[During the run-up to the April 10 elections I will be providing occasional commentary, focusing, as always, on matters relevant to North Korea or to inter-Korean relations.– BRM]
Why the special treatment, Ignorarium?
Of all the left-wing national movements in the OECD, South Korea’s is the least Americanized. I’m not denying that many a Minjoo Party member has studied in the US, or sent his or her children to study there. Every self-respecting family in the Gangnam left includes at least one US passport-holder. A certain pro-Norther is, according to persistent rumor, the only fellow in his immediate family without a US passport. It’s equally true that these people now live, eat and entertain themselves in as American a fashion as everyone else.
But the ROK left never went through the ideological Americanization that the European and to some extent the Japanese left went through in the 1990s. That process was best embodied by the German philosopher Habermas, who went from bewailing the fall of the Berlin Wall to supporting the expansion of American power, which he saw as the perfect way to rid Europe of its nationalisms and strengthen human rights. When I was at German university in the 1980s, the sight of Reagan’s face on the evening news would set off a Two-Minute Hate in the dining room on my dormitory floor. Today it’s Europe’s right that opposes Biden’s goal of expanding NATO ever eastward.
The ROK left has changed some of its positions since the 1980s, particularly regarding the economy, but it’s as hostile as ever to the expansion of American power in the region. Its pro-Chinese and Russia-sympathetic tendencies are as impossible to overlook as its ongoing admiration for the militarist-nationalist monarchy to the north, the world’s most anti-globalist, anti-DEI state. (Iran is diverse in comparison.) Ideologically the Minjoo Party has more in common with Germany’s AfD — which the Western press so reviles — than with the SPD.
Many Westerners are more familiar with ROK-left thinking than they realize, for it’s these people who have dominated the entertainment industry since the 1990s, on both sides of the camera, and who can thus take most of the credit for Hallyu. (Until he became famous in the USA, Psy of “Gangnam Style” fame was anti-American even by Minjoo standards.)
Just how much wokeness do you see on screen in South Korea’s nationalist romances? How much equality of the sexes for that matter? The storylines and tropes on display — the charmingly drunk girl being carried home on the wealthy young hero’s back — take me right back to the KBS of the military-ruled 1980s. This social conservatism is real and not feigned. See Moon Jae-in’s remarks on same-sex marriage.
Which reminds me of another side of him that our media avoided talking about. It was but a few weeks after his inauguration in May 2017 that I went to buy Russian bread in Busan’s Chinatown, and found the shop abuzz with news of the most rigorous round-up of illegal immigrants anyone could remember. A Trumpian move — from a party which, for other reasons of course, would love to see Trump back in the White House next year.
So again, I ask the question: Why the special treatment? Why do Western media not only exempt the ROK left from criticism, but mislabel it as “liberal,” and root consistently for it against the globalist, US-loyal People Power Party? Why was no attention paid in 2016 to the misogynistic overtones of the vilification of Park Geun-hye — the posters of a squawking hen, the calls for her to “just go and get married”? Why did our media misrepresent the last ROK presidential election campaign as an incels vs feminists clash, when opinion polls clearly told otherwise?
Why does the number of “Hell Chosun” stories — the ones about what a joyless and cutthroat society South Korea supposedly is — always seem to increase the moment the globalists return to power? Isn’t it normal US-media practice to bash foreign nationalisms instead? Why are the low birth rate and high suicide rate treated primarily as problems of the (pseudo-)conservatives’ making? Weren’t those rates much higher and lower, respectively, under right-wing dictatorship? In short, what’s going on?
I have no answer yet, or at least, none that I feel confident enough to set down here. Perhaps this will change over the ensuing weeks. In my next entry, I will discuss the scandal now besetting President Yoon’s wife.
UPDATE: The Dior [not Chanel] bag (4 February 2024):
I need to explain my lingo. In a list of fictional Irish tourist sites Flann O’Brien included (without explanation) something called the Ignorarium, a term I first used here in regard to the Seoul Foreign Correspondents’ Club and now apply to Western mainstream media as a whole. As many have already noted, starting with Jacques Ellul at the very latest, media bias manifests more often through omission of context than through outright falsehood.
Which brings me to the bag scandal currently in the news. Western coverage has been more balanced and nuanced than I expected, Choe Sang-hun, for example, making sure to mention the first lady’s efforts to get the sale of dog meat banned. Nevertheless I believe that the most important aspect of the scandal, and the effect it’s most likely to have, are being overlooked.
The facts: In late 2022, a few months into her husband’s presidency, Kim Keon-hee accepted a Dior handbag priced at about $2200 from a Korean-American pastor who secretly filmed their encounter.
Our media try to convey the impression that South Koreans find her behavior shockingly unethical. The following is from Choe Sang-hun’s article in the
“This is an explosive issue” because it reminds South Koreans of the recurring corruption that has disgraced most of the country’s former presidents, said Ahn Byong-jin, a political scientist at Kyung Hee University in Seoul.
Actually, most South Koreans (especially on the left) believe that prosecutors were terribly mean for investigating Roh Moo Hyun and his wife in connection with two Piaget watches — combined value: well over $100,000 — gifted them by a businessman during his presidency. During the Moon Jae-in administration the public generally shrugged off various allegations of impropriety on the part of the president’s wife. These included the allegation, which conservatives are now reviving, that she kept a special coat made for her by Chanel.
