A shorter, edited version of the following text first appeared on Sidecar, the blog of New Left Review, on 19 December 2024, under the title “Saving Democracy?“. It is now published in its entirety on Communis with the authors’ permission.
Yoon Suk Yeol’s botched coup attempt
On 3 December, Judith Butler arrived in South Korea to give a lecture at Kyung Hee University. The title of her talk: “Democracy and the Future of Humanities”. Within hours, however, the lecture, scheduled to take place at the University’s Global Campus in Yongin, had been cancelled. Chat messages began to circulate claiming that unspecified threats had been made by Christian nationalists.
A few hours later, at 10.23pm local time, the 13th President of the Republic of Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, for whom anti-feminism and anti-gender equality legislation had been explicit policy commitments in his 2022 election campaign, declared martial law. In a televised address Yoon announced his own personal vision of democracy and the future of humanities, justifying his extraordinary action by citing the parliamentary opposition’s “legislative dictatorship”. Looking frustrated and fatigued (rumours suggest the president may have been drinking) Yoon claimed that the “dictatorship” was “a clear anti-state act of conspiring to incite rebellion by trampling on the constitutional order of the free Republic of Korea and disrupting legitimate state institutions established by the Constitution and the law.”
But Yoon’s speech went further, insinuating the political opposition’s collusion with “North Korean communist forces” and its attempt to undermine South Korean democracy. “Through this state of emergency martial law,” the president announced, “I will rebuild and protect the free Republic of Korea, which is falling into the abyss of national ruin.”
Martial law didn’t last long: all of six hours, in which time opposition leader Lee Jae-myung and his fellow lawmakers wrestled through a police cordon at the National Assembly and barricaded themselves inside. Their efforts were supported by massive civilian resistance, with Seoul residents jumping out of bed and rushing to parliament in the middle of the night to form a “human shield” around the parliament, as paratroopers arrived by helicopter. The presidential decree was voted down unanimously, and in an embarrassing climbdown Yoon appeared on television again agreeing to lift his emergency decree.
The US, South Korea’s closest ally — which stood idly by during the Coup d’etat of 12th December 1979 – had reportedly been given no prior warning of Yoon’s audacious move. This seems plausible, given that the Americans’ “grave concerns” were communicated directly to Woo Won-sik, the chairman of the Korean National Assembly, not President Yoon.
On the face of it Yoon’s talk of “conspiracy” and “threats by North Korean communist forces” is grandiloquent nonsense. However, this brief act of political suicide — on 14 December the President was impeached by the National Assembly; the constitutional court is deciding whether to remove him from office — does at least expose a political truth that escapes the country’s liberal commentariat.
As much as South Korea’s liberal opposition, headed by the Democratic Party, will belittle the idea of it being in league with North Korea’s “communist forces”, the country’s liberal constitution is unlikely to be vindicated in the weeks and months to come. Indeed, despite a collective sigh of relief that democracy has been saved, the inconvenient truth remains that anti-communism not only remains the central support of South Korea’s political establishment, and has been since the Japanese colonial era. Anti-communism, in the guise of the country’s National Security Act, forms the very foundation of the country’s constitutional law. Only by properly acknowledging this fact can Yoon’s momentary act of madness, hubris or both, be properly clarified, and placed in its wider political context, which we propose to refer to here as “liberal anti-communism”.
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Yoon Suk Yeol was born in 1960 in Seongbuk, a wealthy northern neighbourhood of Seoul. Both of Yoon’s parents were university professors. Much has been made in recent days of the fact that Yoon attended Chungam High School, along with his defence minister Kim Yong-hyun. Speculation has centred on a “Chungam faction” comprising members of Yoon’s inner circle, and what role it might have played in the planning and execution of the martial law decree.
After studying law at Seoul National University, Yoon passed the bar exam in 1991. Following several high profile cases as a public prosecutor, including the so-called “National Intelligence Services (NIS) public opinion manipulation scandal” (involving President Park Geun-hye), in 2017 Yoon was appointed to the Central Seoul District Prosecutor’s Office by President Moon Jae-in, and two years later he became Prosecutor General. However, the relationship soured after Yoon pursued investigations against Moon’s justice minister, among other allies.
