Long shadows between DC and Manila

This column comes out almost a week after the 2024 United States Elections on Nov. 5. The world seems to have settled to the globally upsetting news of the return of Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party to the White House and Capitol Hill. Both have been elected with unquestionable majorities (at least compared to the previous 2016 and 2020 cycles). A Republican victory, bolstered by the mainstreaming of far-right, white supremacist, and fascist efforts, is an ominous portent for the world.

For those whose politics and values spring from global and liberal norms, there is much to grieve and grit our teeth for. For many like me who have been led by these values to global solidarity, political activism, and development work, it is another indictment of the weakness, if not strategic poverty, of our position. The concurrent rise of countries whose hostility to universal human rights (of which China and Russia are only the largest) continue to belie prospects towards global peace, addressing global climate change, and ending inequality across nations.

It is not my intent to cast a further pall of gloom on a disappointing week. However, steeling ourselves for the next four years (nay, the next decade) requires us to answer hard questions not only on the impact of America’s politics on the world. What genuine questions must the Philippines contend with moving forward? For now, I offer three.

First: Why was Trump’s return even possible? What might it mean for other democratic countries like us?

The possible answers are as myriad, overlapping, and impossible to reconcile as there are opinion-makers. Some will chalk it up to the unabated outpouring of money from billionaire lobbyists, campaign finance laws be damned. Some would blame the haphazard, latecomer and inward-looking campaign run by Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, despite its forward-looking ethos. Others see it an indictment not of Harris’ character, but of the Democratic Party’s failure under outgoing President Joe Biden to address the lingering causes of post-COVID socio-economic insecurity. Let’s not even get to the “culture wars” that entrenched Americans’ intransigence against each other.

These invite relevant, and lamentable, comparison to the tragedies of former Vice-President Leni Robredo’s campaign against current President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr. back in 2022. Even now, liberal institutions, policies, and political leaders continue to prove themselves lacking strategic innovation and in denial about the destruction of the EDSA Revolution’s symbolic capital. With these unaddressed, all the genuine enthusiasm, innovations, and heroic efforts of grassroots movements and mobilized citizens to bolster and prop up institutional liberal projects are doomed to disappointment, if not disillusion.

Second: Is a second Trump presidency heralding the irreversible decline of America’s role in global affairs?

This is usually asked despairingly, with an uncritical acceptance of American hegemony in global governance. Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, the aftermath of the War on Terror, and the 2008 financial crisis, America’s role in global affairs is much contested. Critiques come across the spectrum, from competing powers like Russia and China who actively undermine global institutions, to global solidarity movements whose advocacies have been much injured by America’s adventurist, techno-muscular, and unabashedly neoliberal foreign policy. America’s countenancing of war crimes and atrocities from preferred governments, plus its abating of corporate excess even at the expense of climate regulation, invite rightful opprobrium.

For both, American decline is perhaps long in coming. But it is only to the global solidarity movements that we should listen in good faith. The loss of credible American participation in multilateral affairs presages the weakening of international institutions dependent on American-led blocs’ funding. This also leads to the loss of global norms which served as the foundation of universal human rights, development policy and investment, as well as the expansion of global civil society space.

Crucially, contraction of American intervention may mean the evaporation of development and military aid to those long reliant on it. This ranges from the unconscionable (like Israel’s genocide in Gaza) to those also at the forefront of battling Russian and Chinese aggression (such as Ukraine, Taiwan, and our fight in the West Philippine Sea).

The Philippine security sector’s optimism that America will not retreat from us, even with the Republican Party’s hostility to internationalism, is perhaps informed by previous experience. Yet it is at this very moment that the old certainties are weakest and being upended. Prudence requires us to look to ourselves, to newer allies, and to friends closer to home.

Third: What should Filipino democratic advocates take away from the US election?

The continuing degeneration of American politics need not despair us more than it already has. As Philippine politics continues to be under the grip of unabated clientelism, vulnerabilities to disinformation (thanks in part to American social media conglomerates), and the continuing isolation of our civil society under changing demographics, we must now confront the elephants in our own living rooms. America has no monopoly on a “perfect democratic model.” Democratic potential starts in acknowledging our people have been much abused, denied their opportunities, and made overdependent on the munificence of the elites holding them economic hostage. The challenge of “saving democracy” must start by asking: Have our people taken ownership of the democratic society we supposedly live under? To what extent are the people we “fight for” already developing skewed values, drifting away from democratic norms? To what extent, then, must we first talk and listen to the people instead of mounting our kneejerk actions, reactions, and mobilizations? This last point, ironically, is where we keep falling short.

Our own clock is ticking. The 2025 midterm elections do not offer much optimism. These will pile up greater hurdles for the 2028 succession. We can no longer say with a straight face that we were not warned.

“The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. But what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow.” — Alexander Herzen, 1849

Hansley A. Juliano serves as instructor with the Department of Political Science, School of Social Sciences, Ateneo de Manila University. He is finishing his doctoral research at the Graduate School of International Development, Nagoya University. He also serves as a radio show producer for Radyo Katipunan 87.9, Jesuit Communications Foundation.