The politics of the General Will in Thailand

Excerpts from

Cultural policy as general will and social-order protectionism: Thailand’s conservative double movement

Michael K. Connors
International Journal of Cultural Policy        2016.

Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10286632.2016.1184656

From cultural enforcer to networker: the Cultural Surveillance Centre (Ministry of Culture)

Despite its seemingly Orwellian appellation, the CSC’s activities are not unlike those practised by other nationally-based cultural guardians – either state or societal – who doubt the moral and political competencies of their respective cultural charges. Given the work of the CSC to constantly remind people of Thainess through its newsletters, public exhibitions, workshops, media appearances, a case may be made that the CSC is merely an add-on to the cultural infrastructure that functions to banally remind people, as Billig (1995)) describes, to be self-conscious of the nation-root of identity, of which subjectivity should be an expression. Such a view places the CSC in a stream of hegemonic politics whereby the coupling of self-nation identification has historically served a broader hegemony of the dominant power bloc of senior bureaucracy, palace and business (Thongchai 2008;Reynolds 2002); this hegemonic bloc emerged through the twentieth Century, although events since the coup of September 2006 have led to a fracturing of that hegemony and splits in its conceptualisation (Glassman 2011).

Viewing the CSC as a persistent ‘identity reminder’ also entails recognising that its cultural surveillance work seeks to generate real-life manifestations of embedded ‘modest’ and ‘decent’ social norms among Thai citizens in market capitalism. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the agency is attempting to nurture and embed national identity as a public good, embodied in officially endorsed notions of culture as a way of life (which agencies seek to shape). As a public good, national identity acts as a normative institution that tempers the possessive individualism of capitalism. This understanding of culture – as a public good/general will – consciously derives, in part, from UNESCO’s instrumental elevation of culture as a prime resource that drives sustainable development, an understanding that has demonstrably shaped MOC policies (Connors 2005;        Surapan, Chareonsap. 2011 ;UNESCO 1998) As Miller and Yudice (2002, pp. 12–15) have pointed out, cultural policy is in part an iterance of the foundational position of all educational projects: that the subject is ethically incomplete and requires reform; and taken in a national context that reform serves simultaneously the nurturing of a civilised individual and nation.

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The CSC aims to extend the legislative capacity of ‘the people’ to rule themselves through the principle of the general will – which can only ever be understood as a decision about what is the right way to live together. It is evident that to the iterative Legislator (any usurping governmental agency tasked with constituting the people-body), an enabling capacity for making that decision means engagement in the bio-politics of Thainess, or varied governmental intervention. Thainess works to authorise legislation without an electoral democratic mandate, for it is the enabling condition of the assumed social contract between the Thai state and its subjects, at least among conservatives. Here then we find at its rawest the mentality of many in the moral reform agencies of the Thai state. Its logic in the cultural realm is mirrored in the political realm. In the absence of a capacity to form a general will, in the presence of fractious politics of interest and ideology, limited forms of democracy are viewed as necessary so that the people can be led towards the general will. If one were seeking to find the general tenor of politics informing the justification for suspending Thailand’s electoral democracy, it may be found in embryonic form in the CSC and other pedagogical agencies of state and society. Its surveillance activities form one channel through which a general will may appear and citizens ‘forced’ to be free. That Thailand has, since 1932, never succeeded in embedding any constitutional form (in 2015 and 2016 it deliberated its 20th constitution) means that the figure of the iterative legislator (military coup, government agency, monarchy, etc.) is constant in the modern period.

Thailand and the United States

Thailand and the United States of America: Beyond Hegemony?
Draft of article that appears in Bush and Asia, edited by Mark Beeson, Routledge, London 2006
Michael K. Connors
Introduction
This paper explores US-Thai relations in the context of a rapidly shifting global and regional landscape since the end of the Cold War. The days when US Cold War objectives twinned with a militarised Thai state are well over. Bereft of this unifying theme, any analysis of the Thai–US relationship immediately confronts a range of seemingly contradictory phenomena. In the last several years, for example, Thailand has been declared a major non-NATO ally at the very time that it has been coy about support for US strategy in the Middle East. The Thai government initially opposed the war in Iraq, but Thailand was the first Asian nation to send troops to Iraq as part of a ‘post conflict’ humanitarian mission. Having earlier announced that US forces would not use Thai airbases for transit to Iraq, the government cited treaty obligations to explain subsequent US access. Confronted with these inconsistencies, it is easy to see the attraction of the popular metaphoric phrase ‘bending with the wind’, which originated in the 19th Century to describe Siam’s adaptation to evolving structures of imperial power. In the current period, a more appropriate phrase might be ‘bending US hegemony’, suggesting that Thailand has not simply glided hither and thither according to prevailing winds. Rather, it has closely associated itself with the US, while obviously seeking to pursue its own elite defined ‘national’ interests.

