I’ve haven’t read a lot of U.S. commentary damning the Obama administration for not standing with the Red Shirts. Maybe they should have worn green? ~Greg Scoblete

I know Greg’s remark is tongue-in-cheek, but this is an important point. There is very little Western interest in the pro-Thaksin protesters because, unlike in every other “color” revolution, there is absolutely no geopolitical significance to the outcome. Popular protests typically interest democracy promoters only when the protests are aimed at a government the democracy promoters want to see gone. If the Yellow faction representing Thai’s upper and middle class loses, Thailand will remain a U.S. ally, which is what it remained after the coup and the later establishment of a civilian government.

Despite a lot of airy rhetoric about the “freedom agenda,” the Bush administration could barely bring itself to condemn the coup that removed Thaksin. Unlike in Honduras, the coup then actually resulted in the establishment of a military regime for a short time. The muted Western response to the Thai coup was a reminder that a lot of the enthusiasm for “color” revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan derived mostly from a desire to subvert perceived pro-Russian governments and install more, er, reliable “democrats.” No one outside Thailand particularly wanted to take Thaksin’s side, democratic government was restored not very long after his removal, and the military’s claim that it was defending Thai institutions against Thaksin’s abuses of power have seemed credible.

So there is no lazy, convenient, false narrative portraying the dispute as a struggle between Democracy and Oppression. If anything, the Yellow royalists had more real grievances against Thaksin when he was in power than the Reds have against the less offensive Abhisit Vejjajiva. The Red protesters are simply copying what the supporters of the current government did to their Prime Minister, Samak Sundaravej. Thaksin, the leader whose cause the Reds were initially championing, has since abandoned his country and has taken a position as an economic advisor to the Cambodian government. Thaksin was removed by the military four years ago partly on account of his genuine, massive corruption, so there is not much of a noble cause with which to sympathize here.

A Red victory will not be an example of either advancing or retreating democracy. The main differences between the factions are over domestic policies and the distribution of wealth and power in the country. While there are ideological differences between the factions, they really have nothing to do with the preoccupations of Western democracy promoters. There is no outside government sponsoring either side, so the political dispute in Thailand cannot serve as a proxy for a larger great-power or ideological struggle. Democratists are probably not keen to draw attention to an example where it was the demagogic democrat who abused his power and was overthrown to the applause of an overwhelming majority of his countrymen.

Aside from the lack of extensive media coverage that was given to the approved “color” revolutions, another factor behind the general Western indifference to the Red protesters is their socioeconomic background and political agenda. The pattern has been quite clear over the last ten years. When Chavez came to power in Venezuela, this was not cheered as proof of the empowerment of the Venezuelan majority. When Venezuela’s elites attempted to remove him in a coup in 2002, Washington clearly wanted the coup to work. That might have been better for Venezuela’s economy, but there was clearly not any deep concern for the political rights of the poor majority that supported Chavez. When Morales and his coca growers were rallying the poor and indigenous Bolivians in street protests against Lozada, you did not hear much praise for Bolivian “people power” in the Western media. Latin American left-populism has not produced the “right” kind of democratic governments as far as Washington is concerned, and so it has even become necessary to deny the democratic nature of these governments. Meanwhile, in the “color” revolutions in Ukraine, Lebanon and Iran, Western sympathizers were sympathizing with the protesters in some measure because most of the protesters have been urban, educated, middle-class people with whom a lot of Western pundits, journalists and bloggers can identify. Their sort of “people power” wins Western attention and sympathy, and it is simply taken more seriously than the populism of the rural and urban poor. So the Red protesters in Thailand don’t have much going for them if they are hoping to receive the same kind of breathless Western enthusiasm for their cause that has been shown to various other protest movements over the last seven years.