First, the democratic political system in Thailand was not born out of a mass movement but came about by power seizure by a small number of military officers and civil bureaucrats, mostly Western educated, ironically on the King’s scholarship, who sought to overthrow the absolute monarchy in 1932. The people in general were not involved whatsoever while the merchant class consisting mostly of non-political ethnic Chinese who were considered aliens at the time was politically irrelevant. It was thus a coup d’ etat, not a revolution as mistakenly referred to. It had turned the Thai society into a bureaucratic polity for about four decades until the October 14, 1973 mass uprising. A bureaucratic polity was antithetical to democratic development.