If we understand hegemony in the manner proposed by Antonio Gramsci (1972), we are interested in the problematic of how a ruling strata is able to integrate subordinate elements into a hierarchical order on a seemingly consensual basis. Robert Cox (1987, 7) extends this problematic to the international level arguing that “the dominant state creates an order based ideologically on a broad measure of consent, functioning according to general principles that in fact ensure the continuing supremacy of the leading state or states and leading social classes but at the same time offer some measure or prospect of satisfaction to the less powerful.” Neo-Gramscian perspectives move beyond the territorial state as the articulator of hegemony, developing analyses of the role of transnational capitalist classes, and their impact on the nature of trading and investment regimes, and on the functioning of international financial institutions. For his part, Cox (1997, 60) has recognised the growing power of what he terms the ‘nebuleuse’: “a loose elite network of influentials and agencies, sharing a common set of ideas that collectively perform the [international] governance function.” These include the World Bank, the IMF, the WEF, the OECD, the ADB and so on. By virtue of the structure of the global economy and US dominance, and the presence of the world’s major TNCs there, sections of the US state are powerful within these agencies. These considerations are relevant to the status of inter-elite Thai-US relations.

In the Gramscian perspective hegemony, does not principally entail direct forms of domination under duress, nor does it indicate identical interests. The constitution of hegemony requires that over a range of crucial areas of interstate and international life (security, trade, sometimes regime form), metropolitan and peripheral elites share broad understanding of economic and security matters, and move towards similar objectives. Such understandings are mediated by the prevailing structures of economy and security, projects for change, patterns of socialization, and by the constitution of forces within territorial states and in transnational spheres. For the most part, Thai peripheral elites have contended and cooperated in an international order structured by US hegemony. While accepting US leadership over the last half century, there have been disagreements and significant divergences in particular arenas. Divergence does not necessarily entail the end of hegemony, a threshold needs to be reached where matters of substantive difference over crucial arenas outweigh matters of agreement and compliance. The Thai state has rarely strayed from a broad subaltern position vis-à-vis the US and the nebuleuse: this is despite countervailing pressures emanating from its regional environment, and apparent Thai doubts over the 2002 US National Security Strategy. The hegemonic relationship is also sustained by the partly deterritorialised nature of the nebuleuse, which allows some elements of the internationalised Thai elite to benefit by entering its ranks and assuming a hegemonic role (a Thai national and former Finance Minister currently heads the WTO). While many economic sectors remain nationally based, the rise of international and transnational elite spheres blurs the line between metropole and periphery.

The Thai relationship to US hegemony is historically fluid, with material, security and political elements of the relationship differing over time. This paper explores some of the characteristics of this fluidity. From the 1950s to the early 1970s, US-Thai state elites shared strong affinities across all three elements. Between the late 1970s and 1980s these affinities weakened, although they were sufficiently robust to survive Thailand’s drift into regionalism. In the 1990s the Thai state underwent a significant process of economic and political liberalization. This reflected the emerge of new domestic forces, and an increasingly transnational Thai-based nebuleuse. In tune with the US concerns to press for democratic enlargement in the post cold war era, the two states moved closer together. In the current period, commencing in 2001 with the arrival of the Bush and Thaksin administrations, the hegemonic relationship has taken on a new form, with security and resource imperatives compelling the US to extend its relationship with a Thai state that remains uneasy about US global strategy. Furthermore, the democratic convergence of the 1990s has receded, with Thailand moving towards authoritarian forms of rule. The hegemonic relationship has become strained. The rest of this chapter explores these different periods, with the spotlight on more recent times.

Read the full draft here http://www.latrobe.edu.au/socsci/staff/connors/connors-Thai-US.doc

Hegemony is not the Name of a Band

International Relations: Hegemony Is Not The Name of A Band
By: Michael Connors
Wednesday 11 July 2007
New Matilda


What to make of Australia’s forays into international politics? Of its double-timing of the US and China? Does it really matter what an apparently bit-like player such as Australia does, even if it does occasionally punch above Alexander’s waistline? On that point, how should we interpret Australia being ranked 12th in the world for military expenditure, while ranking 54th in population terms?

