Is corruption inborn in democracy?

Part One of this column* looked into how acutely vulnerable Philippine democracy to corruption. And explored this colossal corruptibility of liberal democratic institutions, a century old in this country, to then ask whether there is in fact something about democracy that yields easily — or actually produces — its own corruption.

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The proposed answer: No, but. Which is to recognize that the freedom guaranteed by democracy guarantees it for the entire citizenry; but that, therefore, also guarantees it for bad actors who have increasingly upped their ability to usurp the legal system that should have curtailed greed.

Democracy’s guarantee of freedom unexpectedly guarantees the freedom to think to subvert freedom. This sentence, particularly in the case of the Philippines’ democratic project, is no mere semantic curlicue. The corrupt and corrupted political landscape is very real indeed concrete, as the Marxists will say. (Today’s United States is an even more horrific example.)

Still, as the previous column observed, democracy managed to sustain its idealisms and restrain its innate corruptibility through most of the 20th Century. Despite the century-old, incrementally more awful histories of criminal leaders using democracy against itself, the threat was not existential until this past decade of the 21st Century.

Today it is clear that democracy may not hold as majority culture and politics globally. In the Philippines as in the US, Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela, even Austria, Italy, and also India, Pakistan, Bolivia, Brazil, Nicaragua, and many others, at least one of three pillars of a democratic state is listing badly.

They lack adequate representation, or strong enough protection of human rights, and the constant ascendance of the vaunted rule of law. Either one, two, or all three have been thrashed (however differently and unevenly) by corrupting agents arrogating the freedom to foist impunity on the weak.

New data from the Global State of Democracy Indices “documents a troubling trend: more than half of all countries assessed have declined in at least one key aspect of democratic performance over the past five years.”