WTF Just Happened In South Korea?

There was an attempt at a military dictatorship in South Korea in which the president of South Korea issued a command for martial law. It was reversed hours later, but what exactly was going on there? 

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol is a member of a party that controls the presidency but is in the minority in the actual parliament of the country. He claimed the majority in the parliament (a party called the Democratic Party in South Korea) is basically a tool of the North Koreans, citing them to be crypto-communists preventing the functioning of the government. 

Essentially, the Democratic Party of South Korea, which represents a large majority in the National Assembly, has been threatening and attempting to impeach the state prosecutors who are looking into the Democratic Party leadership. The prosecutors were supposed to be looking into the family of the president of South Korea, and they had apparently decided to exonerate the president’s wife. Meanwhile, the same prosecutors were additionally looking into the leadership of the Democratic Party regarding corruption charges. In turn, the Democratic Party attempted to impeach these prosecutors. 

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So, the South Korean president looked at the opposition party (which controls the National Assembly) and contended they were attempting to clean out the prosecutorial part of the government in order to protect themselves or weaponize it against him. Therefore, he would declare martial law. 

The South Korean parliament voted unanimously to defy the country’s president and lift his martial law declaration.  

But there’s something deeper happening here. 

This sort of constitutional crisis is now taking place in a variety of countries. It’s happening in Israel, where there are fights between the prosecutorial wing of the government and the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s happening in Hungary, where they’ve been fighting over state prosecutors. It’s happening in Brazil, where Lula da Silva, the authoritarian Left-wing leader of the country, is now attempting to militarize the justice system against Jair Bolsonaro, his predecessor. And, of course, there are shades of this in the United States. 

Why, exactly, is all this happening right now? 

To understand that, we must understand the role of the prosecutorial system in democratic republics, because that has changed over time. And this has implications, by the way, for everything, up to and including the Hunter Biden pardon and the Biden DOJ weaponizing itself against Donald Trump.

Democratic republics typically rely on checks and balances to prevent the government from engaging in authoritarianism; that is the basis of the United States Constitution. The House and the Senate check one another. Both are checked by the presidency, and all three of those bodies are checked by the judiciary and vice versa. 

Traditionally, one of the checks and balances to avoid tyranny was impeachment. If you didn’t like members of the government or you suspected that members of the government were corrupt, a bipartisan majority would work to oust those corrupt officials. 

This is obviously problematic when it comes to getting rid of corrupt officials because if the corrupt official happens to be a member of your party, then you are very unlikely to vote for their impeachment. 

In Democratic republics, the question of how to police corruption is a very real question if there is a corrupt public official. The United States Constitution says that person is impeached in the House, and then there is a full trial in the Senate. 

When the Constitution was designed, Alexander Hamilton and the rest of the Founding Fathers believed the Senate would be the most objective body. United States senators were not appointed by party or by public approval. They were appointed by the state legislatures, and they served six-year terms. The goal was for them to be more independent of the public passions than the House.

The judiciary could not do it because the judiciary could be hijacked. But the Senate was sort of half political: answerable but also indirectly answerable to the public — and thus more insulated from public pressure.

Hamilton pointed out that setting up a separate impeachment court (which we might now call the DOJ) wouldn’t actually solve the problem because that, too, could be politicized.

The problem is that over time, in a wide variety of countries, as democratic republics and their checks and balances have transitioned into administrative bureaucracies in which enormous power is centralized in the executive branch, checks and balances have atrophied until Donald Trump was impeached twice. The impeachment power was almost never used by the Congress of the United States, for example.

We made a decision at the outset of the 20th century that was echoed in other burgeoning democracies that law enforcement checking corruption was not to be done by the elected bodies of government. Instead, it was outsourced to so-called independent branches of government.

In the United States, that is the Department of Justice; in South Korea, it is the state prosecutor’s office; in Brazil, the prosecutors, the police, the judiciary; in Israel, the attorney general, and so forth.

There is a problem that happens here, and this is a problem with the administrative state. The problem is that state prosecutors can also be corrupted by politics, as we have seen in the United States. And then the solution isn’t to change the people in government anymore, because these are independent branches, and they’re unelected. It’s not a matter of replacing some people with other people.

