BEFORE Bea Kim first left the stage she briefly shared with President Rodrigo Duterte two weeks ago, she took his hand and gently held it against her forehead. It’s a gesture that remains powerful, no matter how often it’s performed. As a sign of respect, few can match it.
But while President Duterte accepted the gesture, he didn’t seem entirely pleased by it. He told Kim to approach him again and then asked her for a kiss. Your views of what followed will be colored by the lens you favor: it either demonstrated abuse of one’s power or was a crafty political actor’s pandering to the crowd. Sexism or show business, or perhaps a combination of both.
To those trying to cast President Duterte as “Tatay Digong” or “Daddy Digs,” it was an off-script moment best glossed over as quickly as possible. I don’t doubt that there are some people who see Duterte as a father figure and call him “Tatay” to show their sincere affection and respect. I wish, though, that we would mature enough to see our political leaders not as father figures, but as accountable public officials.
As a tactic, portraying a political figure as a patriarch, as a father-ruler, dates back to the Roman Empire. That it endures to this day proves its effectiveness: we continue to hear about “founding fathers” and “fathers of the nation” even in more advanced democracies. We’ve seen it “in just about everything from ancient Rome to the Chicago mafia to current Middle Eastern and Asian politics,” the sociologist Julia Adams wrote in “The Rule of the Father: Patriarchy and Patrimonialism in Early Modern Europe.”
Nearly a century ago, the German sociologist Max Weber wrote that patrimonialism, which are “forms of government that are based on rulers’ family-households,” was not ideal. In patrimonial societies, power was fully discretionary. Rulers ran the state as if they were running their own household, with full and unquestionable control over administrative decisions and legal judgments, instead of rational institutions that depended on competence, rules, and procedures.
If this way of governing feels familiar to Asians, it’s because we, too, have seen political power wielded in the context of families and political clans. “Patria potestas,” the father’s absolute power over life, death, and property, may be a Roman construction, but it has an Asian equivalent that, until recently, was the principle that defined our societies.
There’s a reason propagandists of certain politicians, including President Duterte, encourage us to call them “Tatay” or “Daddy.” For one, it shields the father-ruler from critical evaluation. We criticize our fathers only in our most private thoughts, when we criticize them at all. And even when we do, forgiveness is, in most cases, guaranteed. “The category of patriarch itself can be seen as an ongoing cultural and social achievement,” Adams points out. “The people who first soldered together separate signs like ‘father’ and ‘ruler’ had real political imagination.”
So call him “Tatay” or “Daddy” if you must; that is well within your rights. But know that in doing so, it’s as if you’ve signed away your identity as an equal citizen and chosen to regard yourself as a child of the father, or as the subject of a king. History has shown us many rulers who styled themselves as society’s fathers, only to betray the allegiance, trust, and obedience they demanded, but did not, in the end, deserve. (@isoldeamante)