Wenceslao: Dead people voting

In the movie, “The Sixth Sense,” Bruce Willis plays a child psychologist, whose patient, played by Haley Joel Osment, claims he sees and talks with dead people. In the recent indictment of former US president Donald Trump, the charges include claims by Trump and some of those who are in his team, that dead people voted for Joe Biden in some US states. Trump wants to run again in the coming elections in the US. The indictment is part of efforts to pin him down on his role in the riot that had Trump and his supporters looking for ways to overturn the election four years ago. Trump lost in his reelection bid that time.

Of course, claims that dead people vote in elections have long been part of Philippine election lore. In the Philippines, or so election veterans say, nobody loses in the balloting, rather, candidates are merely being cheated. It was only under the Trump presidency that the existence of the so-called “alternative truth” was peddled. Trump represents that country’s “far right,” whose acts tended to sow chaos in a country with a dominant liberal democratic belief. Or am I talking of the past here?

Trump’s indictment put to a test the strength of the US legal system. For the first time, a former US president may be jailed for acting to undermine the country’s electoral system. But Trump is irrepressible, and in a country that values individual freedoms, that sounds like a plus. Will Trump be able to promote his far right views in an electoral campaign again?

But times are changing. Even in the Philippines, Duterterism is no more. The current President brings with him the Western principles he grew up with while spending time abroad. Perhaps, we will see another Duterte in Malacañang soon, but Sara Duterte is no Digong. She is a different government official from her father.

What I am saying is that the ideological storm we experienced in the past, especially in the West, may be over. A return to a rules-based setup may just be around the bend. All the noises we heard in the past may soon be muted.

But it does seem to me like there is no longer going back to the pure liberal democracy that we practiced in the past. Conservatives have succeeded in muddling the set of beliefs that were dominant years ago. I never thought I would live to see the day when liberal and progressive views would be ridiculed. That thinking has been included in the now pejorative term, “woke.”

That is why I am very much interested in how the US will straighten all that have been made crooked by Trumpism. I hope Trump and his supporters will finally be marginalized as part of the long process of normalization. If it means jailing him, so be it. Even former presidents must be made to account for their wrongdoings. In the Philippines, that process was weakened by the pardon power given to succeeding presidents. But at least, the procedure is there and the US seems to be determined to implement it. And may the lesson be finally learned by those concerned.