Author: Ryan Manuel

Some friends of mine at grad school have a great saying: “using the word normative does not automatically improve your argument”.

Having read Josh Kurlantzick’s latest piece, I am tempted to change that to “using the words ‘middle class’ does not automatically improve your argument”.

Kurlantzick argues that “in country after country, democratic reforms are in retreat. The surprising culprit: the middle class”. A prime example, he argues, is Thailand, which was once the poster child for a successful switch to democracy until the rise of Thaksin Sinawatra.

To quote Kurlantzick’s thesis:

In 2000, Thailand’s middle class faced a problem it might not have anticipated – a politician who actually canvassed the poor for votes. Thaksin Shinawatra, a billionaire telecommunications tycoon turned pol, traveled the rural hinterlands, spewing populist promises unlike anything the country had ever seen: cheap, government-backed healthcare, loans to every village, and many more. When I traveled with Thaksin on the campaign trail, villagers welcomed him like a kind of god, gathering in packs to listen and try to touch him. And the rural poor, who make up the majority of the country, voted.

His next point, that the countries often lack institutions strong enough to constrain the power of the leaders, is a valid one. But his conclusion seems somewhat bizarre:

in many of these weak democracies, members of the middle class place their hopes in the very men they once deplored, realizing they trust the army officers, who tend to come from the same elite backgrounds, more than they trust the newly empowered poor.

Now, the last time I checked, the middle class didn’t come from the “same elite backgrounds”. Indeed, if we look at some recent research from the MIT, a ‘middle class’ person is defined as someone who is holding down a steady job. To quote Duflo, the characteristics of a middle class citizen are:

a salaried job with steady paychecks provides enough stability to encourage people to start investing for the future. They spend more on healthcare, which enables them to keep working. They keep their children in school, helping the children land middle-class jobs later on.

These are not the urban elite that, Kurlantzick argues, flock to similarly elite military institutions when they don’t like the cut of the democratically elected leaders’ jib.

This gets us to the crux of the problem with Kurlantzick’s argument: it has nothing to do with the middle class. Instead, what seems to drive it is a dislike for the fact that the leaders of these nascent democracies often have a populist bent. Kurlantzick then isn’t doubting the efficacy of democracy in delivering benefits to poorer voters. Rather, like a lord of the manor forced to mix with the hoi polloi, he is turning his nose up and sniffing at the nouveau riche elements of democracy that are emerging. His distaste for the Thaksins of the world is based on a premise that countries don’t just need democracy, they need democracy led by certain types of people.

Buying this line of argument is risky. It is right to condemn the attacking of institutions, the co-option of free media and difficulty in instituting rule of law in a democratic state. But democracy itself should not be trashed simply because we think its new leaders aren’t simply the servants of an imaginary “middle class”.