Then there are the far more serious allegations that Lee Jae-myung, the Minjoo Party chief, has been facing since before the last presidential campaign. If people here were so haunted by memories of corrupt presidencies, Lee wouldn’t have received his party’s nomination in the first place, let alone come within a hair of winning the election. One could buy dozens of Chanel bags with the amount of private expenses Lee and his wife are alleged to have had charged to government offices during his stints as mayor and provincial governor.
No one’s moral outrage rings hollower than that of Choi Jae-young, the Korean-American pastor behind the whole affair. From the description of him in the Guardian – “Choi has a history of engagement with the North and has visited the communist [sic] country several times to conduct prayers” – I can see we’re all meant to imagine a Desmond Tutu or Billy Graham figure. (The NYT says, “Mr. Choi advocates friendly relations between North and South Korea.”)
In fact the pastor is a prominent pro-Norther of many years’ standing and a frequent contributor to the radical website Tongil News. Clearly his actual goal is to return an appeasement- or confederation-minded party to power as soon as possible.
The scandal won’t shift votes from one party to another. It’s more likely to keep some conservatives at home on April 10 who would otherwise have voted (and even then with no great enthusiasm) for the ruling party. The bag itself is not the main problem. For one thing it’s not expensive enough. Last year I was told in class discussions of consumption habits that the average female college senior in Busan possesses at least one imported handbag in the $1000 to $3000 price range. Two? By no means uncommon. (Students chuckled at my incredulity.) So you can imagine what Seoul’s like.
More scandalous to conservatives, as I gather from Youtube and social media, is the fact that a) the first lady chose to have a long and private conversation with a well-known pro-North opponent of the US-ROK alliance, and b) no one in the administration, intelligence agency or bodyguard detail had a problem with this, despite her having said indiscreet things in an earlier conversation with a known leftist that nearly derailed her husband’s campaign. (Keep in mind here that Yoon’s abandonment of the Blue House in 2022, a disastrous blunder in itself, was justified in part with reference to how the North had riddled the place with listening devices.)
I believe that the pastor intended to create the impression that presidential policy is being made behind the scenes by an unelected, unappointed and deeply corrupt woman. A man would be bad enough, but a woman! Which was pretty much the narrative that set off the misogynist impeachment hysteria of 2016, only to fall apart under investigation. I don’t see it working this time. One reason is that the conservative press won’t join in. Another is that Park Geun-hye’s friend was plainly an intelligent woman whom one could imagine pulling the strings, whereas we know from the hidden-camera video that Yoon’s wife, when not hawking and spitting into tissues, speaks like this:
When [public interest] in me dies down to a degree, I think I’ll actively venture a bit into North-South relations. Really… North-South unification must be done, the North Koreans are in too pitiful a situation….They’re our citizens so we must quickly accept them….
These statements aren’t the first indication she’s given that she regards the presidency as a marital joint venture, which is certainly cause for concern, but it’s equally obvious that she hasn’t paid attention to inter-Korean relations for years (if ever) and is unlikely to care enough to meddle in them. If the scandal hurts the ruling party on April 10, it will be because her whole deportment in the video reflects so badly on the president himself. South Korea has never had a first lady like this.
UPDATE: The growth of the Progressive Party (7 February 2024):
As I made clear here in 2019, there are no insuperable ideological animosities on the South Korean left.
What was once the nationalist Left is now the Nationalist left…. 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.
There is thus a tradition of electoral alliances between the Minjoo and the “far left” or openly pro-North party, which used to be called the United Progressive Party (a grouping forced to disband during the Park Geun-hye era) and is now the Progressive Party. Equally traditional is the Ignorarium’s refusal to cover this fraternity, which in European terms would be like social democrats working together with socialists, the one party or the other agreeing to stay out of certain races to ensure that the common conservative enemy loses.
For example, it was thanks to the UPP candidate’s withdrawal from the Seongnam mayoral race in 2010 that Lee Jae-myung was able to make his start in politics. And it was thanks to the Minjoo’s staying out of a by-election in the southwest last year that the Progressive Party’s Kang Sung-hee won a seat in the National Assembly. (The Minjoo claims to have stood down as a show of contrition, the seat having been vacated due to a Minjoo parliamentarian’s wrongdoing). Kang was the man dragged out of a hall last January after shouting at President Yoon, whose hand he had refused to let go of.
In a recent poll the PP came third in the Busan-Ulsan-South Gyeongsang region. 8% support strikes me as a little too high to be plausible, but then again, Ulsan has long been one of the four strongholds of the nationalist far left (the others being the entire Jeolla region, Incheon, and east Gyeonggi Province). In any case, the PP is clearly much more popular in Busan than it was only a year or two ago. This is partly the result of growing disaffection with the Minjoo Party, which is seen as being too preoccupied with keeping Lee Jae-myung out of prison. He is therefore more worried about these splinter parties than Moon Jae-in ever was; they can be counted on to vote with the Minjoo on most issues, but not to stand by him in his legal battles.
