SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
authoritarianism
South Koreans Must Keep Up Our Courage Against Anti-Democratic Forces
The movement continues to end Yoon Suk Yeol’s legacy of betrayal and dismantlement of Korea’s sovereignty.
Jan 06, 2025
For more than 44 hours Koreans have braved freezing snowstorms to demand the arrest of the elusive Yoon Suk Yeol, who has barricaded himself inside his official residence in defiance of constitutional and legal authority. Yoon, extolled by Washington as a “champion of democracy,” has vanished from public view behind hastily erected barricades manned by security and military personnel while ignoring repeated summons from both the anti-corruption and prosecution services.
Capping a monthlong standoff with the National Assembly and the Korean public over his brazen attempted coup, Washington’s “perfect partner” has spent the past week deploying the armed military and security services at his disposal to physically prevent police from serving him with an arrest warrant for insurrectionism and abuse of authority. Investigators from the Corruption Investigation Office attempting to execute the warrant—the first against a sitting president—were forced to withdraw from the presidential compound after a five-hour standoff with the over 200 armed men deployed by Yoon.
This unprecedented drama began unfolding on the night of December 3, 2024. Amid over 250 days of intentionally destabilizing U.S.-led war games and months of massive citizen protests demanding his resignation, the deeply unpopular president put his nation under martial law for the first time since 1979, dispatching armed troops with the orders to “shoot to kill” if necessary to surround the National Assembly and prevent lawmakers from convening to rescind the order.
How can the world support Korea’s quest for democracy, peace, and true sovereignty?
By the following night, some 2 million Koreans bearing light sticks, candles, and beacons formed a luminous sea around the National Assembly to demand the impeachment of Yoon Suk Yeol, while lawmakers clambered over fences and security barriers to gain access to the chambers. With a vote of 204 to 85, which included 12 lawmakers from the ruling People’s Power Party (PPP), the National Assembly impeached Yoon, with Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung declaring, “The people have proved that they are the owners of this country.”
While the Constitutional Court has 180 days to render a judgment on whether the impeachment motion is constitutional, Yoon’s rogue insurrectionism and contemptuous defiance of the rule of law is continuing, escalating tensions and instability.
Yoon’s motivation for his failed insurrection lies in the ongoing crisis of legitimacy facing his puppet government, which has eagerly acquiesced to every demand made by its American and Japanese “allies” while making a hollow mockery of Korean self-determination and ignoring the interests of the nation he swore to defend. Since assuming power in 2022 after winning the presidency by a razor-thin margin of 0.7%, Yoon has actively worked to undermine the very basis of Korean independence and democracy back to its roots during the brutal period of Japanese colonization in WWII.
Moreover, Washington’s unquenchable geopolitical ambitions, couched behind its so-called “ironclad commitment to Korea,” mandates the continuation of its policy of preferring right-wing governments at the expense of Korea’s sovereignty. This has overtly empowered and legitimized Yoon’s autocratic pursuit of power against the interests of the Korean people.
Thus, Yoon—who represented his country by sycophantically singing “American Pie” during a state dinner at the White House—has dutifully promoted the U.S.-led trilateral “Axis of War”, facilitating non-stop U.S.-led war games, and escalating tensions with Pyongyang while persecuting his domestic critics as “communists” and “anti-state forces.” His ongoing rogue behavior of defiance of the rule of law is directly related to the strong support he has received from Washington as “Biden’s man” in Seoul.
With the president suspended from power, what’s next for Korea’s “Revolution of Lights”? How can the world support Korea’s quest for democracy, peace, and true sovereignty? Demand accountability for Yoon’s legacy of authoritarianism, his continuing assault on democracy and the rule of law, and his betrayal of Korean sovereignty in service of Washington’s geopolitical ambitions. Call for a final end to Washington’s shameful history of subverting South Korean politics by abetting dangerous far-right forces that take Korea’s democracy and sovereignty hostage.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Sanders Lays Out Plan to Fight Oligarchy as Wealth of Top Billionaires Passes $10 Trillion
"If there was ever a moment when progressives needed to communicate our vision to the people of our country, this is that time," wrote Sen. Bernie Sanders. "Despair is not an option."
