With the election of Rodrigo Duterte to the Philippine presidency in May 2016 came a flood of academic work on Philippine politics on a scale not seen since the transition from Marcos to Aquino and from dictatorship to democracy in the mid to late 1980s. Alongside human rights reports on Duterte's murderous “War on Drugs,” and in parallel with commentary on “populism” and “democratic backsliding” in countries across the world, this scholarship focused on an urgently unsettling puzzle: Why and how could such an “illiberal,” homicidal, misogynistic psychopath win the Philippine presidency and enjoy consistently high levels of popularity among Filipinos throughout his term in office? But with the end of Duterte's six-year term and the election of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. to the presidency in mid-2022, the unnerving “anomaly” of Duterte quickly lost its apparent significance, only to be replaced by a new wave of anxiety and analysis focused...

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