If you fire some people, that’s considered interference with the magical “objective branch.” If you leave people in place and they target your political opponents, it’s weaponization.

That’s what leads to constitutional crises. Once the job of policing corruption from the elected branches of government — like the Senate of the United States or the National Assembly in South Korea — is outsourced to state prosecutors, sooner or later, state prosecutors will attempt to go after the wrong people, the legislature after state prosecutors, or the president after state prosecutors, in order to prevent weaponization.

This is the problem with sending up fake “objective legal enforcement” bodies. It creates constitutional crises because the only solution to a politicized law enforcement branch is to either overthrow the government for interfering with the system, which is what the president of South Korea attempted to do, or to call for the overthrow of the government for weaponizing the system.

Constitutional crises are the result of supposedly untouchable, nonpartisan institutions that can either be weaponized or interfered with.

This is happening across the West. It’s a major, major problem. It’s the problem with administrative governments. It’s a major problem in regards to the idea that it is the job of impartial legal bodies to police corruption.

So democracies are throwing themselves into crisis, specifically over this.

Let’s say that you are in the United States and you are really, really angry that Donald Trump became president in 2016. What do you do? You could try to impeach him, but it will probably fail if you don’t have the votes because it’ll break down along strictly partisan lines. 

What do you do instead? You rely on the DOJ; you rely on the FBI. You weaponize those institutions against Trump. And that prompts Trump, if he becomes president, to clean out those institutions, in which case he will be accused of weaponizing those institutions. And so the constitutional crisis just continues to roll on, all because this sort of bipartisan consensus around impeaching presidents who are guilty of crimes has gone away in the United States. 

You could say it died during the Clinton era. And the United States is now feeling the aftereffects. 

The same is true in Israel. In Israel, the attorney general’s office has put Benjamin Netanyahu under three separate prosecutions; all of them appear to be somewhat specious. The goal is obviously political. Netanyahu has been in power for some 14 of the last 15 years in Israel. He’s a masterful Machiavellian politician, just in pure, raw talent terms. And so the attorney general’s office has been weaponized against him, as claims Netanyahu, which I think is largely correct in a wide variety of cases. 

But every time he tries to mess with the prosecution, he’s accused of tampering with democracy.

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Once these institutions are set up as the final arbiter of guilt and innocence, then anyone who tampers with them on either side is then considered a threat to democracy, even if the person who is actually militarizing law enforcement is the person who is in power.

In Brazil, the law enforcement mechanisms have been weaponized by Lula da Silva against Jair Bolsonaro. That means as Lula is cleaning out the judiciary institutions, he’s being lauded as someone upholding the norms of democracy while he, at the same time, engages in widespread censorship. Instead of corruption being seen as a political issue to be answered by the political branches and eventually the people, because it’s been outsourced to law enforcement, the law enforcement branch can be routinely corrupted.

Not all that long ago Lula himself had been banned from running because of his own corruption convictions. Then, in 2021, a Left-wing Supreme Court judge annulled his corruption convictions and allowed him to run again. After he ran and won, the Brazilian police formally accused former President Bolsonaro and his aides of an alleged 2022 coup attempt. That happened just last week.

Bolsonaro has said he would fight the case. Meanwhile, Lula is openly consolidating power in the executive branch in wildly anti-democratic ways. But he has been praised by many members of the media as an anti-authoritarian politician. Yet the reality is that Lula has been a close ally of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, who’s been a close ally of the Cuban regime. In fact, it’s rare to find some sort of authoritarian regime that Lula doesn’t like. From China to Nicaragua, from Iran to Russia, he has cozied up to authoritarians everywhere. But because he’s a Left-wing authoritarian, the perception is that he’s not really an authoritarian, even if he engages in widespread censorship.

This is what happens when democratic republics delegate the power to check political opposition to a supposedly objective, nonpartisan branch of government. It’s not real. It doesn’t work. Administrative states do not work for precisely this reason because they’re never dispassionate, ever.

It’s true in a wide variety of countries, from South Korea to Israel to Hungary to Brazil.

It’s always a problem.

Again, all of this breakdown is happening because so many people across so many Westernized countries have decided they no longer trust the mechanisms of checks and balances of the democratic republic and, instead, are going to delegate all power to these impartial institutions.

Then, those institutions break down.

And then, the entire country starts to break down.