In the next few months I’d like to offer some of my own musings on these matters. This week I’ll begin with the idea of hegemony, since it is the pursuit of this, or resistance to it, which defines the play of world politics.

Here in Australia, both Labor and the Coalition have made fundamental commitments to anchoring Australia’s future to the US Alliance. Even as they exchange tit-for-tat recriminations on the management of the Alliance relationship, neither Party’s leadership could imagine a foreign policy bereft of it.


The basis of the Alliance is simple: mutual interest. Australia and the US share not only similar security and trade interests, but also an interest in jointly pursuing a particular world order. John Howard joined the war in Iraq not just to earn brownie points within the narrow Alliance relationship, but because he believes that Australia’s future is best secured in a US-structured world. Such a world is safe for market capitalism, a system in which Australia does well.

It is my guess that what is written in the above paragraph would not be controversial inside the PM’s Office. It is a statement of the obvious.

One of the strangest paradoxes of international politics is that hardened Rightwing realists and critical theorists often agree with each other. That’s Kissinger and Marx in bed together. Or of a lesser stature, imagine Howard and Chavez knocking the bedposts against the wall at Kirribilli.

In between the Left and the Right, with a head ache, are soggy-lettuce liberals who are maligned by realists as tree huggers, and by the Left as, well, tree huggers.

Against the gumph that is ‘liberalism’ (that we can build a peaceful world order of market capitalism mediated by national cultures), critical theorists and Realists agree that the international system is driven by competing States, power, empire and exploitation — and within these different arenas is the pursuit of hegemony or counter-hegemony. The difference lies in whose side you are on. Do you finish all the huffing and puffing by getting out of the Right or the Left side of bed?

One of the most noxious views of realism comes from that latter day Rudyard Kipling, Niall Ferguson, who fears a world without a superpower, in much the same manner I imagine John Howard does. You will recall that in his book Empire, Ferguson calls upon America’s distracted youth to serve the new empire for the global good. Writing in 2004 in Foreign Policy, Ferguson argued that without a global superpower, a new Dark Age will descend upon us:

Religious revivals. Incipient anarchy. A coming retreat into fortified cities. These are the Dark Age experiences that a world without a hyperpower might quickly find itself reliving. The trouble is, of course, that this Dark Age would be an altogether more dangerous one than the Dark Age of the ninth century…Technology has upgraded destruction, too, so it is now possible not just to sack a city but to obliterate it.

Fundamental to realism in international politics is the belief that States — other than your own, of course — are up to no good. Some call this the ‘security dilemma.’

Basically put, because another State can never be trusted, and because the international system lacks any regulatory body that can universally enforce rules, it’s best to stock up on weapons, alliances and the like. That’s why Australia has recently added steroids to its Defence budget. Given what happened to Saddam’s Iraq, the message is clear: no insurance policy (WMDS), no security. Now to reduce a piddling or moderately-sized State’s security dilemma, big States can offer alliances and prophetic visions of global order. So the world is full of complex alliances and international bodies.

For realists, it is only by journeying on the rollercoaster of security dilemmas that the balance of power in world politics is forged. There is no doubt that there is thrill in the ride. Every other ride is for five-year-olds, including the UN and human rights regimes.

John Howard should not be judged too harshly for the debacle in Iraq. He sees the world from the heights of his own realist rollercoaster, and the supersonic vibrations of that ride no doubt affected his balance.

Realists are good at imagining they can plan world order by the use of power and diplomacy. Henry Kissinger, the consummate realist, may have been joking when he said, ‘Next week there can't be any crisis. My schedule is already full,’ but he also revealed the fundamental pretensions of those in power — that the world revolves around them. It’s an understandable pretension to fall into. After all, as one wit put it, when you are the equivalent of an 800kg gorilla (as the US is) in the zoo of world politics, the rest of the world’s eyes are on you; but your eyes are on the bananas. Yum!

Eight hundred kilogram gorilla-States in international politics are called hegemons, from the Greek ‘to lead.’ That is, they have the power and the means — by virtue of superior military capacity — to shape the direction of international politics and to enforce their will. Consider the fact that the US’s military expenditure is greater than the combined expenditure of China, Russia, United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany, India, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Italy, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Turkey, Israel and the Netherlands. That’s why the US could go to war in Iraq in defiance of the United Nations. It had nothing to do with the superiority of argument.

Even so, there are limits to hegemony — as the US is now realising. Just as it messes up in the Middle East, to its South a wave of Left populism is shaping a new soul order based on rolling back neo-liberalism and US meddling.

