I promised a Justice Party thread, so here it comes.

The peak of the progressive parties in S Korea was back in 2000, when the Democratic Labor Party had 10 seats in the National Assembly. Since then, it's been a steady downhill for progressive politics.

S Korea democratized in 1987, but liberal democracy didn't quite settle in until mid-1990s. The DLP was a major step forward, because previously, all labor movement in S Korea was slandered as being communist sympathizers and N Korean spies.

DLP was a party based on the Democratic Labor Union. It was an exemplary, old-school lefty movement: a labor union that also found solidarity with farmers. It went onto win 10 seats in the Nat'l Assembly and 22 local official positions around late 90s-early 2000s.

It also gave birth to some bad-ass protest music in the 1990s. Here's a sample.

"Even if I live just one day, I wish to live like a human ... Oh our love the democratic labor union, the love we achieved through struggle!"

By early 2000s, it looked like the DLP might evolve into a meaningful progressive political force, shoring up the left flank of the center-left Democratic Party.

Then in 2011, it all went to shit. Some of it was not their fault, but it mostly was their fault.

Early 2010s was a nadir for left and center-left politics in S Korea. Park Geun-hye admin was in full force and the conservatives were going full fascist.

By then, the DLP was called the United Progressive Party. And the UPP dumb shits were planning an armed mutiny.

Literally a faction within the UPP was planning to bomb power plants and other critical facilities. The Park admin seized this opportunity to tar all liberals as communist terrorists. They also petitioned the Constitutional Court to disband the UPP, and won.

After the UPP brand became toxic, the remaining (non-terrorist) elements picked up the pieces and founded the Justice Party in 2012. When the PGH admin started cracking in 2016, the JP also looked like it was gaining steam by winning 6 seats in the National Assembly.

By then, JP lost all connection to the labor unions. DLP of 2000s used to be the party of unions and farmers. Justice Party of 2010s was not that, at all - it was a party of urban hipsters who pretended to care about LGBT rights and feminism but didn't work for any of them.

In the 2020 Assembly election, Justice Party was like having a "woke party" that campaigned exclusively on Twitter. No connection to the real world, no actual groundwork to cultivate a local base, just a series of tweets and memes that went viral once in a while. Naive and dumb.

I can get into the more granular details of how the Justice Party (and Sim Sang-jeong in particular) fucked themselves over while pursuing petty gains by leeching off the Democratic Party, but I'll refrain because it gets rather technical.

I'll just say this much: half of my extended family went to prison during the dictatorship era bc they were in labor unions. I can sing all of the protest songs by heart, and I can tell you legendary stories of the democratization movement.

And I fucking hate the Justice Party.

Justice Party signing up as one of its candidates a "conversion therapist" who claimed to cure people of the gay is totally a thing that happened. https://twitter.com/AdamOculporate/status/1250649576110985217?s=19