It was only a year ago that American observers referred to Moon Jae-in as “security-conservative,” and assumed he’d been “blindsided” by Trump’s suspension of war games. Since then it has dawned on almost everyone that the Blue House is well to the soft-line side of the White House. Yet most Korea watchers still believe Moon shares America’s commitment to denuclearizing the North. He just favors a different approach, is all.
The reason: Very little news that reflects badly on the ROK government makes it into the English-language press. Few Americans have so much as heard about its union-aided grip on broadcast media or the use of libel suits to silence its critics. Fewer still think freedom of speech suffers much as a result. Some of the staunchest American believers in Moon’s liberalism live here in South Korea — with their heads stuck firmly in US cyberspace. If they did a little channel surfing they would realize, even with the sound off, how rare the broadcast of fundamental political debate has become.
Application of the epithet McCarthyist to Moon’s domestic critics is a sure sign of someone uninformed or disinforming. It’s Korean nationalism, not communism, that the Chosun Ilbo warns against most often. The appeal exerted by Pyongyang on an influential minority here is correctly seen as nationalist. This is in contrast to the Western assumption of a failed communist state no sane South Korean looks up to.
The word communization (kongsanhwa, chŏkhwa) tends to be used here in the sense of what I call pro-Northing. When the pop singer Yi Hyŏk used it on Facebook recently he was complaining more or less apolitically about the creeping regulation and censorship of online media. (He quickly thought better of his frankness and deleted the post.)
Since 2017 several controversial appointments to top government posts have drawn attention to the Gangnam left’s fabulous wealth. South Koreans hardly bat an eye anymore on hearing that this or that candlelight-revolutionary owns a few million-dollar apartments in Seoul, or has a Porsche-driving son at university in (of course) the USA. Very few conservatives fear that this lot wants to put an end to private property.
I get the impression many American observers haven’t moved out of the Roh Tae-woo era, when the parliamentary right consisted mostly of former collaborators with the military dictatorship. The Liberty Korea Party’s warnings against the weakening of ROK security are mistrusted accordingly. In fact the LKP carries on the tradition of President Kim Young Sam (1993-98). Like him it has no firm political principles. Its strategy has always been to try to win over the leftward-drifting mainstream without losing the old-school conservative vote.
It was presidential administrations led and staffed by these people that got rid of the constitution day holiday, the only republican one in the calendar; that initiated apologetic commemoration of the 1948 Jeju revolt against the planned establishment of the republic; that popularized the slogans “economic democracy” and “balanced diplomacy”; that formally agreed South Korea should stop “slandering” the North. It was these people who helped impeach their own president in the hope of introducing a trough-widening parliamentary system.
This “phony right,” as Moon has perceptively called it, projects its own lack of principles onto his administration. Seeing him put veterans of the pro-North protest movement in every position of authority and influence, they assume he’s just rewarding old cronies. His endless purge of their people is seen as vindictiveness, his intolerance of criticism as touchiness. Except for a small minority the LKP’s members don’t seem to connect these things either to his confederation pledge or to the Minjoo’s professed determination to rule for 20 more years.
A few weeks ago a conservative lawmaker startled the ruling-party side of the aisle into an uproar simply by referring to Moon’s overseas reputation as a spokesman for Pyongyang. That shows you how mild-mannered the opposition usually is.
Which isn’t to deny that it’s harder on Moon than Washingtonians generally are. His few sharp critics in the Beltway are well outside the consensus view of a good ally committed to denuclearizing the North.
This although the ROK left has shown next to no urgency in regard to that goal. Since 2000 we have seen from it everything from denial of the North’s nuclear ambitions (Kim Dae Jung) to sympathetic understanding (Roh Moo Hyun) to outright support on the grounds that the nukes will end up in a unified Korea (“civic groups,” inner-track nationalist-left media).
