Understanding Asymmetric Polarization in Korea

On April 4, South Korea’s Constitutional Court voted 8-0 to impeach conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol, removing him from office for grave legal violations and betrayal of public trust, primarily linked to his imposition of martial law on December 3–4. Key reasons cited for the decision included:

• Lack of legal basis for martial law: Yoon’s justification — political crisis and opposition party tyranny — did not meet the constitutional or legal criteria.

• Procedural violations: Yoon bypassed required Cabinet deliberation, failed to properly announce martial law details, and did not notify the National Assembly.

• Obstruction of the National Assembly: The president used the police and military to block and remove lawmakers, infringing their constitutional rights and immunities.

• Suppression of political opponents: Yoon ordered intelligence officials to track opposition leaders for possible arrests.

• Misuse of the military for political purposes: Military forces were deployed to interfere with democratic institutions.

• Undermining democracy and the separation of powers: The martial law orders barred political and legislative activity nationwide.

• Violations of civil liberties: Citizens’ political rights, freedoms of assembly and occupation were unjustly restricted.

• Illegal raid on the National Election Commission: Yoon ordered a warrantless military operation against the NEC, breaching its independence.

• Threats to judicial independence: He tracked former justices, creating a chilling effect on the judiciary.

Following the ruling, Yoon was immediately removed from office, thus mandating a new presidential election within 60 days.

Far from resolving the polarizing debate over Yoon’s martial law declaration of December 3-4, the unanimous ruling may have exacerbated it. The dominant progressive Democratic Party (DP) saw the ruling as affirming its view of Yoon and his conservative People’s Power Party supporters as legacies of the nation’s authoritarian past. International media, such as the BBC, reinforced this narrative by interviewing reasonable, younger, English-speaking progressive activists and politicians, and translating the angry Korean outbursts of older, conservative protestors.

Conversely, conservatives saw the ruling as affirming progressive dominance of the nation’s major institutions and marginalizing conservative voices; specifically, conservative lawyers argued, the ruling relied on contradictory and unreliable testimonies that the President ordered the arrest of political leaders or attempted to obstruct the National Assembly, despite Yoon’s claim to the contrary. Others made less-substantiated claims about Chinese and North Korean influence.

What we have then is a mainstream media narrative on the impeachment ruling that selectively highlights certain forms of information that support the progressive party, along with an alternative media narrative that makes both reasonable and poorly founded claims. All of this illustrates a general pattern of what we may term asymmetric polarization in South Korea and other countries, where two sides act in ways that threaten liberal democratic norms and individual rights through different methods, depending on their levels of representation within elite institutions.

In a 2022 Pew Research survey, South Koreans ranked the most polarized among 19 countries, with 49% of respondents endorsing the idea of “very strong conflicts between people who support different political parties.” The US was ranked second, with 41% claiming the same.

Vigorous disagreement among supporters of different ideologies and parties is not necessarily problematic for liberal democracy. What is problematic is when partisans view and treat their opponents as illiberal, harmful actors, who do not deserve the protection of liberal procedural rights and norms (PRN), which include both formal-legal rights such as free speech, due process, and equal treatment under the law, and non-legal norms such as journalistic impartiality and academic objectivity, which are associated with fair procedures in a liberal democracy.

When competing groups of partisans exercise differential power in mainstream bureaucratic institutions, they may violate liberal PRN in different ways. To the extent that supporters of one party or ideology dominate institutionally, and view members of the opposing party as illiberal, they can exercise institutional power to marginalize opposing viewpoints and information. Conversely, to the extent that members of the opposing party view mainstream institutions as biased and oppressive, they reject them and turn to alternative outlets. Non-mainstream media offer both substantive information suppressed in elite institutions, and unsubstantiated information and conspiracy theories that fuel grassroots support for radical disruption.

In America’s post-1960 culture war politics, partisan identity is significantly defined by one’s view of the nation’s political and religious founding, as heroic and inspiring or oppressive. Progressive-leaning Democrats often view the nation’s white, male, Christian-dominated past as problematic and champion its challengers, while conservatives take the opposite position.

