The Fantasy of Annihilation

Let there be no misunderstanding: the Democratic Party won. It took most of the metropolitan and provincial governorships, and among voters in their forties and fifties it was overwhelming.¹ Seen nationally, this was an unambiguous victory.

And yet what lodged in my eye that night was not the dozen-plus offices the DP took, but the one it gave up. Seoul. Why did a single loss shake me so?

The reason is simple. That one place put a hole in my belief. I could easily have patched it over: a squeaker of 0.6 percentage points; a reversal manufactured by Gangnam’s late count; nothing more than a rerun of Oh Se-hoon versus Han Myeong-sook in 2010. All of those explanations, in fact, are true.

But I decided not to cover it up that way. Having resolved to face the uncomfortable truths head-on, the first thing I had to doubt was not the other side. It was my own relief.

The first thing to give way was a word: “turning far right.”

For some time I had been saying that young men in their twenties and thirties had turned far right. Out of deprivation, I said. That young people anxious about jobs, housing, and the future were being pushed to the right edge was, I said, a worldwide phenomenon. The diagnosis was plausible, and above all it was comfortable.

Then I looked at the numbers, and a contradiction jumped out. In these local elections, PPP support among men in their twenties and under was 55.8 percent. In the same election four years earlier, it had been 65.1. Men in their thirties had slid from 58.2 to 48.6.³ Radicalization should intensify. Yet at the ballot box, their conservative consolidation had, if anything, weakened.

Faced with this contradiction, I had to admit that my word had been lazy. I had been packing two different things into a single term. One is a broad, shallow layer — cohesive but not ideological, a majority simply tilted against the Democratic Party. The other is a narrow, deep layer — a genuinely anti-system minority that storms courthouses and is certain the election was stolen.

The real danger was the latter. Yet by branding the whole of it “far right,” I was blurring the very core I should have feared. Demonizing the majority feels like widening your field of view; in fact, it erases the outline of the true threat.

The second thing to collapse was my certainty about the cause.

I believed deprivation was the cause. Then data from other countries pressed an inconvenient fact on me. The youth gender gap was opening not along the axis of economics but along the axis of culture and identity.¹⁰ The decisive point is this — young women who endured the same economic deprivation went the opposite way. They went left.

If poverty pushes people to the right, poor young women should have gone right too. They did not. Then what pulled the trigger was not deprivation itself, but something that translated that deprivation into “a matter of gender.” Deprivation was not the cause; it was the alibi. A comfortable, easy-listening alibi that drapes something simple over a complicated reality.

And one colder fact. In this phenomenon, Korea is not a laggard but the country furthest ahead. As young American men’s support for Trump climbs from 41 to 56 percent, as one in four young German men votes for a far-right party — the curve the West is only now ascending, Korea crested years ago and has passed into the stage of differentiation. We are the leading indicator. The canary sang first in our shaft of the mine.

Now for the heart of it. The question itself.

To find the answer, I had to go back to 2022. And there I discovered I had gotten the first fact wrong. Yoon Suk-yeol was not elected on a mandate for dictatorship. He won by the narrowest margin in Korean constitutional history: 0.73 percentage points.⁶ What those votes actually were was fury at runaway housing prices, a felt collapse of fairness, and above all a vote of refusal — anyone but Lee Jae-myung.

Martial law was a clause that appeared nowhere in that contract. On the night of December 3, many of the people who had voted for him were, in fact, aghast. So my question — how could they vote again for the party that staged an insurrection — stood on a false premise: that they had knowingly bought the insurrection in the first place. They never had.

Then what is in the mind that still marks that party’s box after martial law? Days of thinking brought me to this: people vote less by what they support than by what they loathe. If the other camp in power frightens you more than your own camp’s sins, you hold your nose and vote. Oh Se-hoon’s closing message was precisely that: “the last bulwark against a colossal ruling party.” For the voter in Gangnam, that ballot was not a ratification of insurrection; it was about property taxes, redevelopment, and a check on power.

What is more, people do not treat democracy as a single issue. Political scientists have confirmed the same finding in country after country: the great majority of voters place violations of democratic norms on the same scale as their policy interests and their identity, and weigh them together. The “democracy-defending voter” who crosses camp lines over a norm violation alone is always a minority. And local elections make that decoupling easiest of all. “I am choosing someone to run the city, not ratifying an insurrection.” Time erases the shock, and the ordinary gravity of partisanship returns.

Here I had to be most honest with myself. It is not that I did not know these mechanisms. I knew them. I simply let my anger hope that, this once, they would not operate.

Still, there was one consolation: the forties and fifties.

Men and women alike, this generation gave the Democratic Party support in the 60-to-70-percent range.¹ Ordinarily, people drift right as they age, as assets accumulate and taxes grow heavier. This generation grew wealthy and did not drift. When I thought about why, it was plain: their first-order cleavage is not the economy. This is the generation that had democratization carved into its body in the 1980s, and the generation that entered politics through Roh Moo-hyun and the candlelight protests. For them, the deepest axis is democracy versus dictatorship.

And that axis was reignited twice. Once with the impeachment of Park Geun-hye, and once with the impeachment of Yoon Suk-yeol. Two events, eight years apart, hardened into a single narrative. Give the conservative party power and it breaks democracy. We are the ones who stop it. Once is an incident; twice is a pattern; and once it becomes a pattern, it is no longer a leaning but an identity.

