The one resolved only to do what they believed the people would like and approve; and the other that the people should like and approve what they had resolved. And this difference in the measures they took was the true cause of the so different success in all they undertook. — Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion (1702)
A few days before the legislative elections on April 15 a banner went up near my house in Sasang District urging all local residents to claim their roughly $40 coronavirus benefit. The Sri Lankan factory-workers I see sitting glumly in front of E-Mart are no doubt in greater need of this money than, say, the local Benz-driving restaurateur who has been “temporarily” accepting cash only for as long as I can remember.
But a telephone call to the number on the banner confirmed what I had instantly assumed: foreign residents need not apply. No, the lady said, it makes no difference if the foreigner has lived and paid taxes in Sasang-gu for 13 years. No, not even if he has the right to vote in municipal elections. It turned out that the only Sasang residents qualified to get the money were those entitled to vote on April 15. Honi soit qui mal y pense.
The day after the election, the city of Ansan announced with some fanfare that its foreign residents would be getting 70% of what the Koreans get. The prevailing ideology that makes such discrimination possible, even respectable, is not progressivism or liberalism but nationalist leftism.
Not that the Western media will ever say so; the “counter-intuitive” combination of nationalist and left is already more than they think the reader can handle. In coverage of foreign developments, they favor explanations that can be understood without entering into unfamiliar cultures and mindsets. There are always academics eager to provide that sort of soundbite. The result is what experts on the media call “the illusion of transparency”: that reassuring feeling given (or sold) to the average Joe that nothing in the world, nothing that really matters, surpasses his immediate understanding.
Having overlooked the public anger at the Moon government’s initial mishandling of the coronavirus, outsiders find it all the easier to attribute the ruling party’s victory to public gratitude for an impeccable response. Although ideology played an especially strong role in this election, as was reflected in the high turn-out, the foreign press acts as if South Korean voters were admirably free of it, choosing the ruling party out of pragmatism or common sense.
In the same spirit we are told that the conservatives did badly because of their inability to abandon an anachronistic anti-communist ideology and get with the times. The English-only observers may honestly see things this way. I suspect the Korean-reading ones only pretend to; they want the world to root for Moon, and figure that exaggerating the South Korean opposition’s conservatism is the best way to do that. They also want to present the vote to the US government as a mandate for North-South cooperation, therefore as a call for an ethnic exemption from sanctions.
But there are no grounds for the claim that the United Future Party (UFP) failed because it stuck to a right-wing tradition extending back to the days of dictatorship. Most of the candidates in those hideous pink jackets were Park-impeachers, center-rightists, and centrists. Only an outcry from the rank and file prevented the party from nominating a young woman who until recently had been supporting Moon on social media. I spotted at least one candidate who surely still counts as center-left: the Pyongyang watcher Kim Geun-sik. It was just four years ago, I think, that he and I debated the Kaesong issue at a breakfast event in Seoul.
The only candidate whose name made one instantly think “anti-Pyongyang” was the defector Thae Yong-ho, who won by a landslide in Gangnam of all places. That fact alone makes one wonder if the UFP might have done better with a more classic campaign.
From the start of things in March the party put its eggs in the corona basket, riding around on the government’s purely technical errors in the hope that public anger would continue up to April 15. In effect the UFP was joining the fight with the left on the latter’s social-welfare turf. Isn’t that all an opposition party can do, if fundamental ideological argument is out?
But from mid-March to mid-April, South Korea went from the second-worst-hit country to a perceived model for the world, forcing the UFP’s charisma-free leader to resort to petty carping about the government’s latest measures. One UFP pol even complained about all the time President Moon was spending on the phone, fielding foreign leaders’ calls for help.
Throughout the campaign the party seemed determined to persuade the street right to stay home on the big day. Having already locked horns with the popular mega-church preacher who led the flag-waving demonstrations last autumn, it dropped heavy hints of a readiness to go along with constitutional revision. In response a few Youtubers called for the boycott of all candidates who didn’t vow to protect the constitution. And in the crucial final stretch of the campaign, the UFP tried vainly to expel from the party a candidate who had brought up the so-called “Sewol tent threesome” scandal.
This last was a classic example of the parliamentary right’s effort to woo the mainstream by respecting all the velvet ropes the left-wing strings up around events, reputations and myths from which it derives a perceived moral capital. Like most appeasement policies this has the opposite effect to the one intended, as witness the flying water bottles, threats and insults that greet even center-right figures who “have the effrontery” to turn up at memorial services for Gwangju 1980. The right seems not to grasp that one cannot respect the orthodox version of history without perpetuating the ideology behind it.
