people wanted a closure to her father’s death. She said these people saw her “as the image of FPJ in defense of the oppressed, the champion of the poor” in his movies.

The result of the Philippine national elections demonstrates and validates theories and academic studies showing why elections are nothing but about feel good politics and of the myth of the rational voter.

The lists of winners consist of families from the political elites, celebrities or people with popular symbolical representations or a combination of.

As I wrote back then on the US elections

It would be conceivably naïve to rely on political rhetoric of competing candidates as basis for examining and projecting prospective policies.

Politicians usually appeal to the views the median voter to ensnare votes. In other words, politicians, who are running for office, are predisposed to say what the public wants or expects to hear.

On the obverse end, people hardly vote for policies but for symbolisms which these candidates represent. Thus aspiring politicians work hard to project themselves as symbols to reinforce people’s biases.

And this is why politicians usually end up with unfulfilled promises or have usually gone against their rhetorical assurances made during the campaign sorties.

Voters become useful only to politicians when election season arrives.

Yet the oppressor-oppressed political axis (Arnold Kling: Three Languages of Politics) which has been embedded deeply in human nature represents how domestic politics works, or how local politicians have exploited the Progressive perspective of justifying ‘social justice’ through coercive redistribution.

This serves as another reason why the Philippine boom will soon be revealed as a paper tiger. Social policies will be directed mostly towards redistribution than to real economic reforms. This means more government spending that will be financed by higher taxes, debt and inflation.

All these validates my view of the quasi-mob rule way of the selection process, which lays foundation to the local version of social democracy that has been skewed to, or even tacitly designed for the benefit of the political class and their allies.

As an old saw goes "the more things change the more they stay the same"