Why letting teachers afford homes is still called communism

Courtesy of Minku Kang

Every Korean president promises change. They use lofty words like revolution. They promise that everything that happened in the past would simply be a footnote to what is about to take place. People hold their breath. “It’s about to start,” they think. The struggle, the war, the division, the colonialism. Everything will now be solved and the country will become a place for the people. Having sacrificed more than one could possibly imagine, after enduring hardships so outrageous they make you baulk, having democratically chosen a leader, the time has come. The destiny fulfilled. And then…

And then. Plus ca change.

I remember when President Moon Jae-in’s administration sent me a special gift set upon entering office. It was a wonderfully ornate set of drinking glasses and traditional Korean liquor. My family looked at me askance. “Wow,” they thought. From the Blue House? To you? The guy that sits around reading books and drinking? It was a lovely gesture and I am thankful for it. However, it didn’t stop me writing about issues that troubled him (these generally revolved around labor issues and showing a more proactive approach to protecting the LGBT community and addressing gender inequalities).

It's somewhat sad, however, when you see people do the opposite. They get associated with a particular administration, they get close to power, and then they stop what doing made them worth reading in the first place. They turn their eyes away. They lessen their language. They address trivial topics. What’s worse is that many people don’t know this is happening. They continue to read the news, they look at the headlines, the Insta stories, and the LinkedIn posts, and they think that the reporting they are receiving is objective. Not tainted by influence, ideology, or monetary gain.

I wish I could tell you that academics were any better. They’re not. Far from it. They line up and take sides and hope that they too will be chosen. Given a sip from the cup. They share and promote the work of those who side with them ideologically and ignore the publications and posts of those who bat for the other team.

What one learns is that truth doesn’t exist in a particular profession, political bias, gender, or ethnicity. Truth and the ability to tell it remains in us as individuals. Every day we are faced with this challenge. We all know it. We experience it at the dinner table, on the subway, with our loved ones, when we video call our mother, and when explaining to our children where Santa Claus lives. The truth is a difficult thing to spend time with.

Now in the modern age we are more and more worried about reputation as our identity is our product. We have commodified the self. Our egos grow. Our online presence becomes an extension of our physical bodies. The followers add up. The likes accumulate. We change our profile photo. We share common talking points. We avoid other issues for fear of being challenged.

You know this happens to you just as it happens to me. Or at least the tendency is there for all of us to act in such a way. Of course some of us try to keep a straight bat. We say it how it is. We are lucky that our comments and words don’t affect our livelihood or salaries. It doesn’t secure our children’s education. It’s simply a way to rally at the world and the system we see as corrupt.

But for most people inside that system, the media talking heads, the journalists, the lawmakers, the politicians, they are dependent on maintaining a personal image and that means that they have to say (and not say) certain things. Essentially, they don’t speak the truth. They have opinions, they have beliefs, but they just decide to speak in non-committal terms or avoid certain conversations so as not to disrupt their position.

It's etiquette. But, at the same time, it’s violence.

The Incomplete House

In practice, South Korea does not have a meaningful left–right divide on certain fundamentals. It has two capitalist parties with different branding, different media cheerleaders, and different rhetorical aesthetics, but broadly identical commitments. They compete theatrically, like rival teams whose jerseys differ but whose playbooks are suspiciously the same.

However, the conservative opposition is fractured. The former president faces investigation under circumstances so extraordinary he’s looking at a decade in jail. And thus President Lee Jae Myung is in office under unusually favorable conditions. There is a genuine mandate. It’s not a blank check, but an unmistakable opening nevertheless. And with that opening come two options.

One option is familiar: symbolic gestures, small money hand-outs, photoshoots with K-pop idols, and bread-and-circuses politics designed to distract rather than deliver. Minor tax tweaks. Shiny announcements. A careful soothing of markets and conglomerates while inequality quietly metastasizes in the background. Five years of national growth and individual struggle for the citizens.

The other option is harder and rarer: to use political capital for durable, structural change in the areas that actually determine whether ordinary people’s lives improve or merely continue. And when one strips away the noise, the endless distractions, what this comes down to, relentlessly, boringly, morally, is affordability. And above all: housing.

Most normal people in South Korea know that it’s outrageously difficult now to purchase a house. For a normal working or middle-class family, the idea of owning a house for a family to live in is beyond fantasy. But housing is not a lifestyle accessory. It is not a speculative instrument. Not a political football. It is where people sleep, eat, recover, argue, love, raise children, and age. So if a society cannot provide reasonably secure and affordable housing to the people who keep it running, the teachers, nurses, cooks, cleaners, delivery drivers, and care workers, then that society has a problem more fundamental than ideology.

But somewhere along the way, housing ceased to be a place to live and became a vehicle for wealth accumulation. Homeownership increasingly divided society into those who could build equity and those who could not. This is not accidental. Policymakers, many of whom already own property, have strong incentives to see prices rise.

The result is a grotesque contradiction. The very people whose labor sustains society return each night to homes they do not own, cannot afford to buy, and increasingly fear losing. They are told to be patient, to work harder, to wait, as if shelter were a luxury rather than a prerequisite for dignity.

Of course there is something actively insulting about the way Koreans react whenever the suggestion is made that a Korean president might serve the Korean people in reality rather than just words and slogans. The idea comes as heresy. “Commie,” people mutter, as if the proposal that teachers and nurses should be able to afford homes were tantamount to abolishing money, collectivizing toothbrushes, or ceremonially handing Seoul over to Pyongyang.

We have been trained over the decades to accept a political class that bows instinctively toward conglomerates and capital, and to regard this posture as realism. So much so that when someone proposes the frankly unremarkable idea that the presidency exists to improve the material lives of citizens, it sounds radical only because the baseline has sunk so low. President Lee will inevitably face accusations if he tries to do something drastic with the country’s outrageous housing prices. He will be called a communist, a North Korean sympathizer, a threat to markets, a puppet of China. These claims are as predictable as they are baseless.

But there is reason to worry that this presidency, however, will default to the familiar pattern: rhetorical progressivism paired with economic caution, a gentle mollycoddling of conglomerates in the name of growth while everyday inequality worsens. We have seen this movie before, all promising transformation while carefully maintaining the status quo.

Yet President Lee has something his counterparts elsewhere did not: nothing to lose. Korea’s constitution denies him a second term. There is no future campaign to hedge for, no need to triangulate endlessly toward the center. The usual excuse of “I must govern carefully to survive politically” does not apply. What remains, then, is responsibility.

The people made the president, not the other way around. And if politics is to mean anything more than managed decline with better slogans, now is the moment to prove it. Housing is not a marginal issue. It is the foundation upon which everything else rests. The president and his team have claimed his administration is one of revolution. And while those who received special gifts will soften their criticisms and throw around words like “progressive,” daily life on the ground gets harder.

We have heard the language of revolution before, and we know how it usually ends. This time, the difference will not be the words but the prices. The real game starts now, Mr. president.