That ideology rejects the right as an inherently immoral, genealogically tainted, pro-Japanese hereditary caste. The word “accumulated ill,” originally first applied to bad practices, institutions, etc, is now — along with “pro-Japanese faction” — the main epithet for a conservative of any prominence or wealth. Let me be perfectly clear: The individual person is a walking ill or evil, the embodiment of all that is wrong with Korean society. It follows that his corruption, his abuse of power reflects his true self, whereas the nationalist leftist, being purely Korean and thus incapable of premeditated evil (see C. Fred Alford), errs only under duress or out of good intentions.
Example: The “accumulated ill” who games the university admissions system does so to perpetuate the pro-Japanese caste’s hold on power and privilege. The nationalist-left millionaire does so because he loves his children too much — and what could be more Korean? The same logic is applied to insider trading and real-estate speculation. It’s not a double standard when you think about it.
So it is that even the many young people who were furious at the ruling party during the first months of the Cho Kuk scandal or the first few weeks of corona did not — as the polls showed clearly at the time — warm to the right as a result. Nor did they stay angry for long. In this sense the ruling party is not wrong in interpreting its victory as a mandate for the “peace system,” even though it avoided that topic during the campaign just as Moon did in 2017. The win was certainly a mandate for nationalist leftism. If the masses still don’t know what that movement’s main goal is, after all it has said publicly on the subject since 2000, they have only themselves to blame.
UPDATE: 3 May 2020: Anti-Communism?
A recent article by Jean Do in the National Interest starts as follows:
On April 15, the constituents of Seoul’s most affluent district in Gangnam elected a North Korean defector as their parliamentary representative in a general election held at the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic. This attested to the Korean people’s unswerving commitment to democracy but underscored the persistent weight of Cold War ideology on the country’s politics which deters inclusion and diversity. A highly visible figure in the campaign for North Korean regime change (regime collapse), Thae Yong-ho served as Pyongyang’s deputy ambassador to the United Kingdom before he defected in 2016 and ran on the ticket of the opposition United Future Party (UFP). The UFP represents the most critical view of the current South Korean President Moon Jae In’s reconciliation policy, charging the government for being soft on “communism (which means the Kim family rule).” The people’s response to Thae Yong-ho’s election has ranged from amusing, unexpected, puzzling, to outright shocking.
[Read: “amusement, surprise, puzzlement, to outright shock.”] Now, I found Thae’s election surprising myself, having thought him too obviously lacking in relevant know-how to win by such a wide margin. But I have to assume that the 58% of Gangnam voters who chose him and the 41% who voted conservative across the country welcomed his election. No doubt many also saw it (as the Western press did) as a step towards “inclusion and diversity.” Which is to say that when Jean Do speaks of “the people,” she means what the ruling party does.
But none of these responses are warranted given the fact that his constituents in the upscale Gangnam district cast the exact ideological vote they would have cast, and have always casted, in any case, based on an anti-communism.
So the main reason upscale voters went for the United Future Party was not their opposition to higher taxes and restrictions on business; it was because their Cold War ideology made them angry at Moon Jae-in for being soft on Kim Jong Un? Maybe it’s my class envy talking, but I refuse to believe that Gangnamites worry more about the future of the peninsula than about their bank accounts — especially considering how little opportunity Washington has given Moon to be soft on Kim since 2018.
True, Thae was the most obviously anti-Pyongyang candidate on the UFP ticket. At the very least, his victory showed that criticism of the Kim regime did not go down as badly with voters as some in the UFP feared it would. Maybe he brought out some elderly street-right voters who might otherwise have stayed home, though I doubt there are many in that part of the country.
After all, an opinion poll taken in Gangnam before the voting revealed no significant interest in inter-Korean issues. People said they supported Thae a) for the party he belonged to, and b) for his campaign pledges, which prioritized economic matters. He also did well with female voters, who don’t usually warm to anti-North types. I therefore posit that National Interest article in the tired academic tradition of ascribing all right-wing election victories here to irrational, propaganda-heightened fears of the North.
What bothers me more is the familiar assumption that opposition to “Kim family rule” equals “anti-communism.” I don’t deny that when the average South Korean conservative describes someone as a communist or a “red,” he or she means nothing more by it than “a supporter of the Kim regime.” But this is no reason why the rest of us should misuse the words communism and anti-communism in the same way. In my circle of acquaintances at university was a communist fiercely opposed to North Korea. Was he communist and anti-communist at the same time?