In Asia, the rise of China is of such consequence that US foreign policy has been preoccupied by it since the end of the Cold War. Under the convenient excuse of the ‘war on terror,’ the US has expanded its military bases through mineral rich Central Asian States as a means of ensuring its continued but troubled hegemony.

How Australia relates to this hegemony, its role in its enforcement, and the forces gathering against that hegemony will be my concern in future articles.

Democrasubjection : the sovereign myth and democratic citizens

Excerpted from Democracy and National Identity in Thailand, 2007, revised edition, NIAS PRESS. Michael K. Connors

Full references appear in the original


Note: This is a pre-proof copy of Chapter 9 of Democracy and National Identity in Thailand, published 2003 (rev. 2007). A full length discussion of democrasubjection appears in the book.


The idea of democrasubjection first appeared in my Melb Uni Honours dissertation 1994 and was fully sketched out in my PhD, 2000.


A related literature has emerged around the idea of democratic subjectification.


Towards the idea of democrasubjection

Studies of political socialization are often normatively oriented to a given order, seeking to understand maturation or deviance measured against a given, often liberal, value frame. In that sense, political socialization studies, through various techniques, are part and parcel of responding to the people-problem. When applied to third world societies, the concept of political socialization is deployed in prescriptive terms – why are people the way they are now, and how shall we remake them? The use of democrasubjection in this book is restrictive, it does not look at acquisition of ideological traits or reception by intended subjects. This book looks at the interaction of different practices external to the subject, which is to say it focuses on government and hegemony, and leaves the question of impact bracketed. Nevertheless the book proceeds on the premise that democrasubjection is at least partly successful in making people into national-citizens. Clearly, it is a restrictive concept, but it does provide a conceptual clearing space for approaching democracy in a critical manner.

In the movement between projects for reform of political subjects/citizen construction and grandiose claims regarding the sovereignty of the people, complementary strategies of hegemony and governmentality converge in the practice of what may be termed democrasubjection—the subjection of people to imaginary forms of their own rule. Here ‘imaginary’ is understood as the discursive and ideological effects that produce a way of seeing that might be otherwise, given different conditions. Such ways of seeing imprint on social relations a really existing nature (to think and act like a citizen for example). The generalized experience of this imagined realm, for subjects, is shaped by the discursive limits imposed by apparatuses of security and the broader hegemonic conditions under which subjects live.

Schematically, the deployment of democracy, as a metaphor of the common good, proceeds within two parallel moments. First, there is the moment of broad hegemony conceived as a specific historical formation of cemented leadership by a historical bloc over a social formation, framed by moments of state-building, ideological practices, economic development and conjunctural politics. Within this historical condition democracy may variously be advanced as an ideological state, an institutional form, a project to build. Underlying these possibilities, either alone or in combination, is the organization of a centre that aggrandizes for itself the capacity to speak for the common good. Second, there is the moment of democracy as a political rationality, or specific project of government, aimed at creating practices of self-government. This may be framed as the production of capacity for the practice of citizenship and the promotion of civic virtue through which the particular is transcended, such that individuals act in a manner commensurate with the common good (the particular of the elite universalized). To the extent that a moment of democratic hegemony becomes effective in dispositional terms, by orientating people to particular ways of seeing and acting as citizens of a political community, then we are studying the effects of government situated within the problem space called democracy. To give specificity to this discrete area of governmentality and hegemony, it may be named democrasubjection. As theoretical constructions, both hegemony and governmentality are not exhaustive of the forms of power operative in society, nor do they work in an enduring balance; rather, as organizing concepts for enquiry, they point to a critical reading of democracy as democrasubjection.

Democrasubjection, or ‘people in democratic subjection’, refers to the potentially oppressive dimension of democracy, the never-succeeding project of subjecting people to new institutional and ideological forms of power in the construction of democratic subjects. This is more than a play on words: it is an attempt to suggest some productive insights that flow from a recognition of the constructedness of subjecthood. It also draws on Althusser’s noting of the ambiguity of the term ‘subject’:

In the ordinary use of the term, subject in fact means: (1) a free subjectivity, a centre of initiations, author of and responsible for its own actions; (2) a subjected being who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of all freedom…the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, ie, in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection…There are no subjects except by and for their subjection.