But there are other reasons for the PP’s growth. Under its leader Yoon Hee-suk (not to be confused with her conservative namesake) the party has toned down the pro-Pyongyang stuff, and now makes a more convincing show of commitment to issues of social equality and welfare than the Justice Party. (If you think North Korea couldn’t have advised such a savvy strategy, remember its opposition to extreme rhetoric in the days of the protest movement.) The PP has also benefited from displays of solidarity with the more radical trade unions, like the one for delivery workers. Particularly interesting is how the party has trained its cadres in debt counseling. Banners urge people in difficulty to call the PP’s own debt hotline, or to seek out the party vans that will be traveling the country during campaign season. Something tells me Kang, who is ahead of his Minjoo and People Power rivals in the latest Jeonju polls, won’t be the only PP representative in the National Assembly for long.
UPDATE: President Yoon’s numbers improve (10 February 2024):
The handbag scandal which, as the Hankyoreh gloated, put the “first lady in the spotlight of the Western press,” which the Guardian claimed had “plunged South Korea’s government into disarray,” and which the NYT said had become “one of the biggest political crises” for President Yoon, turns out to have had no discernible effect on his approval ratings, which in fact improved quite significantly even as the controversy “raged” (NYT).
UPDATE: Korea Pro explains the election system (11 February 2024):
I was dreading having to go into the semi-mixed-member-proportional (semi-MMP) system, but now I see that Jeongmin Park and Lina Park (who understand it better than I do anyway) have explained it very well for Korea Pro readers. They forbear to remark on the strangeness of letting one party’s boss choose a country’s electoral system (and that only weeks before elections take place) but an article can only be so long. An understanding of the system is necessary to grasp the inter-Korean or DPRK-relevant aspects of the upcoming election, which I will be discussing in future entries.
UPDATE: The unlikely turn in the PPP’s fortunes (17 February 2024):
The ruling party’s rise in opinion polls has taken many people by surprise, myself included. Naturally conservative media credit it in large part to Yoon’s supposedly improved performance on the economic and diplomatic fronts. (The reestablishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba was certainly a triumph, and a shock to the opposition.) Much praise is also lavished on Han Dong-hoon, the former prosecutor and Justice Minister, who since becoming the PPP’s interim leader has done much to convey the impression of a party infusing itself with new blood. It seems clear that the PPP will bring plenty of young and female faces into its satellite or puppet party (see my preceding entry on the electoral system).
This as opposed to reserving its puppet party for people too ideologically extreme to win election, as the Minjoo seems set on doing. Evidently the Democratic Reform and Progressive Election Coalition (as it’s called) will include the Progressive Party’s Yoon Hee-suk along with pro-North figures who played a key role in the mass anti-American protests of 2002 and 2008. This seems a more radical bunch than gained seats (without being actually elected of course) on the back of the Minjoo’s last puppet party. It has been suggested that Lee wants to see more of a rabble-rousing element in the Assembly – and thus on the nightly TV news — in order to get an impeachment drive going against Yoon. (Note that about 20 seats are likely to go to each of the big two puppet parties.)
I derive the turn in the PPP’s fortunes less from its own successes than from the failures of the Minjoo, which continues to suffer from the perception that it has been “privatized” by Lee. The unseemly squabble between pro-Moon and pro-Lee factions over nominations to districts (so reminiscent of the conservatives’ disastrous disunity in 2016) has been a further drag on its approval ratings. Its sustained effort to whip up public anger over that Dior bag now seems to have been a waste of time, which isn’t to say that the first lady can’t cause additional problems for the ruling party before April 10.
The anti-Yoon right has raised the valid point that a radically pro-North pastor — radical enough to have got in trouble during the Moon administration — doesn’t get invited to an ostensibly conservative president’s inauguration ceremony, let alone to the exclusive banquet afterwards, and then enjoy opportunities for text exchanges and one-on-one face time with the first lady, simply because his father allegedly used to be acquainted with hers. The speculation is that the frequent Air Koryo flyer may have presented himself to the first couple, or been perceived by it without his prompting, as a potential liaison with the Kim Jong Un regime. Since every conservative president since Chun Doo Hwan has tried to get an inter-Korean summit going, with the possible exception of Park Geun-hye (who had met the Dear Leader before her election anyway), the notion isn’t as far-fetched as all that.
UPDATE: The Minjoo joins hands with the Progressive Party (23 February 2024):
For years there has been speculation as to how Lee Jae-myung is going to pay all of his lawyers. Now we may have an answer: a few are likely to be nominated to run in the April elections, unlike several well-known and popular members of the opposition party whom Lee doesn’t trust to stand by him. This “privatization” of the Minjoo (the local media’s term, not mine) continues to hurt both his and the party’s approval ratings, but as April 10 draws closer, and pro-Moon voters get past their anger about the “nomination massacre,” the gap between the Minjoo and PPP will narrow again.
Meanwhile Lee has forged an electoral alliance with the pro-North and anti-American Progressive Party I discussed above. The Minjoo will stay out of races in certain districts where the PP candidate scores higher in opinion polls, so as not to divide the leftist vote; a race in a district of Ulsan has already been effectively ceded to the PP. The Minjoo will also give 3 prime spots in its satellite or puppet party to PP members, ensuring that they win seats in the Assembly even without running for election. A few more seats will be given to members of comparably radical civic groups.