The contrast between Yoon and his predecessor Moon, who in 2018 presided over a series of Inter-Korean summits, could hardly be more stark. A symbolic meeting in April between Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s communist leader, and South Korean President Moon was accompanied by the ambitious Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity and the Reunification of the Korean Peninsula. A commitment to “denuclearization” was announced, along with a peace treaty to finally bring the sixty-five year long Korean War to an end. Further incremental steps towards a resumption of diplomatic relations, easing tensions and eliminating propaganda around the Demilitarised Zone, and engaging in limited economic cooperation were agreed.
By the time of the South Korean presidential elections in 2022, however, and with the departure of Donald Trump from the White House (Trump had been a vocal champion of Korean “denuclearization”) the entente cordiale between the two Koreas had fizzled out. The South Korean elections were dominated by domestic issues, primarily the lack of affordable housing and the economic fallout from Covid-19, which Yoon’s People Power Party sought to blame on the Moon administration. Yoon triumphed over his Democratic Party rival Lee Jae-myung by a slender margin, winning broad support among younger male voters.
Yoon had sparked controversy during the election campaign by suggesting that South Korea would benefit from a 120-hour work week. In office, the new president’s economic fantasies provoked a major backlash from the youth and trade unions. Although South Korea ranks second in the world in R&D, productivity growth has been flatlining thanks to demographic decline – down from 6.1% in 2001-10 to 0.5% in 2011-20. Yoon also caused mass resignations among junior doctors over medical school admission quotas. In foreign policy, the president was hawkish, seeking to upgrade relations with Japan to the level of a strategic military alliance. In addition to vocal hostility toward North Korea, Yoon stoked anti-China sentiment. The ROK’s trade surplus with the country turned into a deficit of around a billion dollars in the first half of his presidency.
It would be all too easy to characterise this apparent lurch to the right in South Korean politics as the latest episode of a global trend. As transnational capital continues to tear across the globe unchecked, workers are laid off, productivity slumps, and ugly social antagonisms give way to the “great politics” of a “man of destiny” who promises to return the country to tried and tested conservative values.
Describing the coup attempt for Al Jazeera, Andrew Mitrovica surmises that “Yoon heard Trump’s fascist clarion call loud and clear and beat him to the despotic punch by imposing martial law.” In this article and several others like it, mere word association aligns Yoon with “Trump, Bolsonaro and Netanyahu” (the author might have added Modi, Putin and Milei for good measure) all of whom “are the antidote to the sentimental idea that liberal democracies in name only are the bulwark against extremism.”
But such homilies pretending to diagnose a global fascist turn utterly fail to grasp the politics of South Korea. Rather than simply wielding executive power against a “liberal democracy in name only” – presumably this means a democracy insufficiently “liberal” to protect itself against such arbitrary abuses of power — South Korea’s constitution is explicitly framed to enable such abuses. Indeed, the anti-communist rhetoric that seeks to protect the nation from “North Korean communist forces” is not the extremist discourse of a demagogue; instead, anti-communist discourse is enshrined in South Korea’s liberal constitution, and in the National Security Act (NSA) that is hardly liberal “in name only”.
Consider the fact that the NSA is routinely used to prosecute political “extremists”, as it was most recently in August 2024, when police raided the offices of the People’s Democratic Party, seized documents and arrested its leader Lee Sang-hoon. The potentially treasonous acts listed by the NSA include the mere recognition of North Korea as a political entity, the printing and distribution of “anti-government” propaganda, and the promotion of a “rebellion against the state”. One wonders how many of the elected legislators and active citizens who went to defend the National Assembly on 3 December, in a concerted effort to save democracy, might have fallen foul of this anti-communist law, had President Yoon’s coup attempt succeeded.
Throughout the 20th century people have been subject to far more draconian applications of anti-communist laws than this. The mass executions of communist sympathisers by US forces during the Korean War has been widely documented. Gone are the days when the statement “I am a communist” could land a Korean in a mass grave. However, the NSA remains no less arbitrary in its powers, as countless wrongful arrests and detentions over the years prove, for possession of “subversive literature”, alleged espionage, or even a casual expression of sympathy for the North Korean people.
