Leon Hadar draws attention to a Financial Times post that I had wanted to discuss earlier. The ongoing efforts of the urban middle, or upper-middle, class in Thailand to force a change to the structure of Thailand’s legislature to minimize the influence of poor, rural populations are a fascinating modern example of liberal backlash against democracy, an attempt to have liberal political institutions that also give significantly different weight to different classes of citizens. The coup against Thaksin provided the decisive rupture in the normal political process that created the opportunity to try to roll back mass democracy. Unlike previous episodes in modern history, the mass democratic movement appears for the moment to be losing to the more mobilized, coordinated urban liberals. Some may object that the bourgeoisie here is not really liberal, but merely a self-interested elite. I don’t see any necessary contradiction here.

What is interesting and different about this case is that there is not a landed aristocracy or any old guard conservative magnates who are willing to ally with the rural and poor population, as happened time and time again during the democratization of many different European countries. It was frequently a practice of anti-liberals in the late 19th century to expand the franchise to lower class people as a way of undermining the power of liberal parties, which drew their strength overwhelmingly from urban middle-class merchants and professionals. The latter were very political active and engaged, and more important they were of sufficient means to be allowed to participate in the electoral process; they were also not very numerous. Expanding the electorate was bound to dilute liberal power, because the majority did not particularly benefit, at least not directly, from liberal policies. In Austria, this was entirely successful, perhaps far more successful than the conservatives wanted, as Christian Socialism and Social Democracy overwhelmed the liberals after conservative elites empowered the countryside and the expanding population of workers in Vienna. Defenders of the privileges of landed elites were able to join together with non-German ethnic groups, farmers and workers, all of whom were clearly put at a disadvantage or otherwise alienated by the policies the liberals enacted during their brief post-1867 stint in power. In the aftermath of their fall from power, the Freisinnigen were reduced to a rump and their members for the most part either embraced social democracy or some form of pan-German nationalism (incidentally, the modern FPOe is more or less the direct inheritor of the latter tendency).

In Thailand, as in Austria and many other modernizing states, the urban middle class allies itself to the monarch, but unlike Austria this is not an alliance of desperation and last resort. Like Franz-Josef, King Bhumibol probably believes it is his duty to protect his people from their government, but I would guess that the King would not be terribly distressed if the forces that helped bring Thaksin to power are constrained by the new proposed rules for the legislature.