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South Korea is in turmoil after the failed imposition of martial law on December 3, which was essentially an attempted coup by President Yoon Suk Yeol. He was impeached on December 14, and last week criminal investigators detained him for questioning on the charge of insurrection.

The drama will continue, as the Constitutional Court still needs to adjudicate the validity of Yoon’s impeachment. The earliest a ruling will come is next month, and the judgment will be keen anticipated, as much by Yoon as by the opposition, the Democratic Party.

Yoon’s successor, acting president Han Duck-soo, refused to appoint three more judges to bring the understrength court up to a full nine members, and so the Democratic Party impeached him too.

The current acting president, Choi Sang-mok, has appointed only two out of the three possible candidates to the court. Neither Yoon’s conservative People Power Party, who wanted no appointments, nor the vaguely centre-left Democratic Party, which wanted all three, were pleased.

One year ago, the Democratic Party’s leader, Lee Jae-myung, survived an assassination attempt. In November he was convicted of making false statements during the 2022 presidential election campaign and given a one-year suspended prison sentence. Lee is also facing at least four trials stemming from indictments on charges of bribery, corruption and conflict of interest.

When analysing liberal representative democracy as a whole, South Korea is illuminating because of the extreme political polarisation. In the 2022 general election Yoon triumphed over Lee by a mere 0.7%, making it the closest presidential contest in South Korea’s history.

Police officers stand outside of the Seoul Western District Court after Yoon supporters break into the court on January 19, 2025 in Seoul, South Korea. Picture: CHUNG SUNG-JUN/GETTY IMAGES
Police officers stand outside of the Seoul Western District Court after Yoon supporters break into the court on January 19, 2025 in Seoul, South Korea. Picture: CHUNG SUNG-JUN/GETTY IMAGES

While polarisation has been a part of the country ever since its founding in 1948, the process has taken off since former president Park Geun-hye was impeached in 2016 on grounds of corruption. The result is, as Korea analyst John Nilsson-Wright states, a political climate of “relative intolerance and uncompromising, scorched-earth turf wars between the left and the right”.

If that sounds somewhat familiar, it should. While polarisation is nothing new — every revolution axiomatically marks a bitterly divided society — it has become a general hallmark of liberal democracies across the world. Zero-sum politics are increasingly the norm, and representing the entire demos a quaint patrician idea of yesteryear. The question is why?

Social media algorithms and distrust in mainstream media are often blamed. Facebook and X promote views you already agree on up the feeds, which results in the formation of echo chambers. When coupled with the notion that mainstream media are biased and to be avoided, people end up stuck in self-reinforcing digital ecosystems in which there is no debate, only hatred of the other side.

This theory confuses method with causation. Newspapers have always held ideological views of the world. The Economist, about as mainstream as you can get, has been reporting through a liberal free-market lens since 1843. The US’s yellow press of the 1890s spewed out more rabid fake news than X on a particularly foul day.

Opinionated pamphlets became the main source of news in England around 1580 and were highly influential during the English civil wars (1642-51). News, ideology and bias have been mixed for ages. People have long since gravitated to outlets according to their political views. Social media’s sole advance has been a concentration of wealth of mind-boggling proportions of indecency.

Liberal representative democracy is not a complete solution precisely because it is not democratic enough, particularly in terms of economics.

A more credible explanation is that politicians have used social issues to drive culture wars to create ideological bases that turn out on election day. Voters are led into a politics of hate and division so that members of the political elite can gain power on a rotating basis.

But there’s blowback. Society actually does become polarised, as do the politicians themselves. Instead of cohering into a bi- or tripartisan centre to rule after an election, the political class itself splits into opposing camps in an increasingly fierce internecine conflict, as in South Korea at the moment.

However, this reasoning is only partial due to the unfounded proposition that voters are led by politicians rather than acting rationally. When someone says the problem is “low-information voters”, people who vote a particular way because they don’t understand the “real” issues or are unaware of “facts” or are “misinformed”, please roll up your favourite ideological rag of a paper and poke some sense into the misguided fool. Voters aren’t stupid. They vote in their perceived best interests. Always.

The deeper problem afflicting liberal representative democracy is that it has hit a brick wall. Not in Francis Fukuyama’s sense of being the end of history, liberal free-market democracy being the terminus of political evolution, but rather that liberal democracy is proving itself unable to solve society’s problems. Poverty endures, inequality widens, the climate burns, consumerism brings naught but mountains of debt, healthcare is expensive and scarce, war grinds, pensions shrink and social mobility has shifted into reverse.

Employment, if you can get it, is often a series of monotonous, soul-crushing shifts under the gaze of a petty, sociopathic manager desperate to show the big bosses his cost-cutting worth so that he can get a raise to pay the interest on the aforementioned mountain of personal debt.

People know the world is wrong and, in a rigged system, polarisation becomes an expression of this, a searching for something … anything … that is different from the status quo. And when there are no solutions from within, just endless screaming across a hollow centre, populism emerges.

Populists such as incoming US president Donald Trump are not just telling people he will kick down the rotten system, democracy be damned if necessary, but saying so with genuine conviction. Our politicians are so uninspiring because they’re genuine about nothing except wanting to chow the entire cake. Hence, a vast number of South Africans don’t vote, quite rationally.

Liberal democracy is a precious thing, which is why South Koreans hit the streets in numbers the moment Yoon decided to channel his inner dictator. Yet liberal representative democracy is not a complete solution precisely because it is not democratic enough, particularly in terms of economics. We do need to make democracy work for everyone and not just the tech giants.

The danger for SA is that somewhere out there in the republic a smart and truly charismatic populist with an anti-democratic bent can see his or her day coming.

• Taylor, a freelance journalist and photographer, is a research fellow in environmental ethics at Stellenbosch University.

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