In 1997 Bruce Cumings characterized South Korea and Japan in the late 1940s as “the subjects of a dual containment policy . . . both to contain the communist enemy and to constrain the capitalist ally”. South Korea’s integration into the global economy was premised on the supposed need to combat communism – a threat invoked by successive governments to suppress political freedoms, via the National Security Act. Ostensibly designed to shield South Korea from the North, to this day the NSA is still used to smother opposition to the status quo. In 2014, it was invoked to ban a newly formed left-wing party, the Unified Progressives, after it performed surprisingly well in the Assembly elections.
Amnesty International has called for the law’s abolition, describing it as “a tool to silence dissent and to arbitrarily prosecute individuals who are peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression and association”. The Korean Journalists Association views the NSA as outdated and incompatible with the country’s modern liberal democracy. With the current President suspended from office but continuing to resist arrest, and given the bitter standoff between his supporters and opponents, Yoon’s belligerent gambit has inadvertently brought the question of anti-communism to the centre of Korean politics. Will progressive voices win out against the forces of reaction? This is difficult to predict. However, we see at least three reasons for optimism.
First, the division of the Korean peninsula has shaped the collective consciousness of the South, deeply embedding anti-communism into its societal fabric. Increasingly, however, anti-communism is seen as the legacy of a discredited political settlement, one that claimed the lives of 3 million civilians in the Korean War. Given the ROK’s various social and economic difficulties—from political corruption to lack of affordable housing, rising unemployment and widespread sexual violence—it seems highly doubtful that North Korea can continue to serve as a convenient scapegoat. Increasingly the communist signifer is losing its capacity to discipline one of the world’s most highly educated workforces.
Second, we must acknowledge the hard political core of South Korea’s defiant democracy. The ROK has endured numerous impositions of martial law prior to and following the birth of the Republic in 1948. This has cultivated a collective understanding of how to counter such emergencies. The younger generation, including soldiers and police, is attuned to the horror of the Gwangju massacre of May 1980, in which an estimated 165 civilians, mostly demonstrators, were killed by the army, and a further 76 went missing, following the imposition of martial law by General Chun Doo-hwan. Education, films and literature periodically reanimate this event, with varying degrees of seriousness, but nonetheless play an important role in cultural transmission.
During the recent crisis, many soldiers and police acted more as citizens than as enforcers, responding with restrained actions that showed empathy for a “demonstration”, not just of popular resistance, but of a democratic movement that was perfected throughout the 1980s in the aftermath of Gwangju, one that springs up in times of crisis. The Candlelight Protests, the last of which took place in 2016—18 against former president Park Geun-hye, saw millions of Koreans gather in the streets. Further mobilisations cannot be ruled out should Yoon attempt to frustrate the legal process and cling on to power.
One is struck by the intergenerational scope of the present demonstrations. On the night of 3 December citizens rallying to the National Assembly were predominantly from the 1987 pro-democracy generation. However, by 7 December, when protestors gathered as the first impeachment vote was taking place, younger participants, particularly women, formed the majority. Protest sites resounded with both traditional democratic anthems and contemporary K-pop tracks, blending cultural heritage with youthful energy. All this suggests that any attempt by Yoon and his party to paper over the botched coup and continue with business as usual is likely to backfire, and transform the street protests into a more sustainable democratic movement, throwing back into sharp focus all the pressing social issues that South Korean politics has been unable or unwilling to address in recent times.
Third, and briefly, economic reality. Was Yoon dreaming of a return to authoritarian developmentalism when he announced martial law on 3 December? Surely only he could know how a return to an economic model last seen under Park Chung Hee, the Korean military dictator from 1961–1979, could possibly take hold in a country with a literacy rate of 97.4%, and in which 70% of the population have a college degree, the highest in the OECD in 2024.
Anti-communism is no longer robust enough to operate smoothly within the framework of South Korea’s modern liberal democracy. Yoon’s apologists, among whom one counts the anti-feminists who targeted Judith Butler’s talk, have revealed themselves not only as illiberal opponents of “free speech”, but of ordinary Koreans’ commitment to democracy in all its diversity. Whatever happens over the coming weeks and months, a return to past autocracies would seem highly unlikely.