In the past two decades, self-identified progressives in the US have gained unprecedented dominance in colleges and universities. From 1989 to 2016-2017, the ratio of progressive to conservative faculty more than doubled from 2.3:1 to 5:1, with 60% identifying as liberal and only 12% as conservative; among campus administrators, the ratio was 12:1, as only 6% identified as conservative. In the latest 2021-22 survey, the ratio of liberal to conservative faculty skewed further to 7:1.

Progressive faculty and administrators often frame conservative viewpoints as illiberal and harmful, and exercise their institutional power to marginalize them. Sixty-three percent of liberal faculty believe it can be acceptable to shout down speakers, compared to 47% of moderates and only 12% of conservatives. Additionally, 31% of liberal faculty think blocking students from attending a speech is sometimes acceptable, while only 16% of moderates and 5% of conservatives agree. One survey showed half of academics in the social sciences and humanities expressing a willingness to discriminate against Evangelical Christians in hiring decisions.

Fearing progressive ostracism, scientists avoid certain issues, especially race and gender, or only allow members of a victimized group to speak on a topic. Cathy Young writes, “Researchers and clinicians who depart from the orthodoxy on youth gender dysphoria have been targeted by intense pressure from activists, leading to severe career repercussions and, in one case, the retraction of a large study of adolescent ROGD [rapid onset gender dysphoria].” Thus, progressive-dominated academia and media ignore or suppress inconvenient information, such as the use of puberty blockers being questionable, data that as many as half of transgender female prisoners are sex offenders, or that key scientists were uncertain about the origins of Covid-19.

To the extent that progressives dominate knowledge-producing institutions and view conservatives as illiberal, they exercise institutional power to marginalize information that can be weaponized by those they consider harmful actors; this violates procedural liberal norms on objective scholarship and nonpartisan journalism. Conversely, to the extent that conservatives view mainstream institutions as biased and oppressive, they turn to alternative news sites and social media accounts that are disconnected from and even hostile to mainstream institutions, with these sources usually lacking traditional journalistic procedural norms and practices used to distinguish between corroborated and non-corroborated claims. Alternative media popular with MAGA Republicans such as X and Truth Social offer both true information suppressed in mainstream institutions, and fake news and conspiracy theories, including those that come from Russian influence campaigns.

Mainstream media also disseminate some unsubstantiated claims such as hidden mass graves of indigenous children, but the dissemination of misinformation, without basic fact checking procedures, occurs at much higher rates in conservative and alternative media.

Finally, to the extent that partisans access mutually isolated information markets, they diverge in their worldviews and policy preferences. If the information market on one side is flawed, partisans advance policies based on false assumptions. Some of the Trump Administration’s steps taken on Ukraine, tariffs, and DOGE budget cuts, among other topics, exemplify reliance on false information, such as that President Zelensky is at a four percent approval rating.

The pattern of asymmetric polarization and diverging (mis)information between the progressive-dominated mainstream and the conservative alternative is replicated in other OECD countries such as Germany. As in the US, the far-right media in Europe disseminates more misleading and uncorroborated claims than do mainstream outlets.

In South Korea, asymmetric polarization is both more illiberal, as conservative and progressive partisans use legislation and judicial rulings to imprison opponents who challenge their favored narratives; and unique, as the progressive-dominated mainstream matches the ‘far-right’ alternative in disseminating unsubstantiated claims, and only the progressive mainstream disseminate such claims from their autocratic neighbor, in this case China, and censor serious academics.

Even more than in the US, the major parties in South Korea divide over the legacy of the nation’s major founding presidents: Rhee Syngman (1948-1960) and Park Chung-hee (1961-1979). Conservatives, led by the current People Power Party, generally laud the founders’ opposition to communism, and communist-party led North Korea and China, and support of the US and free market capitalism. Conversely, progressives, led by the Democratic Party, strongly criticize the human rights violations and social injustices associated with the founding administrations’ anticommunist and pro-capitalist policies, and support those more favorable to labor unions at home and to North Korea and China abroad.

Since South Korea’s first leftist government, that of Roh Moo-hyun (2003-08), the communist-capitalist divide has overlapped with another one based on religion. Many Korean Evangelicals laud the Christian values of founding President Rhee, and oppose same-sex marriage and other challenges to traditional family values. Conversely, progressive Presidents Roh and Moon Jae-in (2017-22) have appointed judges who support the rights of historically victimized groups, including members of the LGBT community.

