We need to stop lying to ourselves and catastrophizing democratic politics
When ex-President Yoon Suk Yeol formally exited the ruling People Power Party (PPP) this week, allowing its candidate, Kim Moon-soo, to distance himself and boost his chances in the election on June 3, Yoon took the opportunity to issue a warning.
“The fate of the Republic of Korea is at stake in this presidential election,” he said, adding that, if his now-former party — which, by the way, asked him to leave — doesn’t win, it’s possible the “liberal democratic system will collapse.”
As a responsible columnist, I feel it incumbent on me to advise readers, who may be alarmed upon hearing such claims from the mouth of a former national leader, to not worry, relax, take a chill pill and breathe. The Republic of Korea is doing just fine and will continue to do so, whichever candidate wins.
But I’d like to examine the ex-president’s claim.
We may have some sympathy for Yoon. Not only has he suffered the humiliation of impeachment following his martial law miscalculation, but the system is not finished with him yet. Such is the vindictiveness of the political culture here that he and his wife are likely to end up behind bars with absurdly long sentences.
One explanation for his comments might be that, as his own world is collapsing, he is projecting his anguish onto Korea at large. Such defiance is all too human, given that he made a serious mistake on the national stage and that this mistake will forever be associated with his name.
But Yoon believed this before martial law. Indeed, it was the rationale. He was falling on his sword to protect the country against “pro-Chinese and pro-North Korean forces.”
What’s more, a lot of people share this view. They, too, see this election as a life-or-death struggle between liberal democracy and pro-North Korean communism.
This is a very serious matter. Let’s spell it out: What they believe is that the PPP and some other minor parties are in favor of continuing the country’s liberal democracy, while the major opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) and some other minor parties are serving the ends, wittingly or not, of Korea's non-democratic neighbors, China and North Korea.
They believe that if DPK candidate Lee Jae-myung wins, which he almost certainly will, we’re headed down the road towards communist dictatorship.
The trouble with this perspective expressed in this way is that 99.99 percent of the people saying it do not even believe it. How can we be sure? I’d say because two things are missing: The first is the absence of serious organized resistance. The front-line troops defending liberal democracy dress in red, put on white gloves and handwave at commuter traffic like staff at Everland. Shouldn’t they be campaigning for a Second Amendment?
The second thing is the absence — so far, and hopefully, until the end — of the lone wolf. Such figures, whose futile gestures of violence are against overwhelming power, are romanticized in Korea. We’ve grown up being told they are heroes. So where are they? You’d think there’d be a bunch of them now helping to rescue democracy. The truth is that even those claiming that liberal democracy is going down the plughole will see them as nutters.
Of course, it will not occur to them that their way of characterizing the current political differences and confrontation between the two main sides itself breeds extremism.
They know liberal democracy isn’t going anywhere. What they are doing is taking a nugget of truth – perhaps, for example, that the DPK wants to improve relations with China or try dialogue with North Korea — and catastrophizing it.
Frankly, I’m disappointed. How can we pull back from this and let politics get back to being boring again?
We can’t look abroad for help. This disease has gripped Westerners and set their moral compasses spinning out of control. Even smart people with Ph.D.s and nice people who volunteer at church in America claimed that Donald Trump was Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had taken over when he won in November. They, too, didn’t believe what they were saying and were similarly catastrophizing their dislike of their new president.
What we need to do here is tone things down and accept that, while national-level issues are important, it is a good measure of democracy that politics is not always that interesting. It is dangerous to try and spice it up with untruths.
Michael Breen (mike.breen@insightcomms.com) is the author of "The New Koreans.” The views expressed here are his own.