A little over a week since the May 9 elections, and one understand why those on the side of democracy, Left, Liberal, and civil society, feel like we’ve been robbed.

In that sense, everyone’s performing like victims. Some are raising their fists against the irregularities on election day—dysfunctional vote counting machines, dysfunctional SD cards, long lines because of both, voters disenfranchised. Some have flexed their privilege: not going to help the poor anymore, not going to help nation anymore, bahala kayo sa buhay niyo. Some have shot back at actual people who they know voted for Marcos: magbayad kayo ng utang niyo! A day or two after elections, we heard of some small NGOs losing their funders—purportedly, people were not wanting to help the new government at all, and that is equated with not wanting to help the most vulnerable.

Many are spreading all sorts of disinformation about the president-elect, letting this permeate social media accounts in the way that rumors do. It is fueled, shared across platforms, thrown around Viber and messenger GCs for good measure. Never mind fact checking—it always feels good to have our perceptions proven right by any kind of information at all.

But I guess we want to forgive ourselves for these responses? Emotions are high. We thought we were going to win after all—especially if we believed surveys were unreliable. And now we are grasping at straws, picking the stories and narratives that serve our purpose, because it is the only way to keep the fire burning.

But at a time like this one, these responses, public as they are, do nothing but fuel this divide that already exists, a polarization that we now know is really about 14 million vs 31 million. And we need to understand that it doesn’t matter whether or not you think or believe polarization is happening—the fact is, it already is.

And here is where the bigger picture is important. Because it really is the only way we can actually move forward productively, beyond the Duterte-Marcos-Duterte VS Liberal-Left divides. That polarization will be the death of us, and it will be difficult to win when we refuse to act on that very basic fact of the current political landscape: the divide is huge, deliberately-funded, and always-fueled by Left and Liberal reactions to whatever it is that the current Duterte government, and the future Marcos-Duterte government, will throw at us. When reactions are expected, and media and other institutions are discredited, little else matters but what will gain traction in the minds of the majority of the people.

And we are not that majority. Online and on ground.

This loss is an opportunity to stop feeding the machinery of the other side. But first we need to take stock. That means looking at the bigger picture, which need not be about being dismissive of this election at all, or simply falling silent about it. To me at least, the more productive way to view it is not to insist that we were cheated—that requires incontrovertible proof that the 31 million is a false number, which we do not have at the scale that a declaration of a failure of elections requires.

Instead we call it what it is: a robbery. But it didn’t happen on election day. It was a well-planned, well-strategized theft. And sadly, it was happening right under our noses.  

We were robbed of this election the moment the Marcoses were allowed to return, the moment the Marcoses were allowed to run for office, the moment they started appearing as fodder for pop culture—magazine covers, TV shows, and later on social media content. We were robbed of this election the moment the Marcoses started to strategize how they could get back into the highest seat of the land.

It was going to be easy enough, but they needed to take time. Loyalists were still all over government—if not the same people who were loyal to their father, then the children and grandchildren who were told stories of Marcos greatness. The same could be said of big business and oligarchs, the character of which is to be loyal to those who will collude with big money, never mind people and nation. Political dynasties might have been the easiest to tap—many of those hark back to Marcos years. Certainly they could also depend on those Congress Reps and Senators whose parents used to work for the Marcoses—those were the ones who would let them be. After all, if these children of government officials complicit in Marcos plunder and corruption could be in public office, so could the Marcos children. 

No strategy would be complete without a keen sense of culture and the arts, the academe and media, especially since these are the spaces that have kept Marcos history alive and well. Arts and culture has always been a mess in this country: there is no real security for cultural workers, which ensures that few can actually decide to engage fully with nation and all that means. With so many creative workers, and few opportunities, the chances of culture colluding with and being complicit in the return of the Marcoses was easy to imagine—after all, so many creatives worked with Duterte, many others only care about the cash, never mind the politics.  

The academe is also easy to dismiss: ivory towers are strong in this country, so much of history is written in English, and even in Tagalog doesn’t really speak to the majority who don’t go to university. The gap between scholarship and the bigger populace is a perennial crisis. Between the arts and culture sector and the academe, it must have also become clear early on that there is a divide in terms of forms that we employ: Marcos-critical exhibits in museums will always have a niche audience; as opposed to yet another crass comedy that lives off virality by the new creative that’s raking in cash for some film capitalist who cares little about nation and values—which has a mass audience, thank you very much. There is a different audience for what are deemed as literary and historical publications, and for books that are on Wattpad. There is digital content where it’s practically a free-for-all.

Which brings us to the Marcoses’ need for an alternative to mainstream media, which would just be too critical for this  comeback project. Social media platforms were free and available, and if they planned their content early enough, could take the place of the mainstream. Besides, Duterte had effectively discredited media and the academe; and arts and culture was just exhausted by Duterte, too. The Marcoses knew that somewhere in this landscape, they could carve the space they needed for this return. 

And they did.

And we watched this robbery unfold. Some thought it was harmless, these movements of the Marcoses—certainly it would take more to win a Presidential election. Many others thought that doing things to remind the public, over and over, about the Marcoses’ sins to nation would be enough to keep them from winning the election.

But I think, as with Duterte, our strongest impulse was to think that this was all beneath us. We looked down on the shamelessness of it all, the lies and falsehoods they could spew without batting an eyelash. We cringed at the crassness of their discourse, we laughed at the absurdity of the troll farms, cringed at the bad films, called out the kabastusan. We dismissed the narratives that we knew were lies, thinking it didn’t deserve a response.

And we repeated ourselves, did the same things, in ways that are familiar, disengaging from the forms and platforms that the Duterte-Marcos teams were utilizing for their own ends. In the process we also disengaged from that particular voting population that they had transformed into audience: one that was well aware of Marcos atrocities and corruption, lies and falsehoods, but which was making a choice to believe those didn’t matter, or that they matter less now because the Marcoses had suffered enough, or that it is secondary to all that the Marcoses had given nation in terms of infrastructure.

When we engaged with this audience, we spoke down to them, we grilled them, we questioned their intelligence, or their sense of history. We threw facts in their faces, and insisted this is what they needed to believe. We laughed at them. We wrote our slogans, spoke in the languages we are used to, used forms that are familiar, and we stomped our feet and raised our fists. We said this cannot happen. We said we are the ones who are right. We spewed facts regardless of whether it was getting to the same people who believed the lies.

But ultimately, as election results tell us, we were running in place. We were speaking to ourselves. We were doing things not because these worked, or had a chance at working, but because these were the easier things to do. The expected things. But the expected is already exactly what the Duterte-Marcos-Duterte machinery had prepared for. They are so  familiar with our responses and reactions now, that their propaganda is always so many steps ahead of us.

And while it would be easy to fashion ourselves victims and romanticize our victimhood in the face of this robbery, what might be more productive is to see ourselves as complicit. As accessories to this crime. We take responsibility for this outcome, figure out what we did wrong, and we move forward more strategically, tread more carefully, and think more creatively, about how to finally, and truly, do battle. That takes time, it takes self-criticism, it demands an awareness of this landscape, and it means even letting go of old beliefs for ones that are premised on the present.

Telling the truth has ceased to be enough. We need to sell the truth. Otherwise we’re already watching the robbery unfold for 2025, and certainly for 2028. ***