It’s a shrewd move for various reasons. First, Lee can in this way make up for his lack of a protest-movement background while signalling strong sympathy for North Korea (which everyone understands that a potential future president can’t express directly), thereby finally acquiring a nationalist-moral authority that he has hitherto lacked.
Second, conservatives will express outrage, which Lee, the Hankyoreh and MBC can then use to unite the Minjoo base against a purported relapse into the McCarthyist paranoia of the military dictatorships. (Our Ignorarium will weigh in on the Minjoo’s side, again begging the question I raised at the beginning of this thread.)
Third, Lee can sit back after the elections and watch the largest radical contingent in South Korean parliamentary history become the raucous vanguard of a drive to impeach Yoon. He can also play the disapproving moderate while these people he imported into the Assembly deal weekly blows to the dignity of the administration and ruling party — as when a member of the Democratic Labor Party, an earlier incarnation of the United Progressive Party (which in turn begat the PP), opened a teargas canister at the podium in 2011.
UPDATE: The Birth of Korea (28 February 2024):
Distorting history with tendentious films, launching them in campaign season if possible, and mobilizing sympathetic civic and religious groups to help inflate the box office: this has been a nationalist-left specialty for decades. School classes are regularly taken to watch films that make The Battleship Potemkin look subtle. Now that conservatives are getting into the act with a documentary on Syngman Rhee, the pro-Minjoo press is raising the alarm: Movie theaters, those venerable fonts of truth, are under threat from filmmakers with an agenda. Korea Pro: “the documentary raises critical concerns about the potential distortion of historical facts and its use as a tool for political manipulation.”
Propaganda is what the other camp does; yours would never stoop so low. Type the word into Google News and you’d think it were mainly a Russian thing. At the PIFF ages ago I asked the actor Kang Hye-jung (of Old Boy fame) about the ideological tendency of Welcome to Tongmakkol, and she appeared genuinely unaware of any. Of course the last thing either left or right wants, in any country, are the historical facts in all their moral grayness and complexity. At three of the last four public talks I’ve given in Seoul, I’ve been tetchily asked in the Q & A to explain where I stand, “because you seem critical of both the left and right.” It has become hard for people to understand that this is a stance in itself. Believe it or not, it used to be quite a common one.
Over a million people have seen The Birth of Korea (건국전쟁) since it opened in theaters a month ago. Although the right lacks enough sway over the teachers’ union to mobilize school classes, the film is said to be doing well with the prized “2030” demographic. Then again the right is forever claiming to be turning the corner with young people. When I went to see the film in Busan a little over a week ago, the only person younger than me was a little boy, no doubt somebody’s grandson, who kept sighing and running in and out.
I sighed but stayed put. Historical documentaries need conflict or dialectic just like other movies do, but The Birth of Korea is hagiography from start to finish. Foreign talking heads think Rhee was wonderful; why don’t Koreans themselves? Mistakes were made in the latter part of his rule, but only because the great man’s eyes and ears were blocked by people around him. An intriguing hint that the Americans were behind the 1960 “revolution” goes undeveloped. The director’s main goal, it seems, was to counter the left’s main misrepresentations of Rhee: as pro-Japanese, as sanguinario, as the coward who left Seoul in the lurch in 1950, and so on. Which would be fine if the left got a few minutes to present its case.
Meanwhile the right’s role in retroactively disparaging Rhee is glossed over. It was Park Chung Hee who acted as if Kim Gu would have made a better founding father, and who kept Rhee from returning home, just as dirt was then heaped on Park’s memory by Chun Doo Hwan, who in turn was put in prison by Kim Young Sam, and so on. The left, in contrast, stays so loyal to its past presidents that even the parliamentary right feels compelled to feign respect for them.
The film’s timeline would try Quentin Tarantino’s patience. It starts in 1960, goes up to the exile’s death in Hawaii in 1965, goes back to the land reform — giving Rhee too much credit for it, just as Kim Il Sung gets too much credit for the northern one (see Lankov’s corrective account in From Stalin to Kim Il Sung) — then jumps around in the colonial period before taking a second run at the 1940s, then moves on to the Korean War, and then…. Sorry, the color-footage interludes in modern-day Hawaii made me lose track, but if I remember rightly, the Manhattan ticker-tape parade of 1954 appears at some length at two different points in the film. The muddle precludes any sense of Rhee’s personal or ideological development, which might have been the whole idea; no one (least of all the left) wants to hear about the socialist tendencies he manifested for a while there. David Fields, who has written well on that subject, is repeatedly shown discussing more innocuous matters.
What I found interesting was the implicit message that the left wing’s efforts to “erase” Rhee from history are bad not so much because they do the republic an injustice as because they wrong the poor man himself. Koreans seem much more loyal to individuals alive or dead than to parties, movements, or the state, as witness not only the Kim cult up north, but the Minjoo’s all-too-foreseeable woes under Lee Jae-myung’s leadership.
In the past there has been talk of a “shy conservative” demographic: people who feel so hopelessly outnumbered, so gloomy about political developments, that they avoid watching the news, especially in campaign season, and hide their true allegiance from pollsters. They’re now optimistic enough about the elections to go to “their” movie at the theater. What they fail to realize is that the ruling party is not conservative in any meaningful sense. President Yoon may have recommended the film, but his and his party’s position on the Jeju and Yeosu conflicts of the late 1940s remains squarely anti-Rhee.
