The silent majority speaks

By Robert J. Fouser

After Richard Nixon's landslide re-election in 1972, Pauline Kael, a noted film critic for the New Yorker reportedly said, ``I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him." Since then, conservative political commentators in the U.S. have used the quote as evidence of a small but loud "liberal bubble" that stands in contrast to the "silent majority" of center-right voters.

On election day last month, many Koreans found themselves echoing Kael. Moon Jae-in's supporters dominated Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the social networking services and the blogosphere. Reports of high turnout during the day raised hopes of a Moon victory. As the early returns favoring Park Geun-hye solidified into a lead, Moon's supporters were stupefied.

In the end, Park won 51.6 percent of the vote as opposed to 48 percent for Moon, making her the first president since democratization in 1987 to receive a majority of the votes cast. Her victory was narrow but broad as she just won the vote-rich swing regions of Incheon and Gyeonggi Province. She received a respectable 48 percent of the vote in Seoul.

As the votes were still being counted, pundits offered a number of theories to explain the result. The first and most popular one is the generation gap. This theory holds that a record high turnout of conservative voters in their 50s overwhelmed the strongly pro-Moon vote among those in their 20s and 30s. The theory suggests that voters in their 50s turned to Park for stability amid worries about retirement and declining real estate values. This explains the surprising results in Incheon and Gyeonggi Province where real estate worries are greatest.

Another theory is the ideological gap. This one suggests that older voters were afraid that Moon might move too far to the left. The theory further suggests that Unified Progressive Party candidate Lee Jung-hee's aggressive criticism of Park and far-left rhetoric during two of the televised presidential debates repelled voters and created sympathy for Park.

The underlying theme in the above theories is the search for stability amid fear of the unknown. This is the same mindset of the silent majority that gave Nixon an overwhelming victory in 1972. He represented stability, whereas as George McGovern, his idealistic opponent, represented a sharp change in an unknown direction. Amid unprecedented social unrest in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Americans flocked to stability.

Korea of 2012 is far from the U.S. of 1972, but the political landscape is oddly similar. Like Nixon's landslide reelection, Park's victory confirms the conservative turn in the previous election. During the 20 years following democratization, forces demanding change outnumbered those in favor of stability. The election of Kim Dae-jung in 1997 and Roh Moo-hyun in 2002 were watershed events that represented a sharp break with the dictatorial past. Lee Myung-bak's victory in 2007 brought years of change to an end as voters chose the stability of a ``CEO president" who offered the hope of a stronger economy.

American politics after 1972 offers some interesting lessons to reform-minded groups in Korea. The most important lesson is to find candidates who offer change without compromising stability. The Democratic Party finally found such a candidate in Bill Clinton in 1992, 20 years after the McGovern debacle. Though he leans more strongly in the direction of change, Barack Obama is another such candidate.

Another lesson is to triangulate. This means reaching out to the center, which pushes conservatives to the right while creating distance from the far left. Reaching out to the far left alienates the much larger group of voters in the center. Elections in Korea are decided in the center, in vast apartment blocks of Incheon and Gyeonggi Province; yielding the center means losing the election.

The last lesson is to talk about the future, not the past. Reformers in Korea look at 1987-2007 as the golden age and discuss issues of today in the discourse of those years. Time moves on and voters tire of hearing the debates of yesteryear. Obama knew this well and deftly framed himself as a post-baby boomer candidate who wanted to move the country beyond the boomer discourse of the 1960s. This helped him win the nomination against boomer Hillary Clinton.

In the end, no political group owns the silent majority in Korea because it wants change to deal with problems it knows well, but it also wants stability to reduce the risks that change inevitably brings. A simple maxim that offers reformers a way out of the self-defeating ``liberal bubble."

The writer is a professor at the Department of Korean Language Education at Seoul National University. Email him at fouser@snu.ac.kr.