A reader in the Philippines writes:

I’d like to tell you a bit about some very alarming political developments that have taken place recently here in the Philippines, and how they signify what I believe to be a great threat to what remains of the Christian culture of the Philippines, and that is how much of Filipino population has embraced the culture of death by electing Rodrigo Duterte as the republic’s president.

If you haven’t heard much about Duterte (who was just inaugurated this past Thursday), let me fill you in.

Duterte was the mayor of Davao City, the Philippines’ third largest metropolitan area. When he first became mayor in 1988, Davao was infested with gangs, communist rebels, kidnappers, and other cutthroats. Although he is credited with cleaning up Davao and making it into one of the safer and more orderly cities in the Philippines, this success has come at a very high price. Human rights groups have accused him and his police force of tolerating and even encouraging a wave of vigilantism that has claimed the lives of nearly 1,500 alleged criminals and delinquents since 1998. That number includes over a hundred minors–the youngest known being 12 years old–and a couple of journalists who were outspoken against Duterte and the vigilante gangs (which have been dubbed the Davao Death Squad by the media). Although there is no “smoking gun” that proves that the DDS operates as Duterte’s hit squad, he often speaks quite favorably and enthusiastically of summary executions and extrajudicial killings, and documents published by Wikileaks even reveal that U.S. State Department personnel believe that Duterte is “clearly behind” the vigilante group.

Duterte’s signature method of fighting crime with crime had been the most prominent issue of his presidential campaign. He has promised to kill hundreds of thousands of those he deems criminals, and to make the fish of Manila Bay fat from feeding on their corpses.

More recently, as president-elect, Duterte has made pronouncements encouraging both police and citizens to kill alleged criminals, and he plans to start rewarding bounties to those who shoot first and ask questions later. He will also aggressively attempt to reinstate the death penalty in the Philippines, and insists that it be carried out by hanging.

Even now as I write this, it is being reported that he also plans to make drug addicts deemed non-rehabilitable victims of his killing spree. His justification? They will just go on committing crimes if allowed to live, he says. So now, in Duterte’s perverted little universe, it is not only justifiable to kill someone presumed to be guilty of crimes in the past, but also someone presumed to commit crimes in the future!

In answering the criticisms against his methods, Duterte says that the notion of criminal rehabilitation is just a Western concept that is fundamentally alien to Far Eastern cultures (which betrays his apparent belief in cultural relativism and racialism).

And if Duterte’s disregard for the rule of law isn’t enough, there are also indications that he may soon be showing little tolerance for freedom of the press and freedom of religion.

On the matter of the free press, I should first explain that the Philippines is considered one of the world’s most dangerous country for journalists. It is common for journalists who do investigative work into the corrupt dealings of politicians and businessmen to end up as victims of assassination, and the bulk of those murders go unsolved. When asked about this problem, Duterte responded that if you’re a journalist and you get offed, it’s probably because you were doing something wrong!

On the matter of religious liberty, Duterte is considered a friend to the much-marginalized Muslim minority in the Philippines, but he has grown strongly adversarial against the Catholic Church, particularly the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines. He plans to boldly implement a three-child policy, as well as aggressively enforce an already existing controversial family planning (i.e., population reduction) law, and is ready to fight the Church on this.

Learning these things about Duterte, it is quite easy to be quick to blame the Philippine electorate for voting for such a man. It is necessary to therefore know the conditions that created this rough beast, which are not all that unlike the conditions that have created Donald Trump.

The Philippine government is ranked among the most corrupt in Asia, and the country functions a lot more like an oligarchy and a vassal state for Western neocolonial interests than a sovereign democratic republic.

Six years ago, in the last presidential election, the Filipinos elected Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino, scion of the famous political dynasty that opposed the Marcos regime in the 1970s and ‘80s. Despite Aquino’s promises to drive the government along a “straight path”, his administration has suffered many scandals that expose its outrageous corruption and incredible incompetence. And while it is true that Aquino has presided over some of the highest GDP growth in Southeast Asia, the average Filipino has felt no change to his abject living conditions.

Duterte has thus come in as a kind-of man on a white horse, promising sweeping change of the government. Like Trump, he and his campaign team have done a magnificent job at portraying him as an anti-establishment politician who will champion the cause of the forgotten man, and it has worked quite marvelously: His reputation as a strong man who can get things done has made him a hero to many of his supporters, and thus to many average Filipinos, having such a savior lead their country to the promised land greatly overweighs any concerns about human and constitutional rights, the rule of law, or the due process of law. After all, if the country’s judicial system is hopelessly corrupt, what good is the rule of law, anyway? Might as well go back to the law of eye for an eye, right?

