Admittedly, most, if not all of my friends, religiously vote for the Democrat Party come rain or shine. Therefore, I’ve been rather fascinated by the question of what kind of traits or attributes a typical Democrat possesses. So, for what it’s worth, here is a small list I’ve compiled to help readers determine whether they are Democrats.
1. You’re a Democrat if you’ve never had a real job, never met a real person or never experienced real life and you still think you would make a great prime minister.
2. You’re a Democrat if you think elections are a vital part of the democratic process and all Thais should have the right to free and fair elections, as long as they all freely and fairly vote for the Democrat Party.
Let’s be honest, if voters keep voting for “bad” people instead of “good” people, what is the point of having elections? In fact, we should be eternally grateful to the Democrat Party for saving all of us from ourselves, by boycotting elections and supporting undemocratic entities like the PDRC that want to prevent us from choosing our own leaders.
3. You’re a Democrat if you spend such a ridiculous amount of time petitioning the Constitutional Court for assistance in eliminating Pheu Thai that it would actually make sense if Abhisit Vejjajiva car pools to work with the Constitutional Court judges every morning.
4. You’re a Democrat if you claim to be protectors of the monarchy while deliberately using the monarchy as your personal weapon of choice to character assassinate political opponents. In the interest of fairness, the Democrats are not the only ones guilty of this. There are many Thais that like to engage in what some academics call “flattery inflation” when it comes to the monarchy, because it gives them an exaggerated sense of importance.
In my view, if you really love the King, like most of us do, there’s no need to openly advertise it. After all, most truly intelligent people don’t go around telling others how intelligent they are, do they?
5. You’re a Democrat if you’re an expert at getting others to fight your battles for you. The PAD, the army, the courts, the NACC, the EC and finally the PDRC have one thing in common: They have all been employed by the Democrat Party as proxies to fight their political battles. This is probably why the Democrat Party has come out of this decade-long cat fight with Thaksin relatively unscathed, while all other political parties have been disbanded by order of the courts.
6. You’re a Democrat if you can invoke the rule of law and principles of democracy while giving interviews with members of the press and are still able to keep a straight face. I think the Democrats should drop this act because it’s not at all convincing. If the Democrats really stood for the rule of law, then they would have condemned the PDRC and cast them aside when Suthep Thaugsuban and his band blocked voting booths in the last election. And if the Democrats were genuine defenders of democracy, they would never have petitioned the Constitutional Court to have the Feb 2 election annulled on the grounds it couldn’t be completed in one day. An election which 20 million Thais like myself participated in. An election which was finally voided by the charter court. And an election which the Democrat Party boycotted.
7. You’re a Democrat if you try to hide your inferiority complex by faking a superiority complex. It’s my theory that Democrats are closet Thaksin admirers. They envy the way Thaksin is able to communicate with voters, something they can only dream of doing. They covet Thaksin’s financial muscle and the political clout that comes along with it. But instead of striving to replicate Thaksin’s successes and embracing their “temporary” state of inferiority, the Democrat Party has chosen to fool itself into a sense of superiority by implying that all of Thaksin’s wealth was stolen from state coffers and all his votes were paid for.
By playing the “the good people” card, this false sense of superiority is destroying the party, and with it, our democracy.
8. You’re a Democrat if you think people who didn’t purchase the latest “Shutdown” multi-coloured, limited addition, glow-in-the-dark, designer cap, are all in violation of Section 68 of the constitution because we are attempting to “overthrow the democratic rule with the King as the Head of the State”.
9. Finally, you’re a Democrat if you think that only you should run the country. That is why you need all the help you can get from the army and the courts — the people who actually do run the country. But for this “silent coup” to work out, a vital role has to be played by the PDRC, who wish they could run the country. Moreover, this sinister process will involve fooling around 67 million Thais, who don’t have a clue who runs the country. However, at the end of the day, everything will depend on what the business elites decide, because, ultimately, they are the people who actually own the country.
Songkran Grachangnetara is an entrepreneur. He graduated from The London School of Economics and Columbia University. He can be reached at Twitter: @SongkranTalk