It’s odd enough to call a military-first, blood-nationalist monarchy a left-wing state, but communist is just not on. I use the M-word advisedly, since it denotes any system in which a ruler can choose his successor, whether he calls himself King, Lord Protector, the Great Lion, or National Defense Council Chairman. North Korea is not like a monarchy; it is a monarchy. Of the absolute sort. And as I have said numerous times before, what still attracts its own citizens, South Korean nationalists, Western neo-Nazis and perhaps Donald Trump to the state are its right-wing aspects: its perceived autonomy, its strong, no-nonsense leader, its mighty military and unified, racially homogeneous citizenry, its splendid isolation from harmful foreign influences.
I also take issue (once again) with the long-obsolete notion that South Korean parliamentary conservatism is largely a matter of Cold-War-type, hardline opposition to Pyongyang. The ruling party’s alleged mishandling of the corona crisis, its alleged corruption, abuses of power, economic incompetence, etc: these were the things the UFP made much of during the campaign. More importantly, as I have pointed out repeatedly on this blog, it has been at least thirty-two years, probably longer, since any significant conservative force on the peninsula took a consistently hardline approach to the North (by Western or Cold War standards of that word).
We must keep in mind that Chun Doo Hwan’s was the first ROK administration to publicly propose: a summit at a location of the North Korean leader’s choosing; a Seoul-Pyongyang highway; a joint tourist zone encompassing the North’s Mount Geumgang and the South’s Mount Seorak; the opening of one harbor in each Korea to free inter-trade; and a unified Olympic team (for Los Angeles). Chun’s crony and successor Roh Tae Woo proposed an inter-Korean league; announced a readiness to make “preemptive concessions” to the North; lifted the ban on many of its publications, including fiercely anti-American ones; and called for schoolchildren to be taught to regard North Korea as a partner.
These things were not said or done in grudging response to grass-roots demands; the improvement of North-South Korean relations has always been an elite-driven affair pulling an only sporadically interested electorate behind it. A majority polled under Roh Tae Woo fretted that he was moving far too rashly with the North.
Before this update gets too long let me just recall Kim Young Sam’s “no ally is better than the same nation” statement in 1993; Park Geun-hye’s grinning encounter (before her presidency) with Kim Jong Il, a man likely to have been complicit in the killing of her mother; Lee Myung Bak’s initial response to the killing of a South Korean housewife in the North, which was to call for better inter-Korean relations; and the same “hardline” president’s refusal even to close down the Kaesong Industrial Zone after the deadly North Korean attacks of 2010.
As Norman Jacobs pointed out forty years ago, the central argument here is always over which side is morally better qualified to do the things generally considered advisable. Ever since Rhee left for Hawaii the right has been closer to the nationalist left than is generally believed.
Understandably this remains one of the latter’s main criticisms: not that the right is rigidly and fanatically “anti-communist,” but that it cynically whips up fears of the regime in Pyongyang that deep down it does not share itself. Hence the use, by Moon Jae-in among others, of terms like “vendors of conservatism,” “fake conservatives,” etc. Indeed, I can well imagine how ROK propagandists would have howled had Kim Dae Jung proposed in 1971 the sort of inter-Korean agreement the Park Chung Hee administration signed in 1972.
In 1989 Yim Su-gyeong was demonized for going sans authorization to the World Youth Festival in Pyongyang, yet the ROK government saw no problem in sending tributaries of its own, because, hey, it was the government. In fairness to today’s parliamentary right, I must say that its tradition goes back to Kim Young Sam and not Roh Tae Woo, but its lack of any firm principles in re Pyongyang is Roh- and Kim-like.
I suppose it’s a natural concomitant of globalization that — as I’ve heard colleagues in other fields complain — the Western-academic consensus on foreign countries drifts ever closer toward the orthodoxies prevailing in the countries themselves. I just hope that our media can make an effort to explain this unique political landscape to Western readers, instead of simply trying to encourage support for the Moon administration.
UPDATE: 9 December 2020
Note: The UFP has since been renamed the People’s Power Party and has moved further leftward, as witness how, in this week of a direct government assault on the prosecutors’ office (and the arrest of another journalist) the PPP has shown less interest in agitation or resistance than in a) marginalizing what remains of its old-school conservative element (Kim Jin-tae, Jun Hee-kyung, et al) and b) calling on members to support a collective public apology for offenses committed in the past by actual conservative parties with different chairmen and different names. No South Korean government has been less troubled by the main opposition party since the Chun era (1980-88).