Thus, as bad as having Duterte occupy the Philippine presidency is, his popularity is merely a product of a breakdown in Philippine politics and society as a whole. One political commentator has argued that the Duterte’s support from the masses signifies the Catholic Church’s utter failure to impress upon her flock one of her most important teachings: that all human life is sacred and to be defended.

Indeed, for now it seems that no matter what he says or does, Duterte is set to remain wildly popular. For example, if you were to peruse the comments section of any online news article reporting any of Duterte’s most outrageous statements, you will see the majority giving their enthusiastic approval. And in an infamous video clip of Duterte making a vile joke onstage about raping an Australian missionary woman who was murdered in Davao in 1989, his audience responds with laughter.

Yet, what will happen to the Philippines under Duterte’s administration remains to be seen.

Some dismiss his extreme rhetoric as just the hyperbole of a flamboyant politician who is simply intentionally projecting a caricature of himself, and his spokespersons often defend him by saying his controversial remarks are just jokes or cases of the press taking his words out of context. I, however, believe that the man is a psychopath who probably suffers from delusions of himself as a “Dirty Harry” type who can clean up the streets simply by slaughtering all the bad guys. Such a person obviously has no business being the head of state of any nation.

In any event, for now the Philippines still has a constitutional system very similar to that of the U.S. (although it is a unitary republic rather than a federal one), and as long as it remains–Duterte has threatened to create a revolutionary government and dissolve congress–he might not have such an easy time.

Additionally, there are already some rumblings of opposition forces growing against Duterte’s penchant for vigilantism and his desire to reinstate the death penalty, particularly from people close to the Catholic Church and the CBCP.

However, even if Duterte is successfully defeated, or even ousted, the societal and political climate that produced him will remain, and the country could go simply back into the hands of the corrupt oligarchs. Much work will still need to be done to cure this ailing the Far East’s first democratic republic and only major Christian nation.

I ask for your prayers for the Philippines.

UPDATE: Reader Raskelnikov writes:

The reality is governments supply ORDER. That is their job, their only job. If they can’t supply order, they are failed states (Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Iraq, etc.).

The Philippines is on the brink of failure. Now I don’t know that Duterte will bring order, and root out crime and corruption, but if he does, his sins will be forgiven by the masses.

Civil liberties and efficient bureaucracies and an independent judiciary, and rule of law, these are all very good things, but they can only be effectively implemented if the conditions of ORDER exist in the first place. Otherwise, you have pretty words and practices that are diametrically the opposite and things continue to rot, and you are likely to get pushed aside by someone willing to do the job.

It is very easy for Americans, living in a country with a strong tradition of democracy, rule of law, prosperity, high levels of education, relatively low levels of corruption and the like to impose our view of how things should be on other countries, because we presume ORDER exists and will continue to exist, and its just a matter of filing the burrs off the sharp edges.

But this is ludicrous. Its not true here–order has a cost, and if people aren’t willing to pay it, it breaks down. It is certainly not the way it works in the Philippines. When there is revolt, out-of-control crime, corruption, societal breakdown, the axe gets untied, and when the crisis is solved, (hopefully), the axe gets tied up again.

You don’t get heavy handed government unless you have pervasive social disintegration, and you get heavy handed government when that happens, because in part the people want it. If you want to preserve civil liberties, you don’t need to subsidize the ACLU, you need to insure low crime, low levels of civil unrest, reasonable levels of economic inequality, collective security.

Trump won’t be Duterte because American society has not disintegrated to anything like the crime and corruption in the Philippines. Trust me, if America did have that level of dysfunction, all our white liberals of today would be cheering for the death squads–because that’s just what people do. Further, whoever did the job would get his or her face up on Mt. Rushmore next to Lincoln, who if you actually read the history, acted like a dictator (suspending habeas corpus, jailing newspaper editors for hostile editorials, unleashing Sherman to commit acts of rape, torture, murder and arson on American civilian populations).

Berlusconi with an admixture of Nixon, that’s closer to what you will get with a Trump Presidency. It is unclear that Trump will even be able to get anything through Congress.

Lots of reasons why that may be problematic for some people, but he is not Dutrete.