UPDATE: PPP nominations disappoint even the Chosun (29 February 2024):
Han Dong-hoon’s rhetoric notwithstanding, the ruling party won’t be fielding many young or female faces after all. As the Chosun disapprovingly reports, 87% of the PPP’s nominees are 50 or older, making this a more senior bunch on average than was fielded in 2020. Women make up less than 10% of the total.
This complacency could end up hurting the PPP if Lee can spin his purge of the aging Moon faction more effectively as a rejuvenation and reform drive. It has also been pointed out that by denying nominations to prominent old Minjoo members who are as hated on the right as they are popular on the left — Lim Jong-seok for example — Lee Jae-myung may make it harder for the PPP to get out the vote on April 10.
UPDATE: The mood in Jeolla (6 March 2024):
According to most opinion polls, Lee’s perceived abuse of the party as a tool with which to stay out of prison has done special harm to his and the Minjoo’s approval ratings in the (southwestern) Jeolla region, perhaps because many of the prominent politicians who have fallen victim to the “nomination massacre” have been Jeollans. Even Lee’s diehard supporters are said to have been taken aback by his decision to nominate his wife’s former aide as the Minjoo candidate in Suncheon-Gwangyang (S. Jeolla). Like most districts in the southwest, that’s one where the Minjoo — as the Korean turn of phrase goes — could plant a stick in the ground and see it elected.
Because Lee’s wife is now being prosecuted for misusing her husband’s official credit card to pay for family expenses, many suspect that the promised nomination was intended to buy the nominee’s silence. At least Kwon Hyang-yeop, the person in question, was born in that very part of the country. If Jeollans are unhappy anyway, it’s because the Minjoo’s habit of replacing familiar with new faces in their districts makes it harder for Jeolla-based lawmakers to build up national stature. Then the party turns around every five years and urges the region to support yet another southeastern presidential candidate, on the grounds that it has failed to produce a politician with the national support that Kim Dae Jung enjoyed.
To quell the outcry, the former aide has agreed to compete with the incumbent (Minjoo) lawmaker in a primary she seems likely to lose, but the damage has been done. Not, of course, to the extent that the southwest might elect a conservative or two. But as the Minjoo found out when Moon Jae-in lost the presidential election to Park Geun-hye in 2012, it can’t hope to get out the crucial Jeolla-diaspora vote in Seoul and Busan unless the southwest itself is properly fired up.
UPDATE: A rara avis on Pennmike (7 March 2024):
I’ve always liked the NFL, but I used to look down on the punditry. All those people dressed to the nines, chewing things over with such ridiculous seriousness! I’ve since realized how wrong I was. Where else in public life do Americans with different opinions still engage in civil, reasoned argument? And if that doesn’t merit coordinating your necktie and pocket square, what does? Granted, it’s of no real importance whether this quarterback should be ranked higher than that one, but the pursuit of common judgment always matters more than the thing being judged. Perhaps the discussion culture that European visitors used to praise America for can be rebuilt on this cornerstone when the plague passes. You know the one I mean.
A political analyst of a kind we need more of — in Korea and the US — is Choe Byeong-cheon, who appeared yesterday on the conservative Youtube channel Pennmike. (The interview is in Korean.) Although a left-leaning voter himself, he’s more interested in getting to the bottom of things than in putting a partisan spin on them, unlike the panelists of both camps whom one sees every day on cable TV.
Choe has many interesting things to say, but his main point is this: so far, only one side has used the campaign period to counter negative perceptions about it. President Yoon, having long been seen as caring only about “his wife, alcohol and dogs,” has bolstered his approval ratings by discussing — in carefully curated, town-hall-type meetings — the economic problems facing average families. Meanwhile the people skills and relative youth of the PPP’s interim leader Han Dong-hoon (50) have diverted public attention from the age and dullness of most of the party’s crop of candidates. In contrast, Lee Jae-myung has done little over the past few weeks but solidify a reputation for amorality. The pro-Moon voter will return to the fold in time to vote blue on April 10; not so the average center-leftist.
Although Choe argues that the characterization of Kwon Hyang-yeop as a mere former aide to Lee’s wife — see my previous entry – does an injustice to a Minjoo member with plenty of political experience, he says it’s a bad sign when a party’s stock response to criticism is to complain of fake news.
On the other hand, Choe points out that general elections in South Korea go the ruling party’s way far more often than not, and that the success he predicts for the PPP in April doesn’t mean it will do well in 2027. One of many reasons is that a good Jeolla turn-out can affect the outcome of a presidential election more than the outcome of general elections (in which Jeolla’s seats are capped at 28 no matter what).
UPDATE: Sure enough, the gap narrows (12 March 2024):
If you’re a Korean voter you get two votes on April 10: one for the candidate you select to represent your district, and one for the minor party whose portion of the total vote you want to add to. This portion (if higher than 3%) will translate into a certain number of seats for people chosen in advance by that party – people, in other words, who never had to run for election.
According to the latest poll, some 33% of voters plan to cast their second, “proportional” vote for either the Minjoo’s satellite party (the one with the pro-Northers) or the minor party founded by former justice minister Cho Kuk, until recently a Minjoo man himself. The same poll indicates that 32% of voters will cast their second vote for the ruling party’s satellite party.
