Politics in the 2020s is stranger than fiction. This week, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the Philippines’ infamous dictator, took to the streets of Manila to protest corruption, more than three decades ago, to win the presidency by a landslide against veteran Vice President Lenny Robredo. were ready. , Even by the standards of fake news, supporters of Marcos Jr. have set a new gold standard. Using YouTube to live-stream his rallies, he has claimed in several ways that the Marcos era of the 1980s was characterized by high economic growth and that the election of Marcos was predicted by Nostradamus.
Rumors have circulated that a portion of the gold received from the royal family from his election will be shared with the wider population, even glorifying allegations of corruption against his late father for taking billions of dollars from the country’s treasury. As Americanism goes, you can’t make up this stuff. Years ago, a Facebook executive described the Philippines as “patient zero” in the global propaganda wars, as the New York Times (NYT) observed last week. But coming on the heels of two terms of strong governance by Rodrigo Duterte, whose daughter Sarah will be Marcos’ vice president, Marcos’ victory marks a new low in the spread of liberal democracy. It is exactly 25 years since Fareed Zakaria warned about the rise of liberal democracies in a prominent article for Foreign Affairs magazine. Zakaria was referring to leaders with whom to win an autocratic free election and establish governments with little regard for the rule of law. Over the past several years, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Donald Trump in the US, Recep Erdogan in Turkey and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil have been signs of this trend. ,
Given this gloomy background, cynics could argue that there is nothing unusual about Marcos’s thumping election victory. But liberal democracy is now an epidemic. It is hard to miss a British prime minister who has ruled the country with such disregard for facts and prime ministerial protocol as Boris Johnson. Still, in last week’s local elections, Johnson’s Conservatives may have lost ground, but did better than expected outside London. In late April, while Johnson was in New Delhi, Britain’s parliament voted to investigate whether he had lied about breaking rules by attending a staff party during the lockdown. Britain is grappling with labor shortages in a wide variety of industries. Some of this manpower shortage is a direct result of Britain’s exit from the European Union. Johnson and others had campaigned for it, falsely claiming that Brexit would result in hundreds of millions of pounds being saved to fund the British National Health Service.
Such ‘alternative facts’, a delightful euphemism for a construction coined by then-advisor to Trump, Kellyanne Conway, tend to win elections over and over again. She used the term in January 2017, and it remains the muddy foundation of social media-influenced politics. Facebook, Google and others have done little to police it. The propaganda is now so pervasive and so viral, it is worth remembering that one spirit that Pandora locked in a jar in Greek myth was Elpis, which translates as ‘hope’. It’s hard to be hopeful about democracy in a world dominated by fake news on social media.
Consider that President Bolsonaro has a good chance of winning re-election in Brazil later this year, despite several instances of misgovernance, including claims in October 2021 that people vaccinated against Covid at a higher rate was contracting AIDS. Groups of supporters of the Brazilian president on social media, described by opponents as an ‘office of hate’, have also campaigned to completely scrap the elections in favor of military rule, with Bolsonaro in charge. Meanwhile, US elections this month in places like Ohio and West Virginia confirmed that Trump still has a dominant position over America’s Republican Party. Yale-educated venture capitalist and Hillbilly Allegy author J.D. Vance had the most surprising victory in the Republican primary in Ohio. He once called Trump “the Hitler of America” before becoming an ardent supporter of the former president. Among Vance’s alternative facts was that US President Joseph Biden has tried to punish Republican voters for being addicted to the opioid fentanyl. Voting for him and Biden’s opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin is because Putin does not support transgender rights.
Such nonsense can be laughed at or cried out in turn, but its spread through social media, an opioid in itself, makes it very difficult to win over moderate, liberal policies. President Emmanuel Macron recently succeeded France, but almost entirely because older voters supported him. A recent book by Matthew Continetti on the US Republican Party argues that Trump merely amplified the extreme views that had always existed within his support base by his clever use of social media. Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 2012 was partly attributed to his shying away from extreme views on immigration. This week, the NYT reported that far-right activists were acting as a watchdog and interception of immigrant children at the Arizona border because they believe they need to be protected from sex trafficking gangs in the US. There is little evidence that this is true. This may prove to be one of the defining principles in the upcoming US elections. Any resemblance to Indian politics, from cow slaughter watchers to fake news of ‘illegal’ migrants to dynastic promises of revival, is purely coincidental.
Rahul Jacob is a Mint columnist and a former foreign correspondent for the Financial Times.