Ryuu96 said:
More like 2020 except this time the President of the country will be arrested.
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South Korea I like to keep up with reasonably well in part because I feel like their political trajectory is running a couple two or three years ahead of ours. Many things that happen there, similar things wind up happening here at a two or three year delay these days.
I see our election this year as having certain defining parallels to the 2022 presidential election in South Korea that elected Yoon Suk-Yeol. President Yoon Suk won by running on an anti-feminist message calling for the Ministry of Gender Equality to be closed. He was eventually joined in this call by his liberal opponent, so effective was this message at the time, and won by less than one percent of the vote. He's since proven extremely unpopular. Besides trying (and so far failing) to close the Gender Equality Ministry, he and his party of the working class have also tried to increase the legal work week from 52 hours to 69 and force through an deeply unpopular health care reform that's prompted the country's doctors to go on strike recently. His party got crushed in a landslide in this year's midterm parliamentary elections and Yoon has more recently been caught up in a financial scandal that's seen his job approval rating tank further to around 20% (which makes Joe Biden look like a rock star by comparison at just below 40% here) and he was facing an impeachment probe. That was the context here. Then he declared martial law, closing the parliament and banning opposing parties, seizing the media and placing it under military control, and suspending all human rights like a real man. He explained that "pro-North Korean" forces were supposedly infiltrating the country, and so decided to turn his country into a military police state pretty much exactly like North Korea. I'm almost surprised this coup attempt failed because those things never fail in the 21st century. I was shocked that the democratic forces actually won and got the parliament and human rights back. Of course, he managed to survive the impeachment vote because most of his party boycotted the vote, but large, sustained protests are raising the prospect that the next impeachment vote will be successful.
The parallel between Korea 2022 and us here in 2024 lies in that Trump just defeated a woman specifically by leaning into male identity politics, going after the young male vote with his podcast tour, and it worked, with him winning by a narrow 1.5% of the vote (49.9% to 48.4%). And frankly, I fully expect something analogous to a declaration of martial law to happen in the next several years, certainly before Trump leaves office. I expect something like this: the Democrats perhaps regain the House in the midterms after the Republicans try to close the Department of Education (or something like that). Then investigations of some kind start. Then, sensing like the walls are closing in on him or something, he, in desperation, makes his move. The question is, does it work? That's what I'm watching South Korea for for clues as to what to expect. What I'm getting out of it so far is that perhaps not all is yet lost. Maybe this is evidence that political gravity still exists...somewhere.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 14 December 2024
