Sustained dynastic rule is without a doubt the cause of many of our social problems. The clique’s economic strategy for the nation is to max out the wealth of their members to overflowing. As long as political dynasties are in power, the rest of us have to content ourselves not with our rightful share of the country’s resources but with what they allow to trickle down to us from their excesses. Judging from the nation’s demography, this policy has resulted in mass poverty.
Yet, as logical as it may sound, banning them from running for office is not quite the solution. A deeper dive into the issue would reveal this presumption to be quite wrong from both socio-philosophical and chronological perspectives.
Philosophically, democracy is a political system that guarantees equal opportunities for all sectors of society. You cannot equalize opportunities by banning a sector from participating in our elections. If it is undemocratic to practically deny the poor their constitutional rights because they are poor, it would be equally undemocratic to by law deny the rich those same rights just because they are rich.
(Political dynasties are smart enough to know this. Thus, they agreed to draft an implementing law of their constitutional ban. Anyway, they control law-making and can always draft, as they seem to be doing now, a watered-down anti-dynasty law that, to be democratic, must somehow allow them to run for office.)
At any rate, from a chronological perspective, political dynasties are not the immediate problem to solve. What needs to be solved is the election system that is biased towards rich individuals regardless of personal qualifications. The intersection of elite wealth and the poverty of the electorate is what allows political dynasties to exclusively win in our elections with the latter invariably succumbing to cash or in-kind incentives before, during, and after elections.
The problem is inequality. Only rich individuals win office and decide on the nation’s destiny. We cannot legally ban them because they are wealthy. But we can legally prevent them from using their money to make a travesty of participatory democracy. Among other fundamental changes in the system, taking dole-outs in cash or in kind totally out of the equation is top priority.
Ultimately the poverty of the masses is the problem to solve. Meantime, as long as they are poor, you can’t blame them for succumbing to monetary enticements for their votes. As long as there are no stiff penalties for buying votes, buying the Comelec and buying the computer programmer, wealthy dynastic politicians will continue to wield power and promote their interests at the expense of the vulnerable majority of the population.
This cannot be repeated enough. Political dynasties are not the immediate problem to solve. Our cash-rigged election system is. This heavily favors a few whose only qualification is the financial capacity to buy political power. The true opposition, the people’s party that must be organized sooner than later, must run on the platform of democratizing our elections by somehow completely and definitively taking money out of the equation.