It’s been two months since President Yoon Suk-yeol’s botched self-coup on December 3, during which armed special forces stormed the National Assembly and operatives roamed around to arrest notable politicians. After the National Assembly voted unanimously to overturn the martial law declaration, it seemed that Yoon’s political fate was sealed. Yet that consensus proved to be a mirage.
Most of the ruling People Power Party (PPP) refused to vote in favor of his impeachment. Its members embraced and stoked the alt-right argument that Yoon’s unconstitutional declaration of martial law was legitimate and necessary while also endorsing voter fraud conspiracy theories that have been debunked by numerous police investigations and court rulings. One of its legislators ushered into the National Assembly press room the “White Skull Corps,” a fringe youth league named after a police group that repressed protests against military dictatorships through terror in the 1980s.
The Presidential Security Service at first defied an arrest warrant for Yoon, openly scuffling with the police. On January 17, all the violent rhetoric erupted into actual violence as Yoon’s far-right supporters stormed Seoul Western District Court, injuring dozens of police officers and ransacking the premises while declaring an intent to harm the judge that prolonged Yoon’s detention. As the Constitutional Court deliberates on whether to reinstate Yoon or uphold his impeachment, the PPP and ultra-conservatives are slandering some of the justices as pro-North Korean in an effort to undermine their legitimacy and impugn their impending ruling.
Notably, a throughline for this whole sequence has been the increasing political visibility and truculence of young South Korean men. They were at the forefront of violent clashes on the streets, around the presidential residence and the court, defending martial law and justifying authoritarianism, while leading the “national-flag brigade.”
This ultra-conservative group had previously been populated by people over 60, those nostalgic for the 1960s – 1980s, during which military dictatorships happened to coincide with the country’s exponential economic growth and budding manufacturing base. They particularly swooned over Park Chung-hee, a charismatic strongman assassinated in 1979, and his daughter, former President Park Geun-hye, who was impeached and jailed in 2017 for corruption. Their violent reaction to the news of Park’s impeachment caused dozens of casualties at the time.
The January 17 court riot was sparked by the same rage as laid bare in 2017, with one key difference: this time, it was young men that took the reins. More than half of those arrested for assault and vandalism were men in their 20s and 30s.
Despite Yoon’s and the PPP’s blatant disregard of the rule of law, more and more of South Korea’s young men have shifted to the right. In Gallup’s January aggregate poll, 40 percent of males in their 20s and 30s said they were conservative, with more than a third of them supporting the PPP. They’ve been fomenting violence both online and in real life, feeding ominous rhetoric of subverting social consensus and the rule of law “to save the country” from communists.
This stands in stark contrast to South Korean women in their 20s and 30s, almost half of whom said they supported the opposition Democratic Party (DP) in the same Gallup poll. And more than 80 percent of women in their 20s are in favor of Yoon’s impeachment. South Korea’s women poured onto the streets not for violence but for justice. Swaddled in parkas and blankets, they wielded K-pop light sticks and sang verses denouncing Yoon to familiar K-pop tunes. They danced and busked. Heat packs and snacks and steaming coffee were their supplies, not steel pipes and chilling rhetoric.
Meanwhile, less than 5 percent of participants in these peaceful pro-impeachment protests were young men. Although 53 percent of men in their 20s support Yoon’s impeachment, they are reluctant to publicly voice pro-impeachment sentiments and ratchet up their political involvement. On the surface, they are apparently not as aggrieved and motivated as the men partaking in anti-impeachment demonstrations. But it also seems likely that, as JoongAng, one of South Korea’s major dailies, observed, young men frown upon the “feminists” having taken control of the drive to oust the Yoon administration.
So, three subgroups account for most young South Korean males: those against Yoon but lackadaisical in shooing him away; those who support the PPP to do whatever it needs to do, with or without Yoon, to just keep conservatives in power; and the alt-right faction maniacally shielding Yoon. Clearly, the whole impeachment fracas has become gendered.
What’s going on? The starting point for understanding the rightward shift of young men and the boosted confidence and political presence of the alt-right should be Park Guen-hye’s impeachment and the subsequent regime change in 2017.
Following the Park administration’s incompetence and callousness in the aftermath of the Sewol ferry tragedy and Park’s corruption scandals, the candlelight movements that spurred her downfall saw no gender divide. Young males were as much on board as their female counterparts. They simply wanted to see an end to elitist hubris and self-entitlement to corruption.
In his inaugural speech, newly-elected President Moon Jae-in made a solemn pledge: “Opportunity will be equal. Process will be fair. The result will be just.” His resolve acknowledged the public sensitivity to widening social inequality, income disparity, ever-hardening social stratification and sickly job markets characterized by cutthroat competition.
More than two-thirds of young people were striving to secure employment in the comfortable public sector and large corporations that require stellar performance on tricky examinations and extracurricular activities. A volatile market economy and the skewed perception of social class – comfortable, well-paying jobs translating into social mobility – had engendered the societal peculiarity whereby employment in the public sector ranked first in the list of preferred occupations for marriage partners.
