People Power

A Rising

Perhaps you recall how and where you learned of Trump’s triumph over Clinton four years ago and loss to Biden this past weekend. For me, the bad election night news in 2016 came from a flight attendant while I was en route to China. The good news this year arrived via a Saturday morning phone call from India, asking me to do a TV interview on Biden’s win. It jolted me awake far better than my morning coffee was doing.

However, the strongest memory that word of Biden trumping Trump triggered for me was Philippine People Power: the massive demonstrations, witnessed across the world, that toppled long-entrenched autocrat Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. But also the televised celebrations that immediately ensued.

This weekend’s bursts of dancing, singing and downright jubilation on the streets of Philadelphia and elsewhere couldn’t rival the scale we saw in the Philippines back then. But the feeling was the same.

Rejoicing. Relief. Revival. As a popular pundit might put it, a rising.

An ability to breathe much more easily. A weight lifted from our shoulders. A new dawn after a very long, very dark night.

Some Differences

Before carrying on further here, I know I mustn’t get carried away. The two situations differ in some significant ways.

Filipinos restored a democracy. We prevented ours from falling into an abyss.

They deposed a dictator. We neutered a narcissist with dictatorial designs.

They ended Marcos’s reign of misrule, which had lasted for going on fourteen years. We halted Trump in his tracks after fewer than four – though it seemed so much longer.

They took to the streets to overwhelmingly demonstrate against Marcos. We took to the ballot boxes to just barely beat Trump. We prevailed through narrow wins in a handful of toss-up states – though by well over four million in the national popular vote.

Some Similarities, and Salvation

Some similarities abound as well.

People Power helped prevent Marcos from stealing the country’s presidential election, which had been won by opposition leader Cory Aquino. Despite being relatively narrow, Biden’s wins in swing states stopped Trump from stealing ours.

What’s more, those wins were due to huge turnouts by Biden backers and extraordinary efforts by all sorts of people. They kept the margins in the tens of thousands, rather than smaller figures more easily challenged in court. As a leading constitutional scholar warned shortly before Election Day, our conservative Supreme Court seemed poised to permit a post-election coup if the results had been close enough.

As was the case in the Philippines, in the United States the losing side has either outright rejected its defeat or been unwilling to acknowledge it.

Upon assuming office, Aquino confronted massive political, economic and other problems (including a communist insurgency and military coup attempts) her predecessor caused or exacerbated. So will Biden, with Covid topping his list.

Aquino faced the challenge of presiding over substantial groups of voters who not only rejected her presidency but the very principles of democracy. So does Biden, with many Trump supporters scoring high on a right-wing authoritarian scale.

All of this circles back to the most fundamental similarity. Like the Philippines in 1986, America got the result it most desperately needed from our election: the salvation of our democracy. For all the obstacles ahead, that’s something for people to feel powerful about.