ROK Drop links to an article saying that impeached conservative South Korean president Yoon Seok-yeol has barricaded himself in his presidential compound and has vowed to fight attempts by an anti-corruption agency to arrest him, arguing that any attempt to arrest Yoon goes beyond the agency's authority, and that Yoon’s own personal security might arrest those attempting to arrest Yoon.
While there's good reason to believe that the Korean left is practicing its own version of US-style leftist lawfare against Yoon, Yoon himself is making it hard to sympathize with him. His abortive power grab in early December, whatever the cause, was a clumsy move on his part to try to get the National Assembly to work in his favor. Yoon doesn't have the finesse (or the legal firepower) of a Donald Trump to be able to pull off a minor coup; his quickly rescinded declaration of martial law ended up looking like nothing so much as a naked power grab. (Trump himself would never have resorted to brute force to get his way, anyway, whatever the left might claim about his supposedly authoritarian nature.)
While I'm convinced a conservative president is at least in principle better for South Korea, Yoon seems to be a throwback to the dictatorships of old. I don't normally dabble in Korean politics, which is too confusing for my tiny brain, but that's how things look from my perch. I'm sure Korean conservatives will argue that Yoon is somehow getting a raw deal. By my lights, he lacks the necessary subtlety to make deals and form coalitions, preferring force to negotiations. And his possible replacement, leftist Lee Jae-myung, doesn't promise to be any better for the country.
I'm curious how you would go about defining leftist. How far left on the political spectrum do you have to be to qualify as a leftist? It's my understanding that most Korean liberal politicians are still fsirly conservative in many ways and maybe even be further right than sime mainstrean European conservative parties on more than a few issues. At best Lee is a centrist, sondescribing him as a leftist strikes me as being inherently misleading.in fact describing anyone as a "leftist" in contrast to a "conservative" doesnt seem appropriate, maybe liberal or progressive is better although i'm not sure he really qualifies as either as we would understand them to be.
ReplyDeleteI've written before about left/right, liberal/conservative, etc., as labels and/or terms. I'm no longer an academic, so I'm no longer obsessive about terminological precision. The terms do overlap, though, so only a hairsplitting academic would see, say, left-versus-conservative as a potentially harmful or even a misleading contrast. I'm also aware that the Korean version of these notions is different from the US version; I hinted at this in the post when I claimed that Yoon's authoritarian tendencies seemed to hark back to old-school Korean conservatism, i.e., the bad old days of dictatorships. But wouldn't you agree the face of Korean conservatism has been changing?
DeleteHow do you see Lee as a centrist? He's apparently perceived as whatever people see him as. See this three-year-old Reddit thread, which starts with a claim that Lee is a leftist, provoking comments that he is nothing of the sort. At least one person in the thread, though, agrees with you that Lee is a centrist. But that's only one opinion.
I think you're right that Korean politicians of all stripes are generally more socially conservative than US politicians on the US left, but that's changing, too. Postmodernism has a definite hold on humanities academe in Korea; it's only a matter of time before it metastasizes into the hard sciences here. This is part of a larger tendency of Korea to doggedly head over the same cliffs America is heading over.
Of course, many "mainstream European conservative parties" look awfully leftie from the US-rightie perspective. But a fair counter would be that what is "left/liberal" and "right/conservative" in the US is also in flux. In the end, the labels themselves mean little because reality keeps evolving out from under them.