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The reason why people turn a blind eye to it is that Thailand is, of course, an incredible economic success story. And this was part of the story with Bangladesh. Its economy was growing so fast that people turned a blind eye to the authoritarian government. Thailand is far, far, wealthier... I mean, it's a pretty poor country, when I first went there in the early 80s. It's now a proper upper-middle income country and, you know, an economic miracle. And this is one of the problems, that the link between being a liberal democracy and delivering growth, which, it was this sort of story for 200 years, has been broken. And increasingly from China to Thailand, people are looking at these more authoritarian models and saying, "Well, we don't really mind as long as we're getting wealthier."
Rory Stewart. "Iran’s Imminent Retaliation & Is The Press Softer On Labour?" The Rest Is Politics Podcast. Thursday, 15 August, 2024.

In other words, if it's not broken, why fix it? For supporters of liberal democracy, and other representative forms of government, autocracy is broken by definition. And they'll point to places such as Venezuela and the like to make their point. But in China, Thailand and other similar places, the fact that the government is autocratic, or even totalitarian hasn't resulted in obvious mismanagement of the place. And so widespread resistance to the regime isn't present, because most people don't see the need to change the government to better their material conditions. And people will put up with a lot if it means raising their standards of living.

Liberal democracy is a means, not an end. If it's going to persist, it has to delivery what the populace demands of it. Increased standards of living may be what people are after, but things like national pride have also pushed people to suffer, if not embrace, governments that appear to be disasters from the outside. This, of course, is true of almost any government, but the individual freedoms that many liberal democracies provide mean that they can, intentionally or not, vote themselves out of existence if they are not careful.

And presuming that support for representative governments is a moral imperative can easily become a form of not being careful. Much is made of politicians who have little patience for "democratic norms," but those are also politicians who tend to understand what their constituents want and expect from them, and they put in the effort to deliver it. And not needing to work around the law or political opposition parties (especially opposition parties motivated by negative partisanship) can make the job much easier than it is elsewhere.

People understand which side their bread may be buttered on, and they understand costs and trade-offs. Western governments today aren't, in my opinion, doing a very good job of making the cost-benefit analysis work to their benefits. Some of it is simply a matter of maturity. Thailand, China and Bangladesh started from much lower baselines; so long as their governments were reasonably competent and free of corruption, the nations were going to grow; they were well placed to take advantage of changes in global demand. Europe and North America are going to have much harder times developing industries that both create a lot of value and employ large numbers of people at better than the current prevailing wages. But some of it is also the kruft, to use the technical term, that builds up in highly complex governments that have formalized and involved processes for change. Take generative automation tools. If various forms of both limited and capable artificial intelligence start erode the need for human mental labor what the industrial revolution did to physical labor, the advanced world is going to undergo a period of serious upheaval. If action is not proactive, it will need to be quick, and slow bureaucratic processes will not cut the mustard. If autocracies prove to be more nimble and responsive, people will continue to sour on liberal democracy, and the citizens of autocracies will be even more convinced that turning a blind eye was the right choice.