And so I realized I had been imagining the wrong shape for the punishment. I wanted justice billed as a lump sum — one election that would sweep them away. But justice was on an installment plan. They lost the presidency in last year’s election;⁷ they surrendered most of the governorships and the forties-and-fifties in these local elections; another installment will come due at the next general election. There is a longer invoice, too: a bond with a twenty-year maturity, redeemed as the industrialization generation — today’s elderly conservative base — passes from the world and its place is filled by a candlelight generation locked in against the PPP.

But even this consolation was a double-edged blade. By the same logic, the young men who went right today will carry that leaning into old age. That the forties and fifties form a clean, single bloc is a fact about them; there is no guarantee it will repeat in a divided younger generation. Justice is being collected. Just not at the speed I wanted — at the slow speed of generations.

And at last I stood before the hardest pill to swallow.

“They will be destroyed completely” was never a prediction. It was a wish. I had been confusing the two. And I had to face, one by one, the things that wish had been hiding.

Support is not a contract; it is an identity. Support rooted in identity has a floor — a 30 or 40 percent that will not drain away no matter what the party does. I had assumed a contract. What was there was a blood oath.

My moral hierarchy is not everyone’s hierarchy. To me, martial law is a single disqualifying offense that voids everything else. But to the majority, it is one item on the scale, weighed alongside housing prices, checks on power, and identity. The cry of “how could they vote for them again” was a projection — my hierarchy mistaken for everyone’s.

Cleavages do not vanish when a party does. Yeongnam regionalism, the cohort in their sixties and seventies, young men’s gender grievances, the interests bound up in assets and taxes: these are constants that exist regardless of the People Power Party. Break the vessel and the contents do not evaporate. A party that speaks for unresolved cleavages cannot be “completely” destroyed. For it to die, the cleavages would have to be resolved first — and they have not been.

And the thing I least wanted to see. A system capable of “completely” annihilating one camp is not the liberal democracy I mean to defend. To exterminate a political force by majority will is the death of pluralism. The same pluralism that protects me guarantees their survival too. Their survival is not the system failing; it is the system working.

Their survival is not the system failing; it is the system working.

And here a mirror turned to face me. Their certainty that the election was stolen, and my certainty that their extinction would be just — structurally, how did the two differ? Both were monopolies on morality. Both deemed a world purged of the other side righteous. This was the question that hurt most: the very shape of the certainty I hated was a shape I had come to resemble.

Only when I changed the question did another path open.

If annihilation was never a possible mechanism to begin with, then the real question is this: how do you isolate that small, hard core while winning back the ordinary people who were nearly pulled into its field — the people furious about housing and jobs, the people who held their noses and cast a ballot?

I have nothing yet that deserves to be called an answer. Only provisional thoughts, arrived at over these few days.

Separate the person from the act. The target must be specific acts — martial law, the stolen-election claims, the storming of the courthouse — not the identity called “conservative.” The moment you say “everyone who voted for that party is an accomplice to insurrection,” you shove the nose-holding voter toward the core and hand the enemy a unifying narrative as a gift. That is exactly what Hillary’s one word for the other side’s supporters — “deplorables” — accomplished.

Governing is stronger than rhetoric. Anti-democratic movements grow in the soil of institutional failure and unresolved grievance. The most durable marginalization is not a slogan; it is a government actually improving housing, jobs, and fairness until the reservoir of grievance runs dry. Conversely, when government is incompetent, the reservoir refills, and the core’s recruiting office is crowded again. Government failure is the core’s best ally.

And the most dangerous blade. Judicial punishment of the actual perpetrators is just and necessary. Without punishment there is no deterrence, and the next coup comes easier. But excess pours fuel on the core’s central narrative — “the system is persecuting us.” To manufacture martyrs is to give them a gift. Repress, and the victim narrative blows back; neglect, and it all normalizes. It is a problem of dosage, and there is no correct answer.

Finally, a warning aimed at myself. A weapon pointed at them will one day be turned on an ordinary opposition, and in the end on me. Wherever the banner of “defending democracy” tramples pluralism, democracy dies from the opposite direction. All of this is possible only in ways that limit themselves.

Annihilation has catharsis. Marginalization has none. It is merely tedious, slow, and demanding of patience. Honestly, I wanted the catharsis. What I longed for as I refreshed that screen before dawn was not a refined strategy. It was a satisfying retribution.

Annihilation has catharsis. Marginalization has none.

But patience is all that is possible. Isolate the core with judicial precision; win back the periphery with the fruits of governing; and cut away, ourselves, any excess that would manufacture martyrs along the way. And buy time — while the generational bond runs toward maturity, playing no move that would bring us down by our own hand.

Looking back, what I actually did over these few days was not analyze an enemy. I examined the structure of my anger, the true identity of my prediction. Anyone can see the enemy’s wickedness. What is rare is to see the blind spot in one’s own conviction. I began by vowing to face the uncomfortable truths head-on. But the most uncomfortable truth turned out to be not about them. It was about me.

In what kind of country do I want my children to live? One where even the people I hate survive, unannihilated — or one where a majority’s fury can erase a political force? It galls me, but I choose the former. Because the latter’s blade would, in the end, be pointed at my children too.

Day was breaking. The numbers on the screen still unsettled me. But the question that had held me — how could they vote for them again — was gone. In the place where the wrong question had stood, a far harder and more honest one had moved in. For one dawn, that was enough.