Why does Friedman suddenly surprise?

Thomas Friedman wrote yesterday in the Old Gray Lady:

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.

I added the emphasis…  Mr. Friedman has openly admitted that he is a totalitarian socialist who thinks the Chinese Politburo is a “reasonably enlightened group”.  I’m not shocked.  It was fairly obvious to me over the years that Mr. Friedman was no fan of freedom.  Like many other “big thinkers” who have proposed more government regulation as the solution to our “problems”, China is the shining city on the hill – only because it is the biggest most successful communist state.  Friedman and his socialist co-thinkers, such as Paul Krugman and Michael Ignatieff are convinced that capitalism was doomed to fail, have used the recent recession as “proof” and want to impose autocratic government by a group of enlightened “philosopher-kings”, much like what Pierre Trudeau dreamed.

Friedman does make a strange argument however that America is a one-party democracy:

Look at the climate/energy bill that came out of the House. Its sponsors had to work twice as hard to produce this breakthrough cap-and-trade legislation. Why? Because with basically no G.O.P. representatives willing to vote for any price on carbon that would stimulate investments in clean energy and energy efficiency, the sponsors had to rely entirely on Democrats…{snip}…The only way for us to match them is by legislating a rising carbon price along with efficiency and renewable standards that will stimulate massive private investment in clean-tech. Hard to do with a one-party democracy.

So basically because the Republicans won’t vote the same way as the Democrats (thus making this a real two-party system), Friedman tries to make the case that the opposition is irrelevant and the majority side is behaving as a one-party system…  (This is pretty much how it has worked in most parliametry democracies that have a tradition of a majority government (e.g. the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand)).   He fails to remember that the point of democracy is so that different groups can have different ideas and the people have options.  In China, the people don’t have options and do get to select the Politburo.

I do find it entertaining that Friedman claims the advantages of China’s system in an article that starts on the subject of health care, considering that it was only in the last few weeks that China admitted to harvesting organs from prisoners for transplants…  Does Mr. Friedman think that is “enlightened”?