A bit of a meta-point about Korea watching -

As we could see from S Korea's Assembly election, there is a sea change in the people who are forming the mainstream of S Korea. But the English language media is slow to catch up to this fact.

S Korea's Cold War generation is fading. Few S Koreans live with an existential dread about a N Korean takeover. The new mainstream is people in their 30s and 40s, those who never saw S Korea in terms of war and poverty. They have a fundamentally different outlook of the world.

The "Korea Watchers" - let's define this as the group of people who talk about Korea in English - are being slow to sync to the outlook of this new mainstream. To offer a few reasons why this is:

- Path dependency. Simply being unaware of the new reality.

- Big portion of "Korea Watchers" are natsec / N Korea watchers who live in the permanent Cold War mindset

- Another big portion of "Korea Watchers" are 2nd gen Kor Ams who get their view of Korea from their Boomer parents

- Still another big portion of "Korea Watchers" are English-fluent Koreans whose family was rich enough to send them to an extended period of study in US

-> All these factors are combining to create a corpus of weirdly tone-deaf analysis of S Korea right now.

Just to give an example, I've been getting lots of questions from young 2nd gen Korean Ams about the Assembly elections - specifically, whether the elections were rigged. This is such a batshit crazy theory that even S Korean conservatives officially disavowed it. But...

... it's very popular in S Korea's far-right Youtube circuit! The first gen Boomer Korean Ams are watching this shit and telling their children this is happening back in Korea. It all feeds into the received wisdom that Moon Jae-in is a secret commie driving S Korea into a ditch.

Meanwhile, Moon and the Democrats won 4 nat'l elections in a row and won more seats in the legislature than the dictators who held elections at a gunpoint. The tectonic shift is obvious, but you would never know it from reading about S Korea in English.

A weird consequence of this trend is that K-pop / K-drama experts are becoming the class of Korea Watchers who often end up having the clearest view of S Korea, because they are the only Korea Watchers who actually interact with younger Koreans and see thru their perspective.

I would expect this phase to pass as the new mainstream of S Korea eventually joins the Korea Watchers group. But for now, we are living through a period of a strange disconnect, and I see it in every direction. /end