What isn’t encountered is much argument between those who shrug off the North’s nuclear program and those who assure Washington they’re dead-set against it. Even more tellingly, the latter prefer the former to their own kind. Moon’s appointment of Im Jong-seok as chief of staff is a well-known case in point. The academic Kim Yeon-cheol, who has long advocated a much more appeasement-minded approach than Moon has supported in public, is set to be the new Unification Minister.
The great harmony in evidence on that whole half of the spectrum is quite a recent thing. Until five or six years ago three distinct camps were discernible: 1) the labor-centric socialists or social-democrats, 2) the pro-North nationalists, and 3) the “left-wing neoliberals,” to borrow Roh Moo Hyun’s term for his own ilk. The United Progressive Party was so called because it housed “3 families under one roof.” Then two of the families denounced the third as “North-obeying” and left the UPP, which soon ended up banned. (The People’s Democracy Party now carries the torch.)
Since then the protest veterans who attended university between 1985 and 1995, when the Juche Movement reigned supreme, have succeeded in sweeping aside their elders, who tended to be either more Marxist-minded or more liberal-democratic. What was once the nationalist Left is now the Nationalist left. The candlelight protests of 2016 are mythologized by Moon himself not as class struggle or anti-corruption drive but as the culmination of a long heroic fight for national liberation. The implication — kept tacit to let sleeping American dogs lie — is that by working with Washington against Pyongyang, Park Geun-hye betrayed the race, the minjok.
Nationalism is about putting the (ethno-)nation above liberal-democratic and leftist values alike. Once one takes that step, one is not separated from other nationalists by anything irreducible. Having sought out the porridge that tastes just right, one rubs shoulders with those eating from hotter or cooler bowls. Because the differences are merely of degree, the various groupings shade almost imperceptibly into one another, with plenty of interlocking personal relationships. And the “radical” knows that the “moderate” has an important role to play.
I use the one term as reservedly as the other. When I think radical American I think of the Weathermen and not AOC. By that standard there is no longer real radicalism in South Korea, though many people, including some judges, don’t greatly mind seeing policemen roughed up now and then. If it comes from a good place, you understand. (Weimar says hello.)
Such amorphousness is far from typical of the international left. As a student in West Germany in 1983 I signed a petition protesting the firing of a local mailman for membership in the communist party. A Young Socialist law student in my dorm took me to task, saying only suicidal states allowed anti-constitutional elements into their civil service. Comparable divides can be found left of the center of most Western political spectra. Firm principles, easily summarized, separate the liberal from the social democrat from the socialist from the communist.
If Moon’s popularity slips under 40%, things may change, but for now the South Korean left presents a more united front than the literal one formed under US military occupation. The Justice Party and (Jeolla-based) Democratic Peace Party complain when the Blue House nominates a particularly brazen scofflaw for a top post, but that’s about the extent of their opposition to a president most of their voters support. The Minjoo bowed out of the by-election that just took place in Changwon so as to facilitate a Justice Party victory, a front victory. South Koreans talk of the pŏmyŏgwŏn, the pan-ruling-camp, although no formal coalition exists.
Criticism of the government from extra-parliamentary left quarters is strident but sporadic. The Blue House doesn’t seem to mind it much. Tongil News scolds Moon for kowtowing to Washington, who in return congratulates the online newspaper on the 18th anniversary of its founding. The need to maintain the appearance of divided camps could explain why Lee Seok-ki is yet to be let out of prison – and why, for a while there at least, he seemed so understanding about it. (His sentence was recently added to for financial wrongdoing.)
In closing, let me forestall reductio ad absurdum by again conceding that the left’s discourse is by no means uniform. The “radical” praises the North. The “moderate” assails those who mistrust it. The one denies the legitimacy of the ROK founded in 1948. The other talks up the ROK-superseding legitimacy of an exile republic said to date back to 1919. But such differences are rhetorical, tactical. The point of the front after all is to appeal to all the constituencies it needs. One of them is the US government.