Before democratic reforms and the political transition of the 1990s, conservatives used their dominance of the government and media to frame their opponents as pro-North Korea leftists and collaborators. They vigorously enforced the 1948 National Security Law’s Article 7 prohibition against pro-communist speech to silence progressives.

Since the 1990s, however, progressive partisans have effectively promulgated an equally Manichaean narrative of the Rhee and Park regimes, and their conservative successors, as pro-Japan collaborators and authoritarian fascists. Korean progressive media producers partner with US providers of content like Apple TV and Netflix to globally disseminate narratives that dramatize or fantasize the evils of the Japanese colonial (1910-45) and anticommunist regimes (1947-1987), which effectively stigmatize pro-Japan or anti-communist viewpoints and justify their legal suppression. Works in this genre include the film Exhuma (2014), and the series Mr. Sunshine (2018-) and Taxi Driver (2021-).

Although progressive icon Kim Dae-jung praised free speech, his successors in the Democratic Party have used their growing political and judicial influence to punish speech that defames former victims of colonial or authoritarian regimes, including obtaining a six-month prison sentence for Song Dae-yup, a professor who suggested that most Korean comfort women had volunteered for the Japanese military and two years for Jee Man-won, a commentator who claimed that North Korea helped direct rioters during the 1980 pro-democracy movement in Gwangju.

In December 2020, the DP-dominated Assembly passed the May 18 Distortion Punishment Act to imprison up to five years those who make false claims about the 1980 movement. If progressives regain the presidency, they promise to extend the Act to cover “false” claims, including those about North Korean agents, in other democratic uprisings.

By suppressing supposedly harmful far-right or pro-Japanese viewpoints and information, progressive-dominated media and schools become an echo chamber of uncorroborated claims, such as that the Japanese military kidnapped as many as two hundred thousand Korean girls and that North Korean government agents did not communicate with democracy activists, and that arguments to the contrary are those of fascists.

Soldiers attempt to enter the National Assembly building in Seoul after President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in December

Korean academia and media such as the Korea Times and Hankyoreh also partner with government-controlled institutions in China. In 2014, China’s Jilin Provincial Archives provided the South Korean media with 25 documents showing that the comfort women did not sign up voluntarily in order to make money – as Japan claims – but had actually been officially mobilized by the Japanese imperial army. US-based academics and journalists repeat the sexual slavery narrative and ostracize dissenting scholars such as Harvard Law School’s Mark Ramseyer.

Korea- and US-based academics support South Korean legislative efforts to further criminalize far-right speech. They even target creative fiction: in 2021, activists pressured corporate sponsors to drop the Disney plus television show Snowdrop because of its fictional portrayal of a North Korean spy during South Korea’s democracy movement in the 1980s. US-based mainstream media have supported such activists by labeling claims about North Korean involvement as “conspiracy theories”, despite some documented evidence. Kookmin University historian Andrei Lankov writes that he “personally knows [three] people who once commuted to Pyongyang via submarine” (Lankov, The Real North Korea, p. 31).

Shaped by progressive-dominated, knowledge-producing institutions, Democratic Party leaders condemn scholars who challenge the progressive narrative. After Sejong University professor Park Yu-ha published her book, Comfort Women of the Japanese Empire, which won top academic awards in Japan, Democratic Party chief Lee Jae-myong posted the following on Facebook

This professor…
Is she still holding her position as a professor?
How did I end up breathing under the same sky as someone like her… sigh.
These remnants of pro-Japanese collaborators must be cleared away.

Since former conservative President Park Geun-hye’s 2016 impeachment, the Democratic Party has dominated the National Assembly. Yoon, the conservative party candidate, barely won the 2022 presidential election, but the DP parliamentary majority paralyzed the administration with an unprecedented array of budget cuts, along with 22 motions to impeach government officials, before Yoon declared martial law on December 3, 2024.

To justify such paralysis, DP partisans framed the Yoon Administration’s policies of reconciliation with Japan as pro-Japan collaboration. The initial December 4 impeachment motion stated: “Yoon has neglected geopolitical balance, antagonizing North Korea, China, and Russia, adhering to a bizarre Japan-centered foreign policy, and appointing pro-Japan individuals to key government positions.”

