The Korean system of democracy in place right now is younger than my mom. In fact, to be even more strict, it is younger than I.
When I was growing up in Korea, Gangnam, which is now one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in all of Seoul, the same Gangnam you may know from Oppa Gangnam style, that area was still partly dirt, just raw dirt.
[Gangnam style]
And at the time, even still in the 80s, most elders wore Hanbok because everyone used to wear Hanbok in Korea. It was everyday wear, not a costume to rent for a day to take pictures.
[Beautiful Hanbok]
I am still in shock at how rapidly everything changed in just a couple of decades.
Precisely because the current iteration of democracy is so young, many Koreans remember what it was like before, to get to where we are now. What it was before and what it is becoming.
This election results map from yesterday’s south Korean snap election shows how south Korea divided right down the middle with regard to candidate alignment.
[Divided again]
Blue represents those who voted for the now president Lee Jae Myung, and red signifies those who voted for his opponent, Kim Moon Soo. The areas in blue are historically where some of the biggest democracy movements of the last century have occurred. I’ve written extensively about Gwangju, and the Jeju uprisings.
People remember. The land remembers.
Because Korean democracy is young, it is also still very experimental. It is not embedded or enshrined with the same assumptions that some of the more aged democracies carry.
For instance, election results are announced on major news outlets in wild, original, and innovative ways. These are our candidates’ faces, superimposed onto bodies doing a range of humorous stunts.
Democracy in Korea is still shaping, and the People, we know that we are the ones that are shaping it. This is why in December, when Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, the People said, “There is no way we will allow this to happen.” It was the rapid mobilization of the People that got him impeached.
We are not making assumptions that are typical of older democracies, such as, “We have always done it this way, so we must always do it this way,” or even, “It has always happened this way, so it will continue to happen this way.” We do not have that same extended history.
What we are trying to figure out in Korea is what works, not, do what we have always done. We have an advantage here. We have an advantage of being new and creative with democracy.
But because of those very same reasons, there are many aspects of Korean democracy that are impressionable. And unfortunately, we are impressionable by Empire, especially the one that is occupying us, the United States Empire.
For those around the world that have older democratic systems like in the United States Empire, remember through studying history and through elders, how democracy should be shaped by the people, not by the few who hoard the power.
From the young democracy of Korea, I share that hope.
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