Sara's date with history and appointment with destiny

I wrote this on November 19, 2020, musing about comes next after President Duterte’s term. Now, that Vice President Sara Duterte has announced that she is running for president in 2028; I feel some of the things I wrote here captures the current moment.

In Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Max Weber distinguishes three general types of authority: legal, traditional, and charismatic. For Weber, the social milieu determines which type of authority would be effective in commanding the obedience of the ruled. Weber explained that legal authority, a leadership based on rational grounds, will only be effective if the political order of society has already evolved into an “impersonal order,” in which the bureaucracy is working effectively. The ruled obey the ruler because of their faith in the legal framework undergirding the authority of the leader. Traditional authority is leadership based on tradition. Rulers command obedience because the ruled believe “in the sanctity of immemorial traditions” legitimizing the authority of the rulers. Lastly, charismatic authority is based on the popular recognition that the leader has a heroic mission to fulfil, a date with history, and an appointment with destiny.

Moments of great social crisis require extraordinary deeds. They are the fertile grounds for charismatic leadership. Weber believed that system change is the deed of an exceptional person: a charismatic leader who “seizes the task for which he is destined and demands that others obey and follow him by virtue of his mission.” By implication, the charismatic leader fails when the people perceived that he is an emperor with no clothes. Thus, the charismatic leader must constantly prove himself by actually performing heroic deeds that bring about a new order. As Luciano Cavalli put in Charisma and Twentieth-Century Politics, charismatic leaders must free “his followers from any sense of guilt towards old laws and principles, and give them new laws and principles, arousing a sense of obligation and moral duty towards them.”

Rodrigo Duterte won in 2016 because of a citizenry disenchanted with the Aquino Administration. The indecisiveness of Aquino and other myriad incompetencies served as fertile ground for a very charismatic leader like Duterte to win. But he wasn’t just charismatic, he had experience and will. His presidency lifted the veil of hypocrisy in Philippine politics and the fig leaf of decency covering the dirty genitals of the self-righteous. He effectively weakened the century-long political power of the Catholic Church. Coinciding with his presidency is the democratization of the source of information in the Philippines, which ended the monopoly of the thoroughly corrupt Philippine mainstream media that never reformed itself at all. Duterte’s leadership is the rite of passage of this very young Republic into a brave new world.

The next presidential election in 2022 will be a very significant moment in Philippine political history. Voters have to decide where this rite of passage would lead to after Duterte’s reign marked by the dynamic interplay of creation and destruction. His presidency isn’t definitely silk to adorn our country but sandpaper to polish the roughness of our nation.

We still need another sandpaper. Someone who possesses the same decisiveness. Someone who can still lead with an iron fist but cushioned with softer gloves. Someone who’d appeal to our most progressive ideals but at the same time sobered by pragmatism.

These qualities seem to drive the clamour for Mayor and Colonel Sara Duterte to run for president. Sara isn’t an extension of her father. She is her own person. In fact, her father fears her. One of my readers aptly described her: Inday Sara inherited the best qualities of her dad and a mutated version of the unlikable traits of his father. Add to it beauty, fierceness, and charisma, wit…” The Filipino wokes who hate his father would surely be divided once she runs for president as most of her policy preferences are aligned with theirs. She's the epitome of a cool chick - has tattoos, rides big bikes, reads -- I mean she nicknamed her kids Sharky and Stonefish!

She has her own style of leadership. If we’re going to use Weber’s typology: she exudes both charismatic and legal types of authority. She has a good mix of soft and hard power. She has the charm of a skilled diplomat and the sternness of a military commander.

“I abhor stupidity and mediocre work, so I respectfully request you to tow the line,” she said to the civil servants of Davao City in 2007 when she was elected Vice Mayor. And indeed, she’s known in Davao City as very strict to civil servants — even stricter than her father. Yet this strictness is complemented by her very charming persona. If you watch her interviews, you wouldn’t imagine that this very soft-spoken woman would ever punch a court sheriff who proceeded to demolish houses in a squatter settlement despite her request to wait for her first. She wanted to talk to the residents and mediate in order to avoid a riot.

Fierce. That’s the best way to describe this woman. Fierce in all sense of the word. Her political fierceness first fleshed itself out in the national scene when she maneuvered the change in the House of Speakership that enthroned former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo at the helm of the House of Representatives. And in 2019, the coalition she formed — Hugpong Ng Pagbabago — won 9 out of the 12 seats in the senatorial elections. In other words, she knows how to form a team that wins!

The arch of her political rise is swift and it bends toward a higher call of duty. She has a date with history and an appointment of destiny. And no matter how she resists it, she has no choice but to flow towards it like a river to an ocean.