Grassroots conservatives, in turn, rejected mainstream media, whose “fake news” defamed their political heroes as pro-Japan collaborators, whether former Presidents Rhee Syngman and Park Chung-hee or current President Yoon. Instead, they turned to social media, especially YouTube, which has become a primary source of information for 53% of South Koreans, including 70% of right-wing rally participants. By disconnecting from mainstream media, conservative media became an echo chamber of uncorroborated theories, such as that progressive lawmakers are secretly collaborating with North Korea or that North Korean hackers infiltrated the National Election Commission.

In the aftermath of the December 3 martial law declaration, grassroots conservatives praised President Yoon for performatively standing up to the Democratic Party and drove out institutional conservatives who disagreed. After resigning as PPP chief on December 16, Han Dong-hoon warned party members, “If we sympathise with extremists like the conspiracy theorists and extreme YouTubers, or if we are consumed by their commercially produced fears, there is no future for conservatism.”

Even as institutional conservatives felt excluded in their party by radicalized conservatives, they felt excluded in mainstream, knowledge-producing institutions by dominant progressives. CM, a female graduate student at a Seoul-based university, criticized the May 18 Act:

Asking a question like “Aren’t they rioters?” is not allowed despite the fact that protesters during the May 18 Gwangju Uprising broke into armories and armed themselves with stolen weapons and ammunition. Some people around me argue that the May 18 Special Act suppresses freedom of expression. I would go further and say that it is a draconian law that also suppresses the freedom to seek the truth.

PJ, a male graduate student, opposed Yoon’s martial law declaration as “too radical,” but also opposed the National Assembly’s swift impeachment of the president, before any police investigation or assembly hearing. PJ preferred the months-long process of investigation and deliberation that led to bipartisan consensus on President Nixon’s resignation. But he declined to openly voice this argument in his university, fearing not just condemnation from progressive faculty and student groups, but also imprisonment from a future DP administration. In his view, DP-appointed judges could interpret existing defamation laws, or legislators might pass a new law (“December 3 Act”) modeled on the May 18 Act, to criminalize statements justifying Yoon’s “fascist” martial law declaration.

Korea-based conservatives such as PJ risk more suppression, including imprisonment, for expressing their views than do American conservatives. But unlike their US counterparts, Korean conservative radicalism was largely limited to supporting President Yoon’s (allegedly) performative, and brief, martial law declaration. They have not yet sought to defund and dismantle mainstream, knowledge-producing institutions (e.g., the education ministry, national research foundations, elite universities), as in the US . Neither do conservative Korean students reject elite universities in favor of conservative alternatives like Hillsdale.

Influenced by Confucian norms, practically all Koreans, conservative or progressive, valorize elite, mostly Seoul-based, universities such as Hanyang and higher-ranked universities abroad. Like the older, Bush-style Republicans in the US, Korean conservatives desire mainstream institutions to be more open to conservative perspectives, not to destroy them. Unlike many MAGAs, most Korean conservatives do not consider reforming the elite universities or the education and scientific ministries to be a lost cause, but a worthy even if difficult mission.

A key difference is that matriculation into elite Korean universities, major newspapers, and government bureaucracies is predominantly determined by standardized exams, not subjective and politicized essays, letters of recommendations, and extracurriculars. Seemingly non-meritocratic, Claudine Gay-style educational elites do not exist in Korea. Therefore, Korean conservatives challenge the progressive majority, but not the core legitimacy of mainstream institutions.

Among OECD democracies, the US and Korea exemplify the challenges of polarization and especially asymmetric polarization. Progressive dominance of mainstream information sources does not justify the self-imposed isolationism and disruptive radicalism of conservatives, culminating in the December 3 martial law declaration in South Korea and the defund, dismantle, and deportation agenda of the second Trump Administration. But it does help us understand that conservatives’ procedural illiberalism and misinformation, and policies based on such misinformation, do not appear in a vacuum, and that any infringements of liberal-procedural norms can polarize and destabilize democracy.

Breaking this cycle requires not more suppression or radicalism, but reaffirming the liberal-procedural norms of open debate and respect for legal rules and customs.