Thread on the South Korean Right's crushing legislative defeat yesterday. This is the third defeat in a row, each getting worse. I wrote 16 mos. ago about the right's implosion in the @dongamedia: http://www.donga.com/news/article/all/20181229/93483924/1 & http://www.donga.com/news/article/all/20190126/93867588/1. (Scroll down for the English) /1

I think that analysis still holds up. A quick summary:

1. The SK right needs to get over Park Geun-Hye. More specifically, it needs to accepts that she: A) was in fact corrupt and checked-out from much of her own presidency; B) was removed legally and constitutionally; and C) /2

probably deserved to be impeached, as Choi Soon-Sil had become a weird shadow POTROK. If all this seems obvious, it is not. The conspiracies on the right here over PGH's impeachment are downright strangelovian. All sorts of normal conservatives - not just the evangelical /3

righties who protest everything Moon does - tell me that Park was overthrown in a legal coup by the SK left in cahoots with North Korea. This is bananas. The Park-samo are destroying the right's electability by making it look like they can't move on. That's why the party name /4

keeps getting changed. Too much of the right here can't get over 2017, and the rest of the country thinks it's ridiculous.

2. The right needs a platform beyond anti-communism. A tough line on North Korea is an important & legitimate plank. There is far too much anti-Japanese- /5

anti-American fantasy on the left here about North Korea and not nearly enough recognition about just how horrific the DPRK really is: https://www.michaelkirby.com.au/content/report-united-nations-commission-inquiry-dprk-north-korea-released-geneva. It is great, for example, that @Thaeyongho got elected. But the right needs more than that. And no one can really /6

figure out what that is: more chaebol, more cronyism, more mercantilism, more 'Korea, Inc.' with crazy work hours and cram schools? Bleh. S Koreans may disagree with the social democracy of the center-left Democratic Party, but at least they know what the party stands for. The /7

right is just adrift with little to say about contemporary issues like 'Hell Chosun,' the crashing birth rate, poor air quality, and so on. At least the Moon government is sorta trying on this stuff.

3. So the right is off to the wilderness where it really needs to refashion /8

itself. I see two possible models of re-incarnation: neoliberal or trumpian-populist. Almost all of SK's political parties are deeply statist-mercantilist. As a result, SK is very expensive for consumers; household debt is very high. There is ideological space here to be /9

centrist, small(er) state party like the Free Democrats of Germany. But no one really like libertarianism. Voters like the state to do stuff for them, so my guess is the right will go populist instead, which is the trend of the OECD right these days. The SK right's 2017 /10

presidential candidate already previewed this possibility by calling himself the 'Donald Trump of Korea.' He pulled the right back from single-digit polling and forestalled implosion back then. I bet that is a tempting track in the future. /11