Protests in Thailand, or, Democracy and the Middle Class

In Thailand, protests rage against the democratically-elected government, and now at least three people have been killed in an outbreak of shooting. The conflict is similar to the one that led to the recent coup in Egypt, in that the "yellow shirt" protesters are drawn largely from the educated middle class. They are angry about an amnesty bill proposed by the government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, but more broadly they just hate her, her family, her party, and the peasants who keep electing them. In 2006 they managed to get the army on their side and oust then Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, Yingluck’s brother, driving him into exile. But they did not convince the rest of the country that they were right:

Thaksin remains popular among poorer rural voters, who saw him as a populist ally, and despised by the educated, urban middle class, who viewed him as corrupt and authoritarian. Massive 2010 protests by Thaksin’s supporters, known as red shirts, was met with a military crackdown that left 90 people dead.

Yingluck, elected in 2011 and Thailand’s first female prime minister, was seen by opponents as a proxy for her exiled big brother, and the amnesty bill seemed to fit that narrative. The thing is, after being passed by the lower house, the bill was defeated 141–0 in the Senate last month and the government pledged to drop it.

Unfortunately, rather than continue to fight Yingluck’s agenda from the senate, leaders of the opposition Democrat Party resigned from their offices to lead anti-government protests seeing to overthrow her and replace the country’s current democratic system with a vaguely-defined “People’s Council.”

Several authors have noted that Thailand’s political predicament appears to contradict the longstanding idea in political science that as populations become wealthier and more educated, they will become more democratic. In Thailand, the wealthy, urban middle class are perhaps the least supportive of democracy. It’s not the only place where this seems to be the case.

That's the thing about democracy: the people who win the most votes get power, and the losers have to live with the result. Even in the United States it is difficult to get many people to accept the legitimacy of the opposition, and where democracy is new and the powers of the government unclear, this is often impossible. The lesson of the past 30 years ought to be that democracy is not in itself an answer to the problems that bedevil much of the world. Without mutual respect, without a society used to the ups and downs of democratic politics, without some level of  determination to get along, democracy only adds fuel to the fire of old grievances. I hope Thais eventual get used to losing elections and find ways to get along, but I am not optimistic.