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Pink And Yellow, Pink And Yellow

It’s not quite the famous patriotic statement of the Nicaraguan President in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, but James’ post referring to this Kurlantzick article made me think of it as I contemplated the possibility of a pink state filled with monarchists draped in yellow.  I have to say that, in addition to being aesthetically displeasing, […]

It’s not quite the famous patriotic statement of the Nicaraguan President in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, but James’ post referring to this Kurlantzick article made me think of it as I contemplated the possibility of a pink state filled with monarchists draped in yellow.  I have to say that, in addition to being aesthetically displeasing, something just didn’t fit.   Kurlantzick opens his article with the scene of the demonstrations in Bangkok, which I have neglected to discuss despite my previous postings on the anti-Thaksin coup in 2006:

The antigovernment demonstrators, calling themselves the People’s Alliance for Democracy, were lashing out at the prime minister, Samak Sundaravej, who they claimed was a tyrant who’d violated a range of laws. In truth, however, they were not battling for democracy – they wanted Samak, who was democratically elected, to step down. In addition, they hated him because he was allied with former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, whom they accused of massive graft and human rights abuses. Eventually, they got their wish: Last week, the prime minister resigned after losing a controversial court decision.

In the streets, the seas of yellow openly wept with joy. The democrat was deposed.

Sounds like a happy ending to me.  There’s a problem here?

Of course, Thaksin is certainly guilty of graft and arguably guilty of human rights abuses during his tenure when he was waging a desultory military campaign against Muslims in southern Thailand (the “war on drugs”).  To the extent that Samak was tainted by association with Thaksin, it is hard to see why anyone should lament his fall or see it as part of an undesirable pattern, unless it is undesirable to have corrupt politicos and their cronies ousted from power.  As Kurlantzick rightly notes, the middle class has consistently been the core of anti-Thaksin sentiment, and it would not be the first time that a middle class rallied to a monarchy out of horror at the politicians raised up by mass democracy.  Urban and educated, the Thai middle class have a large stake in Thai institutions, which have been steadily corrupted during the democratic era of the last 16 years.  The Thai middle class is learning, as each nation’s middle class does, that giving the vote to people with radically different interests than theirs results in the government suddenly doing all sorts of things that they never intended for it to do. 

Post-1876 Austria might offer some useful parallels as the buergerlich Vienna liberals found themselves suddenly swamped by the empowered forces of urban labor and rural conservative aristocrats and peasants, and the situation became progressively worse as the franchise was expanded to more and more people.  While this led directly to greater illiberalism in government and the transformation of Austrian liberals more and more into either simple social democrats or nationalists, it did not mark a retreat of democratic reforms, but was the process of broadening political participation.  In the Thai case, the middle class revulsion with Samak and Thaksin is a more straightforward anti-corruption backlash combined with political resentment at the demagogues who have risen to power with the support of rural and poorer voters.  But to say that Thailand has “gone backwards” in recent years is to take for granted that the Thaksin years represented progress.  I reject this absolutely, and evidently so do many Thais.  As for the “pink” element to this story, aside from a passing reference to the demonstration being like Woodstock I have to say that I don’t see the usual signs of the “pink” Faustian bargain of selling out freedom for consumer goods and license.   

Many of the examples Kurlantzick name-checks (Venezuela, Russia, Bangladesh) have one hugely important thing in common: the coincidence of democratic governments and massive corruption.  Many of the others, ranging from Rwanda to Kyrgyzstan, are perfect examples of how outsiders dubbed the winners in an ethnic or tribal struggle to be the true democrats (Kagame could at least say that he hadn’t launched a genocidal war against his neighbors) turn to abusing power soon after acquiring it to benefit their group and the allies of the strongman ruler heroic reformer.  Kurlantzick is describing how democratic despotism emerges in political cultures where institutions are not trusted, personal and family ties are more powerful and there are no strong traditions of rule of law or constitutionalism.  This is not a retreat of democracy, but its logical conclusion when there are no other significant forces to keep its inevitable abuses in check. 

Update: Kurlantzick has another version of the same argument here, in which he “reveals,” among other things, that the new Kyrgyz boss is the same as the old Kyrgyz boss, which those of us watching the so-called “Tulip Revolution” at the time could have told you three years ago.  Freddy has more on the main blog in response to the Globe piece.

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