Democrat lessons
Re: "Democrats chart a cautious course", (BP, March 14).
On Nov 28, 2013, Time magazine published an article under the title "Thailand's Democrat Party is hilariously misnamed", the equally blunt subtitle being, "Don't believe yellow shirt [PDRC] talk of a 'people's revolution' -- what's being demanded is nothing short of a putsch."
Subsequent events included Suthep Thaugsuban's boastful assertions that, as reported in the Bangkok Post on June 27, 2014 ("Army chief slams Suthep and anti-coup duo"), he had advised the army and that he and Gen Prayut had been in frequent contact ever since 2010.
As also reported by the Post, these claims were promptly denied by the man who had recently committed the latest coup, Gen Prayut Chan-o-cha.
The PDRC's Suthep was promptly disappeared from public life into an obliging Buddhist monastery, and a forced silence descended.
At that time, Abhisit Vejjajiva was still leader of the Democrat Party, then in opposition to the government led by Yingluck Shinawatra, until that popular, elected government was overthrown by the coup that Suthep and his also hilariously misnamed People's Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC) and other Democrat Party members may have been colluding to bring about.
This piece of history remains pertinent today.
We now read in the "Democrats chart a cautious course" that back-for-another-bite Abhisit is pondering how seriously to take democratic principles, or whether to continue the party's usual subjugation of democratic principles to conservative ideology, which is what led to Time's description of his party as being "hilariously misnamed".
Has anything changed? Has there been any moral, legal, or political progress by the Democrat Party over the past 13 years?
Following such luminaries of legal, moral, and political philosophy as Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013), former professor at New York University, University College London, and Oxford University, I think democracy is a system of government where all citizens have an equal voice in determining the form of their nation's society, from which members enact their nation's law that all must follow, typically through parliament.
This understanding of democracy, of foundational democratic principles, is flatly contradicted by coup-driven Thai law of at least the last 50 years.
Do Abhisit and his fellow Democrats agree with this understanding of democracy, or do they think it is something so radically different as to actually be consistent with existing Thai criminal law, blessed by a series of coup-inspired constitutions of the last half century or more, which the Post suggests Abhisit might yet be thinking remains more "practical" than actual democratic principle?