This is a fairly solid indication that the PPP’s lead over the Minjoo, which has narrowed to 3% (35% vs 32%), has more to do with Lee’s party-privatizing “nomination massacre” of popular “non-Lee” politicians than with any popular shift toward the center-right. This is bad news for the ruling party, especially since Cho is urging his party’s supporters to cast their first vote for the Minjoo candidate in their district.
That may seem like a contradictory thing to do, but I expect many nationalist-left voters will like the idea of casting their first vote to beat the ruling party, and their second vote to register disapproval of Lee.
Needless to say, the Minjoo boss is facing trial for allegations of corruption on a massive scale, while Cho Kuk just saw a higher court confirm his two-year sentence for a) academic fraud, and b) illegal interference with a government inspection into a corruption case. Surprisingly, for the American observer at least, Cho has been allowed to remain free while he appeals the conviction again. (Quite the “prosecutors’ dictatorship,” eh?)
Meanwhile Song Young-gil, the former Minjoo party boss now on trial for bribery, has founded the charmingly-named Pine Tree Party, on which ticket he will run from behind bars for election in a district of Gwangju. In one of those examples of weird bedfellowship that every South Korean election season seems to produce, this minor party has just recruited a few prominent (former?) hard-rightists with their own grudge against President Yoon and the PPP’s interim chief Han Dong-hoon.
Keep all this in mind the next time the Ignorarium tells you that some corruption scandal on the ROK right is “roiling” the oh-so-law-and-order-minded electorate. (The man in the street’s complaint with Park Geun-hye in 2016 wasn’t that she was corrupt but that she was inept and out of her depth.)
The fact that right-wing scandals — all things being equal — are more roundly condemned than the left-wing sort is in part because in this country, conservatives have less tolerance for in-camp wrongdoing than progressives do. (See the almost immediate end of Kwak Sang-do’s career over bribery allegations.)
Common on the left is the belief — to quote what I wrote here 4 years ago (with Cho Kuk in mind) — that
[the conservative politician’s] 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” [= the conservative] 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?
But this doesn’t mean that the nationalist left wouldn’t prefer a politician less compromised than Cho Kuk, to say nothing of Lee Jae-myung. It will likely get such a candidate in 2027.
UPDATE: The Minjoo takes the lead in Seoul (17 March 2024):
Support for the ruling party in the capital has declined so much over the past week that the Minjoo is now back in front there, which is interesting, considering that it was at about this point in the 2020 election season that it took the lead and stayed there. That was when the Moon administration went from being criticized for its pandemic response to receiving orchestrated foreign praise for handling things especially well — a disastrous turn of events for the PPP, which, having abandoned all talk of conservative values, was campaigning purely on claims to superior technocratic efficiency.
I expect pro-Minjoo Korea watchers will attribute the current shift in public opinion to the government’s lifting of an exit ban on Lee Jong-sup, the former defense minister whom President Yoon rescued from a corruption probe by making him ambassador to Australia. It’s a scandal all right, and a reflection of the hollowness of the PPP’s law-and-order posturing, but horror at corruption is hardly going to make people gravitate to a party led by either Lee Jae-myung or the already-convicted Cho Kuk.
We come closer to the truth by pondering Julian Baggini’s words: “If you think all politicians are crooks, you vote for the most effective crook.” The government’s recent decision to lift greenbelt restrictions shows it to be ineffective at protecting the environment, but few Koreans, young or old, seem to care much about that. Where else do even the salad restaurants lack vegan options? Park Geun-hye was president the last time I ran into a fellow vegan here in Busan — an encounter so improbable it seemed almost a miracle, like Winston meeting Julia in 1984.
No, what’s hurting the PPP more in the capital city, it seems, is the administration’s failure to end the doctors’ strike. Something like that would probably not affect enough voters in the US to change the outcome of an election, unless the strike lasted months, but people here routinely seek medical treatment for minor ailments like head colds. Besides, many rightly reproach the administration for not having decided on a more gradual increase in the number of medical school admissions years ago, instead of waiting until just before elections to announce a drastic one.
UPDATE: The old-school right turns on Han (24 March 2024):
Western media tend to spin every dip in support for South Korea’s conservative party as a matter of people recoiling in a “liberal” direction, usually out of maidenly shock at some corruption scandal or another.
In reality a) the Moon years ruined the Minjoo’s reputation as the cleaner party, b) the public is so inured to elite wrongdoing that 32% of all candidates running this time — including Lee Jae-myung of course — have been convicted at least once, with some boasting a veritable “gift set” of priors, and c) as many people turn away from the PPP in a rightward direction as do so in a leftward one.
Let me enlarge on the last point. Conservatives are now angry at the PPP’s interim boss Han Dong-hoon for cancelling the nominations of two prominent party members, the one for having recommended an investigation into whether North Korea was involved in the Gwangju uprising (1980), and the other, a younger fellow, for various intemperate statements made on Youtube over the years, including one that appeared to sanction orgies and another expressing the wish that all non-food animals disappear from the planet.
It’s odd to see the old-school right defending these two very different people in the same breath as if they were equally representative of conservatism, but never mind that. In both cases one can understand Han’s reasoning. Many Jeollans are disaffected with the Minjoo for reasons I’ve already gone into, and Han wants them to remain that way, especially if they live in districts of Seoul and Busan where the Jeolla diaspora must stay home on April 10 for the PPP to win. As for the other ex-nominee, no party needs a loose cannon in election season.