This derivation of ‘democrasubjection’ does not signify agreement on Althusser’s structuralist reading of the subject, which extinguishes meaning (1). Democrasubjection is understood more as a strategy, within a more general hegemonic project, than an actual state. It may succeed in having some dispositional consequences, in terms of producing ‘consent’ (as an inculcated propensity to see or do things in particular ways by self-volition). Likewise, the Althusserian model of ‘total’ ideology is eschewed here, in favour of a more limited sense which points to the production of closure, a placing of limits on ways of seeing, in a discursive formation, and this closure’s instrumentality for hegemonic blocs.'

Ideologically speaking, then, a citizen, in moments of practice and identification, might be seen as a subjective place of closure inhabited by myths of nationhood and animated by the equivalence of nation and self, produced by such identifying closure. Certainly, across the globe, and no less in Thailand, much effort is expended on producing a political subject able to recognize itself as a modern political citizen, who is held to be an autonomous agent, and capable of consenting to participate in a political community. Althusser’s notion of interpellation is useful for making some general remarks on this. He maintained that a necessary precondition for the maintenance and reproduction of capitalist society was the extent to which its ideological systems were perpetuated. To examine this, Althusser grappled with how the subject internalized ideology, and he famously concluded that ideology was constitutive of the subject: ‘Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects’. By this Althusser meant that ideology, as a representation of the imagined relations of individuals, is a process through which the subject ‘negotiates’ its relationship to societal forces (material ideological apparatus). The ‘negotiation’ takes place at the level of subject (mis)recognition of itself when it is interpellated, or hailed, by outside subjects or institutions. When a subject (mis)recognizes that a discourse is addressed to herself/himself, and responds as the addressee, then the subject is thoroughly implicated in ideology. Thus, Althusser claims that actually the negotiation described above (interpellation/(mis)recognition) does not take place because ‘(t)he existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing’. The subject only ever was an ideological production.

We have in Althusser the strongest statement on the fictive nature of subjecthood, such that lines of resistance are not intelligible. Here the questions of subject autonomy, of consent and resistance, make no theoretical sense. While the idea of interpellation remains a suggestive way for theorizing the discursive making of subjects, for it points to a permanent process of subject constitution, Althusser denies the agential nature of interpellation and the possibility of resistant readings of subject status because interpellation is presented as a formal rather than real process (since ideology and the subject are the same thing). Inasmuch as one might recognize the limits of ‘interpellation’ as an account of subject constitution, it can nevertheless function to name a particular elite orientation which seeks to construct particular ways of being by addressing people as citizens.
Furthermore, an underlying assumption of the chapters that follow is that the democratic aspect of both the statist and liberal hegemonic project entails the discursive citation of what Poulantzas calls the ‘isolation effect’, an effect in which subjects recognize themselves as citizens or individuals rather than class subjects, and which produces forms of politics relevant to this being a ‘person’ in a nation, separate from class politics and identity. As Poulantzas argued, the isolation effect can not be read simply as an automatic process derived from the structural isolation of individuals through commodity production and their de-classed relation to the political region as individuals, mediated by ‘juridical-political ideology’ and legal institutions. Rather, this effect must be organized and constantly articulated as the commonsense operative subjectivity, as a form of subjectivity involving a particular imagining of the political community and one’s location in it.

Projects of dominatively defined citizenship function as constant interpellative appeals to the desired subjectivity. This is not to say they are effective or not subvertible, but it is to say that they form a crucial component of the ideological struggle to combat the ‘people problem’, or the problem of organizing the people productively. Part of the democratic aspect of hegemonic projects in Thailand, both statist and liberal, is precisely the attempt to make manifest and operative the structural potential of the isolation effect, to make it politically operative and organize the population around concepts of citizenship. That is to say that the isolation effect is consciously organized for as a political project. The more organized ideological strata in the state do seek the organization of a national imaginary and a citizen conducive to self-rule. It is for this reason that there exists a durable tradition of practices of government in the Thai state concerned with developing within the people particular subjective orientations that are held to be the civilized condition of modernity, among which is the production of a democratic temper. It is also why it is possible to meaningfully speak of projects of democrasubjection.