Simultaneously, the absence of safety nets for contract workers and those in the informal economy exacerbated the myth that failure to enter public sectors or lucrative corporate worlds meant failure in life. Competition had assumed a life-or-death intensity. Dreams had never been so desperate. Social equity and all-male conscription dominated public discourse.
Febrile competition demanded an investment of time, and young men considered the playing field to be uneven due to their belated participation in the game after sacrificing two prime years of their lives in the military. They wanted to study more and join more extracurricular activities in society, rather than stewing under the sun in battle fatigues. Conscription, therefore, undermined their concept of equity based on “fair competition” and the rigid meritocracy in this job market. (Neglected in these calculations, however, is the fact that the employment status of South Korean women craters following pregnancy and overall employment rates regardless of age are abysmal for them.)
Meanwhile, the #MeToo Movement that came to the fore during Moon’s presidency fell on deaf ears on the part of young South Korean men. Their reaction was to point all the more to the supposed advantages of being a women: not just the exemption from mandatory military service but also Moon’s feminist policies, such as female quotas in government jobs and corporate incentives for hiring more women.
Young men’s perception of equal opportunity and social equity further deteriorated under the Moon administration. Support for the then-ruling DP began to crack as Moon doggedly insisted on the appointment of Cho Kuk, a former professor of law, as justice minister in late 2019. They bristled at the new minister’s callous defense of the fact that he employed his personal ties to facilitate his daughter’s academic and career progress. Cho resigned after a month.
A deadly blow landed on the Moon administration with the revelation that Cho’s successor, Choo Mi-ae, had prodded military officers to grant her son special treatment in the military. It was another manifestation of the way the elite cut corners, made especially sensitive because any issue surrounding conscription is a collective pressure point for South Korean males. Since the supposedly liberal regime promised to reform the judiciary and tighten the noose on corruption of the top brass, its hypocrisy tasted more bitter. Lee Jae-myung, the DP leader, condemned these scandals as “one of the fundamental problems” that made “people turn away from our party.”
In addition, outrage erupted over the impossibility of buying a home. During Moon’s presidency, housing prices had skyrocketed by approximately 70 percent nationwide, while more than doubling in some districts of Seoul. In a society where males are still expected to own a home as a prerequisite for marriage, young men felt the pressure especially keenly. To many, it seemed like the deck was increasingly stacked against them.
Hence, the all-too-familiar story of how the then-opposition PPP wooed young males back into their fold for the 2022 presidential election. Yoon won against Lee by embracing anti-feminist policy and swearing to improve military lifestyles and conscription wages. As a result, voting patterns showed a stark gender divide among young South Koreans: 58.7 of men under 30 voted for Yoon, while 58 percent of women under 30 voted for Lee.
Today, as Yoon’s impeachment draws near, political allegiance and coalitions have hardened along the gender divide once again. As Hankook Ilbo, a South Korean newspaper, observed, young males are back to supporting the PPP, as they feel like they are more at a disadvantage than their female counterparts, and the DP hardly speaks for their feelings. “They find it hard to have to condone another atmosphere where females will be wielding power,” a sociologist told Hankook Ilbo.
If this is the reason most males are lukewarm about bringing Yoon to justice and rallying behind the PPP, there are also the alt-right young males, who have taken an intense personal liking to Yoon. For the past decade, barring a few occasions where the alt-right groups have committed heinous behaviors – binge-eating in front of the bereaved families of the Sewol victims, who were fasting to demand fair investigations into the tragedy, or detonating an explosive against labor unionists – they have largely been a gaggle of terminally online fascists.
Borrowing a description from Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s biggest conservative daily, they are “unexceptional men” made up of “accumulation of a sense of deprivation,” raging against society where competent females refuse to date them. They praise historically “macho” figures, especially South Korea’s military dictators in the past. They were drawn to Yoon and the idea of martial law, a practice inherently brutal and patriarchal in its imposition of force and order.
The problem is that, unlike in 2017, when their male peers shunned and ostracized them by rooting for Park’s impeachment, the alt-right is now being egged on by fellow conservatives, the PPP, and Yoon himself. Before his arrest, Yoon personally thanked them for protecting him and praised their “smart” speeches. For the conservative politicians, the alt-right groups are the ideal puppets in constructing a fictive narrative where young men decided to take things into their own hands to oppose the DP taking over the government.
The alt-right also found a common outlet through which to vindicate their grievances and assert their political visibility. They are reinforcing their collective delusion and organizing meetups through far-right YouTube channels. Their fringe status and sense of isolation have finally been transformed into a sense of community that for the first time is manifesting outside of online platforms. They have stood at the vanguard in public, braving clashes with the police and prison time. Following the court riots on January 17, the nation is on edge yet again, as the police have found online trails of an alt-right plan to ravage the Constitutional Court.