Thailand, Philippines witnessing reversals of people power: Patrick Brown

I've seen my share of people power in action, and often I liked what I saw.

It was heartening, 30 years ago, to surge with a huge crowd through the streets of Manilaand climb over the gates of the presidential palace to witness the end of Ferdinand Marcos's 21-year stranglehold over the Philippines.

Six years on, in 1992, on the streets of Bangkok with protestors under fire from the army, it seemed to be Thailand's turn for a new dawn when the junta led by General Suchinda Kraprayooncaved in under pressure from the people, with a helping hand from the king.

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In between, I'd seen popular revolts succeed in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakiaand Romania.

Each victory for people power gave more currency to the notion that the rise of democracy was unstoppable.

One of the most widelyread books of 1992, The End of History and the Last Manby Francis Fukuyama, proclaimed,"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as suchthat is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

Sadly, Fukuyama overestimated the strength of what seemed to be a democratic tideand ignored the fact that tides not only rise, but fall as well.

In many countries democratic progress is being reversed.

This weekendThailand is holdinga referendum on a new constitution that will consolidate the rule of the latest military junta.

In addition to harassing criticsand detaining them for "attitude adjustment,"the regime has passed a new law against campaigning against the proposed constitution, with a penalty of 10 years in prison.

The junta's leader, Prayuth Chan-ocha, a former general who has appointed himself prime minister, says if the proposed constitution is not approved, he will simply write a new one.

The army insists its increasingly authoritarian rule is necessary to restore democracyand preserve stability as the reign of King Bhumibol, on the throne since 1946, draws to a close.

A model forpolitically ambitious tycoons

At the centre of Thailand's crisis is Thaksin Shinawatra, a former leader whose early career could serve as a model for billionaire tycoons with political ambitions around the world.

He used his enormous fortune to build an image as a strong leader with an almost magical ability to solve complicated problems at a stroke. Populist policies rewarding peasants and the urban poor created a formidable constituency which traditional politicians and parties were unable to match.

Elected in 2001, he tinkered with laws to entrench his power and further enrich his companies until the military forced him into exile in 2006.

Complicated by struggles over the succession to the 88-year-old monarch, who is apparently close to death, Thailand's political life has been dominated for a decade by an epic battle between Shinawatra's supporters and his enemies, with democracy a distant memory.

Police in Philippines get a licence to kill

In the Philippines, where the power of the people to sweep away dictatorship was so heartening,the people used their hard-won right to vote in June to elect a man ofbreathtaking vulgarity, narcissism and casual violence as president for the next six years.

Rodrigo Duterte,a swaggering populist who promised to solve the problems of drugs and crime by giving the police a licence to kill, has done just that. More than 500 people, many of them with little proven connection to crime, have already been killed.

Duterte campaigned as an outsider, mobilizing popular resentment against elite political families thought to ignore the needs and concerns of ordinary people. It was an echo of the 1998 campaign by Joseph Estrada, a venal and empty-headed movie star who won in a landslideand served as president for three years before being removed for corruption.

People power revolutions spring up when rage against rulers becomes stronger than fear of repression.

A different kind of people power can lead to electoral insurgency, a revolt against the system expressed as a vote for a radical demagogue with sweeping promises of change.

The second man to be elected president of the United States, John Adams, wrote that "democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

If Fukuyama was overly optimistic, Adams perhaps erred on the side of pessimism. After all, the United States has elected 42 successors to him and still claims to be the world's greatest democracy.

And yet, in the race to be the 45th president, Donald Trump is waging a populist campaign fueled by anger, which threatens his country's democracy as much as Shinawatra and Duterte do theirs.

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