User:Kerr Neil/sandbox

Every Filipino was for democracy and a republican form of government. Every Filipino was for independence and national sovereignty.

Thus belief in democracy and independence, preserving and guarding free elections, believing in his fellow Filipinos, and nationalism may have been essential attributes of Manuel L. Quezon, but they do not make him worthy of emulation by the youth -at least not to the extent that he should be singled out over and above all his distinguished contemporaries. After all, these attributes are the minimum we should expect of any leader, past, present, or future. So then, what ideal can we say distinguished, or set apart, Quezon from his contemporaries?

There can only be one answer, the thing that set him apart from his contemporaries was his advocacy of social justice. The Social Justice Program and its accompanying rhetoric is the chief qualification for his being remembered as a statesman. Notice that I do not limit myself to social justice itself, but that I also include the rhetoric that accompanied it, as important.

You see, writer after writer has repeated the shibboleth that Quezon’s Social Justice Program was merely a case of “window dressing” to boost his popularity.

This view betrays, I think, a defect on the part of writers, people who should be the first to recognize the importance and significance of rhetoric. These writers love to point out that democracy in Quezon’s time was not just colonial democracy, but “elite democracy;” democracy by and for a small group of Filipinos, whose interests could not coincide with the genuine aspirations of the Filipino masses. A statistic that has profoundly impressed me, and which supports their view, is that in 1941, when Quezon was elected to a second term, an achievement that marked the pinnacle of his electoral career, and which, incidentally, was not to be repeated until Marcos was also elected to a second term in 1969, only about 11% of the population were eligible to vote. Only 11% and this after the voting population had been enlarged enormously by the grant of the right of suffrage to filipino women in 1937! All right, then. Let us assume that the writers are right when they say that during Quezon’s time, we only had “elite democracy.”