Brooks Considers Thai Solution for U.S.

The political impasse in Thailand has been frozen in place today. The military announced that it was taking power. Thomas Fuller has the story, "Thai Army Declares Coup, Citing Need to ‘Reform’ Nation":

BANGKOK — Two days after declaring martial law the Thai military on Thursday seized full control of the country, the second time in a decade that the army has overthrown an elected government. 

The military, which had invited political leaders Thursday for a second day of talks on how to resolve the country’s political deadlock detained the meeting participants instead. The head of the army, Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha then announced the coup on national television, saying it was “necessary to seize power.” 

Mr. Prayuth said the coup was launched “in order to bring the situation back to normal quickly” and to “reform the political structure, the economy and the society.”

Six months of debilitating protests in Thailand have centered on whether to hold elections. The governing party dissolved Parliament in December in an attempt to defuse the crisis and set the election for February. The opposition Democrat Party, which has not won a national election since 1992, refused to take part. Protesters called for an appointed prime minister and blockaded polling stations, leading to a court ruling that the election was unconstitutional.

The country’s democracy was in deadlock.

This has been a long time coming. The speculation has always been why the shyness from the Thai Army. I bring up the Thai coup this morning because of how nicely it dovetails with a David Brooks column published Monday, "The Big Debate." In it Brooks floats a proposal that is identical to the key demand of the Bangkok-based protest movement that has stymied the populist Shinawatra government -- small groups of appointed elites ruling by fiat:

At the national level, American politics has become neurotically democratic. Politicians are campaigning all the time and can scarcely think beyond the news cycle. Legislators are terrified of offending this or that industry lobby, activist group or donor faction. Unrepresentative groups have disproportionate power in primary elections. 

The quickest way around all this is to use elite Simpson-Bowles-type commissions to push populist reforms. 

The process of change would be unapologetically elitist. Gather small groups of the great and the good together to hammer out bipartisan reforms — on immigration, entitlement reform, a social mobility agenda, etc. — and then rally establishment opinion to browbeat the plans through. But the substance would be anything but elitist. Democracy’s great advantage over autocratic states is that information and change flow more freely from the bottom up. Those with local knowledge have more responsibility.

If the Guardian State’s big advantage is speed at the top, democracy’s is speed at the bottom. So, obviously, the elite commissions should push proposals that magnify that advantage: which push control over poverty programs to local charities; which push educational diversity through charter schools; which introduce more market mechanisms into public provision of, say, health care, to spread power to consumers.

If it turns out that the Tea Party backbenchers are too unruly to govern when the GOP controls the White House and the Senate as well as the House, know that the Thai solution is being seriously considered.