Democracy and National Identity in Thailand
Thai discussion from
http://looktao.multiply.com/journal/item/37

หนังสือเล่มนี้มีวัตถุประสงค์เพื่อที่จะวิเคราะห์วาทกรรมของ “ประชาธิปไตย” โดยมองจากแง่มุมของรัฐ ว่า รัฐไทยได้สร้างจินตนาการของคำว่า “ประชาธิปไตย” อย่างไร โดยมีสมมติฐานว่า ประชาธิปไตยและการสร้างอัตลักษณ์ความเป็นไทยเป็นเทคโนโลยีการควบคุมแบบหนึ่งทางการเมืองและการครอบงำหนังสือเล่มนี้เสนอแนะการวิเคราะห์การเมือง โดยผ่านทฤษฎีการพัฒนาการเมือง ซึ่งถูกนำมาใช้โดยรัฐและตัวแสดงอื่น ๆ ของรัฐ โดยอธิบายว่า "ประชาธิปไตยและอัตลักษณ์ของความเป็นไทย ถูกนำมาใช้เป็นภาษาการเมืองเพื่อการสร้างเทคโนโลยีแห่งการชอบธรรม" ประชาธิปไตยถูกนำมาใช้เพื่อเป็นหลักการสร้างความชอบธรรมของตัวแสดงต่าง ๆ โดยไม่ได้มีความหมายคงตัวในตัวของมันเอง เช่นชัยอนันท์ และกนก พบว่าก่อนการรัฐประหารปี 2524 คำว่า “ประชาธิปไตย” ไม่ค่อยถูกนำมาใช้ในประกาศคณะปฏิวัติ และมักจะถูกนำมาใช้ในทางลบ ในขณะที่สมัยหลังคำว่า “ประชาธิปไตย” มีความหมายที่หมายถึงสิทธิในการการปกครองตัวเองของประชาชนประชาธิปไตยในฐานะจินตภาพของชุมชนทางการเมืองและสิทธิในการปกครองตัวเอง เป็นส่วนหนึ่งของผลผลิตของการครอบงำ โดยให้ชุมชนทางการเมืองคือหน่วยหนึ่งที่มีฉันทามติร่วมกัน ประหนึ่งว่าชุมชนใด ๆ ก็ตาม ไม่มีความไม่ลงรอย ไม่ขัดแย้งกันในเรื่องผลประโยชน์ และไม่มีการกดขี่ครอบงำ ในแง่นี้ Connors บอกว่า เรียกว่าทฤษฎีของเขาที่ได้จากการวิเคราะห์วาทกรรมประชาธิปไตยของไทยว่าเป็น “Democrasubjection” หมายถึงเป็นจินตภาพที่ประชาชนคิดไปว่าเขามีอำนาจในการปกครองตัวเอง (..Democrasubjection, or the subjection of people to imaginary forms of their own rule)ที่ผ่านมาประชาธิปไตยถูกใช้ทั้งในแง่ของอุดมการณ์ชาติ และวาทศิลป์เพื่อเสริมอุดมการณ์ของผู้นำทางการเมืองกลุ่มต่าง ๆ 43 ในการอ้างประชาธิปไตยเพื่อความชอบธรรมของกลุ่มต่าง ๆ นั้น คำว่า “พลเมือง” หรือ Citizen จะต้องถูกสร้างขึ้นมาก่อนเพื่อให้เป็นเจ้าของอำนาจอธิปไตย วิธีการสร้างพลเมืองในระบอบประชาธิปไตยของไทยนั้น ถูกสร้างขึ้นในรูปแบบของพลเมืองดีที่ได้รับการพัฒนาทางการเมือง โดยผ่านทางโครงการต่าง ๆ ของรัฐเพื่อพัฒนาให้พวกเขาได้สร้างอัตลักษณ์และภักดีต่อความเป็นไทย ถึงแม้ว่าชุมชนทางการเมืองและประชาชนจะเป็นเป้าหมายหลักทางการเมือง แต่จริง ๆ แล้วผู้กำหนดนโยบายต่างหากที่จะเป็นผู้เสนอนโยบายและสร้างโครงการต่าง ๆ ให้กับประชาชนทั้งนี้ประชาธิปไตยในที่นี่ก็ไม่ใช่เพียงวาทะศิลป์ของเผด็จการ แต่เป็นรูปแบบของพลเมืองที่นำพาไปสู่รัฐที่มีเสรีภาพมากขึ้น ประชาชนคือวัตถุประสงค์หรือเป้าหมายของการพัฒนา โดยความต้องการของพวกเขาได้รับการตอบสนอง แม้ว่าจะถูกกดขี่อยู่บ้าง การเป็นพลเมืองดีขึ้นอยู่กับการปฏิบัติตามกฎหมาย โดยมีสัญลักษณ์อยู่ที่ระบบกษัตริย์ที่ยุติธรรม และเมื่อประชาชนมีความขัดแย้งกัน ผู้นำจะส่งสัญญาณให้เค้ากลับมาคืนดีกัน นี่คือประชาธิปไตย จากการให้คำจำกัดความและชี้แนะของผู้มีอำนาจครอบ