As this blog anticipated on December 3, the declaration of martial law by South Korea’s president did not last long. The certainty and rapidity of the legislature’s response, supported by much of the citizenry and, among others, the chair of the President’s own party, made a strong show of Korea’s democratic resilience.
Still, the need for legislators’ desperate scramble to the National Assembly hall to get ahead of armed forces, and for deliberate disregard of illegal orders by an army general, serve as reminders that democratic constitutions all contain weak points against seizures of power by sitting chief executives. Dwelling on whether or not another country might face this kind of challenge would risk inciting a divisive, inevitably politicized, round of public argument.
The persistence of partisanship was borne out by the failure of the Korean opposition to impeach President Yoon Seok Yeol on December 5, as the bulk of his party walked out of the legislative session. Once actual martial law was quashed, polarized politics resumed its normal course. The opposition leader apparently faces questions of his own probity. And it even turns out that the President’s party chair, who opposed the martial law order, is also a political rival.
South Korea’s democracy has long shown itself as a nasty, zero-sum affair. Elections are democratic, but politics is rife with mistrust and corruption. Two of Yoon’s predecessors, all democratically elected, have been imprisoned after leaving the presidency. Another committed suicide over corruption charges, and one more was revealed to have funneled millions of dollars to North Korea in exchange for summit meetings that gained him a name as a daring peacemaker. As this blog asked on December 3, can South Korea now set its democracy in a political ambience of comity and civility?
The question bears on the viability, and some will say validity, of democratic government. South Korea has been steadily democratic yet its politics seems prone to the kind of vitriol that can destabilize democracy. Illiberal electoral regimes in Turkey, Hungary and Poland until a few years ago, and the rise of populism across the western world, further the impression that democracy itself isn’t truly valued.
If that is true, then the autocrats of the world will gain confidence that rights, rule of law, and impartial justice are not moral norms but tools of power, in the world for affluent societies that propagate them and at home for influential factions. If this view gains followers, how does the United States outcompete Communist China and authoritarian Russia?
One thing Americans can do, if we focus, is to reaffirm that our political allegiances are not fundamental identities. They are only interpretations of the nation’s self-conception in 1776 – on rights universally and equally endowed in all, and that government exists to serve those rights. Even our hard core partisans all claim those same abstract principles. So we can, if we want, accept our political rivals as fellow Americans who prefer different means to common national ends. We need to, to maintain the nation founded on those ends. If we do, democrats in other countries will have our example to encourage them. If we do not, democracy’s sway will continue to erode.
Common Conviction 