But Han’s critics are not unjustified in pointing out his double standard: he had no apparent qualms about nominating people with a record of controversial nationalist-left rhetoric and/or service in the Minjoo. The Moon administration’s labor minister Kim Yeong-ju, whom small-business owners still associate with the catastrophically steep minimum-wage increases of those years, is a case in point. No sooner did she join the PPP earlier this month (having been bypassed for a Minjoo nomination) than the party picked her to run in Yeongdeungpo, a district of Seoul.
Remember what I excerpted here 2 years ago about “the formation of opportunistic cliques whose members will ally themselves to anyone willing and able to offer some advantage.” (From The Korean Road to Modernization and Development, Urbana, 1985, p. 26.)
An analogy for American readers: Feeling neglected, AOC defects from the Democratic Party and joins the Republican one, which then nominates her — sans primary — to run in a blue district. To us, this would seem to make no sense, for naturally Democrat voters will come out hugely on election day to punish her treachery, while a lot of Republicans will stay home in disgust.
In this Korean case, Kim Yeong-ju is lagging her Minjoo rival by over 15% in the latest poll. So why on earth…? Han’s supporters answer that such “strategic nominations” serve the greater goal of signaling centrism or even center-leftism to the greater electorate, the better to win over the undecideds (a much larger demographic here than in the US) in swing districts. Whoever is proven right on April 10 — momentum seems to be shifting back to the PPP at present — the political spectrum will have drifted a little further to the nationalist left.
UPDATE: The PPP’s latest pledge (30 March 2024):
Max Weber famously distinguished between three types of authority: traditional, charismatic and legal-rational. We see all three of them at work in Kafka’s The Castle (1926), a book more interesting to discuss than to read.
The South Korean president exerts no charismatic authority, nor does the republic. As for legal-rational authority, just look at how blithely the opposition party chief flouts demands to appear in court, and how little the public minds. Whatever traditional authority has radiated from the South Korean government through the many political changes since 1948 has been, in large part, the result of its location in the ethno-nation’s ancient capital city, and of the continuity of two symbolic and imposing buildings: a) the Blue House, perhaps the only strictly state symbol here which both left and right have fond associations with, and b) the National Assembly.
It was Roh Moo Hyun (2003-2008) who started relocating government offices to what was then the Jochiwon area, in S. Chungcheong province, and which is now Sejong City. This was ostensibly in order to spread the wealth and relieve congestion in the metropolis, but Chungcheong was and still is South Korea’s Ohio, a perennial swing region of great importance to general and presidential elections. Besides, the political elite stood to make — and did make — a killing on the real-estate market by knowing in advance what would be built where.
Yet the proposed move makes ideological sense too, inasmuch as the old “politics of the vortex” (Henderson) must be radically undermined if the republic is to decentralize, something the nationalist left sees — for reasons I explain here — as a way of facilitating inter-Korean confederation. Relinquishing the ancient capital, centrally located on the peninsula as it is, would also reassure the North that the ROK means it no harm, and make Kaesong, the planned location of confederation HQ, a sensible-looking halfway point between the two governments.
Considering how feeble the other types of authority are here, you’d expect a conservative party to want to shore up the traditional sort, but as I keep saying, the PPP is no more conservative than the Minjoo is liberal. The current president, according to his wife, cried for two hours after watching a cinematic hagiography of Roh Moo Hyun. He went his idol one better in 2022 by refusing to live in the Blue House, though that decision apparently had more to do with shamanic or feng shui concerns than political ones. The current tax-wasting plan is to build a new presidential residence in Sejong, though no one expects it to obviate the need for a separate one in Seoul, where many embassies will presumably remain.
Last Wednesday the PPP’s interim boss Han Dong-hoon called for the relocation of the National Assembly to Sejong, so that the iconic domed building on the bank of the Han River, like the Blue House, can be “given back to the people as a new landmark.” Like Yoon he’s obtuse to the implicit Seoul-centricity of such talk; a state symbol belongs to every citizen, while a tourist attraction is for those with the leisure and money to visit it. (I know many Busanites who haven’t been to Seoul in over ten years.)
Not surprisingly, support for the PPP has increased a bit in the Chungcheong provinces, while many conservatives elsewhere are so exasperated with the ideologically-directionless party that they’ve stopped talking to telephone pollsters, a bad sign. For what it’s worth, my impression from traveling around Busan yesterday (which Lee Jae-myung visits today), is that the wavers and hand-shakers in Minjoo-blue jackets look happier than the red-clad lot.
UPDATE: Why the PPP faces a bad Wednesday (7 April 2024):
I see much of the English-language press (foreign and domestic) is still chalking up the PPP’s dismal ratings to public anger over the first lady’s involvement in a pump-and-dump scheme and her acceptance of that Dior clutch-bag. Never mind that a) months of partisan coverage of that alleged financial wrongdoing did not prevent Yoon from winning the presidency in 2022, and b) the PPP was much more popular right after last winter’s media hubbub over the Dior bag than it is now.
Also being systematically glossed over is the fact that quite a few more financial scandals and reports of sexist gaffes now attach to the Minjoo field than to the PPP lot. For reasons I’ve already gone into, the public generally doesn’t care much. Some of the most scandal-ridden Minjoo candidates are now riding high over candidates whom the left-wing press can pin nothing on. It was the PPP, remember, that tried to turn these elections into a referendum on corruption. Needless to say, that effort — which the first lady’s problems undoubtedly undermined — has failed.
In contrast, the Minjoo has sought to frame the upcoming vote as a public reckoning with the “prosecutors’ dictatorship.” I think that strategy has underperformed, for the obvious reason that the president has put very few left-wingers in prison. This in contrast to the 150 or so conservatives he helped Moon whisk behind bars in 2017 and 2018, to say nothing of the 14 judges who were locked up for not getting into the spirit of the purge. (13 of the 14 have since been acquitted.)
Naturally our Ignorarium, like the local nationalist-left press, prefers not to discuss Yoon’s past as a prosecutor chummy with the unions and with Park Jie-won. It’s the right-wing Youtubers who recall, for example, how his threat to put away for life a woman accused of forgery so frightened her that — by her account, written before he became famous — she lost control of her bladder.
But plenty of conservatives and even centrists chose to vote for Yoon in 2022 in the hope, which his campaign had done everything to encourage, that as president he would go after the Moon camp’s abuses of power with the same fervor. Since then he has been so soft on that whole crowd that the pro-Lee left suspects Moon of having colluded with Yoon all along. Lee with his “nomination massacre” has done more to purge the Moon faction from public life than Yoon ever did.
The president has done some things to please the neoliberal rich, but all he’s done to please average conservatives is to strengthen the US-ROK alliance and security cooperation with Japan — both of which will be weakened again by the next Minjoo president. The nationalist left blames the current state of the economy to a large degree on Yoon’s having too squarely aligned this erstwhile middle power with the US. Stumping for the main opposition party last week, the actor Lee Won-jong said that if the country hadn’t picked the wrong president in 2022, “maybe… a gas pipeline would run from Russia through Kaesong.”
The PPP’s boss Han Dong-hoon, who started the campaign with an aura of infallibility, is going to have to bear a good deal of the blame for how badly it has gone. Clearly he erred in believing he could win over progressives by “strategically” cancelling the nominations of popular conservatives like Do Tae-woo and nominating pseudo-converts from the left like Kim Young-joo.
The comedy is complete when one finds this party and president referred to in the Hankyoreh as “hard right.” Much of the actual hard right, as can be seen from the very low turnout of early voters in Daegu, has given up on Yoon and Han, and that — along with the disastrous turn taken by the initially popular effort to increase the number of doctors — will tilt a lot of swing districts the Minjoo’s way on Wednesday.
UPDATE: The worst defeat ever by a ruling party in South Korea (11 April 2024):
Many conservatives breathed a sigh of relief this morning upon seeing that the nationalist-left front had failed to reach 200 (out of 300) seats after all. Nevertheless, Yoon will spend the next three years as the lamest duck in the history of the presidency — if he’s lucky, that is. Vetoes of Minjoo-driven legislation will continue issuing from his drab office in Yongsan, but they in turn will be overridden if only about 10% of ruling-party lawmakers vote with the opposition.
If 10% seems like a lot, note that the PPP contingent is made up largely of non-Yoon if not anti-Yoon types, most Yoon-faction candidates having lost their races. Besides, the Chosun Ilbo, which has always been more like the PPP’s central committee than its mouthpiece, is already turning on the president it created. The tones struck after the 2016 elections (in regard to Park Geun-hye) were very similar.
It seems highly likely, then, that the National Assembly will soon see those special counsels (independent investigations by a so-called special prosecutor) that the Minjoo has been itching to get underway. Everything from the Itaewon disaster to the Dior bag will be dug into, while hostile media coverage primes the public for another impeachment drive — something street banners in downtown Seoul are already calling for.
It will encounter no more serious resistance than the last one did. The strikingly low turnout in Daegu yesterday made clear that Yoon has lost the old-school right, whose support he took for granted for so long. He began disappointing it as soon as he was elected, by pledging not to live in the Blue House, which he called a “symbol of the imperial presidency.” At the time I asked on this blog the rhetorical question: “What demographic does he expect to prop up his poll numbers when the candlelight theatrics take off?”
This isn’t necessarily to say that the PPP would have done better by moving to the right. It was probably shrewd of Han Dong-hoon not to make too much of Lee’s decision to import a few hardcore pro-Northers into the assembly via the Minjoo’s satellite party. The PPP’s error lay in not communicating any vision or set of values, conservative or otherwise.
Western mainstream media coverage of the Minjoo’s crushing victory has generally been in the cheerful tenor I’d expected. It confronts me again with the mystery of why it’s populist for a European party to be nationalist, to oppose mass immigration, to speak of a monolithic public will, to want looser ties to the US, and better relations with the so-called authoritarian bloc, to say unkind things about globalism (to which There Is No Alternative) — and liberal for a South Korean party to do so. My answer, which I admit is speculative, will have to form the subject of a future blog post. Suffice to say that it touches also on our woke establishment’s curious enthusiasm for the least woke pop culture in the non-Muslim OECD (that “deficit” being an under-discussed reason for its worldwide success).