Dec 31, 2024
A Bloomberganalysis of billionaire wealth published Tuesday found that the combined fortunes of the 500 richest people on the planet surpassed $10 trillion this year, a finding that came shortly after U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders issued an urgent call to action to prevent the emergence of "an oligarchic and authoritarian society."
The new analysis notes that the world's top 500 billionaires "got vastly richer" this year with the help of "an indomitable rally in U.S. technology stocks."
Just eight billionaires—Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin—added more than $600 billion to their collective wealth in 2024 and accounted for 43% of the $1.5 trillion increase in net worth among the world's 500 richest people, according to Bloomberg.
"But it was Musk—the so-called 'first buddy' of President-elect Donald Trump after unprecedented support for his reelection campaign—who dominated the world's wealthiest in 2024," Bloomberg observed, adding that Trump himself also saw his fortune surge to a record high this year, "boosted by the performance of his majority stake in Trump Media & Technology Group Corp."
Musk's use of his enormous fortune to influence the U.S. political system—including via his purchase of one of the world's largest social media platforms and donations to Trump's 2024 campaign—amplified existing concerns about the corrosive impact of massive wealth concentration on democracy.
And wealth inequality in the U.S. could soon get worse, with Trump and the incoming Republican-controlled Congress set to pursue another round of tax cuts for the ultra-rich and large corporations.
"They do not believe in democracy—the right of ordinary people to control their own futures. They firmly believe that the rich and powerful should determine the future."
In an email to supporters on Monday, Sanders (I-Vt.) called the rapid shift toward oligarchy in the U.S. "the defining issue of our time," warning that billionaires have come to increasingly dominate not only "our economic life, but the information we consume and our politics as well."
"A manifestation of the current moment is the rise of Elon Musk, and all that he stands for," Sanders wrote, pointing to Musk's outsize influence on the 2024 election and his key role in shaping Trump's billionaire-dominated Cabinet.
"But it's not just Musk. Billionaire owners of two major newspapers overrode their editorial boards' decisions to endorse Kamala Harris, while many others are kissing Trump's ring by making large donations to his inauguration committee slush fund," the senator continued. "They do not believe in democracy—the right of ordinary people to control their own futures. They firmly believe that the rich and powerful should determine the future."
Progressives, Sanders wrote, have a "radically different vision," one that prioritizes "an economic system based on the principles of justice," "a vibrant democracy based on one person, one vote," and making "healthcare a human right."
"Even though we are not going to succeed in achieving that vision in the immediate future with Trump as president and Republicans controlling Congress, it is important that vision be maintained and we continue to fight for it," wrote Sanders.
Since Trump's victory in the 2024 election, Sanders has focused heavily on the need to organize the working class to combat the threat posed by Musk and other far-right billionaires who have amassed obscene wealth and political power.
In his email on Monday, the senator said he intends to "travel, organize, hold events, and create content that reaches people where they are" in the coming weeks as part of the "struggle to determine where we go from here."
"Will this effort be easy?" asked Sanders. "No, of course it will not. Can it be done? We have no choice. If there was ever a moment when progressives needed to communicate our vision to the people of our country, this is that time. Despair is not an option. We are fighting not only for ourselves. We are fighting for our kids and future generations, and for the well-being of the planet."
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Wrath and Rage of Trump's America
If there is a lesson to draw from the outcome of the 2024 general election, short of giving up on politics, it is the need to cultivate a thicker, stronger democratic character.
Dec 30, 2024
A mob overruns the U.S. Capitol, prompted by the country’s outgoing and now re-elected president. A lone gunman vents his wrath by assassinating health-insurance CEO Brian Thompson and is cheered on social media. These are two among many examples of the eruption of political violence.
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren allowed that the shooting of Thompson was a “visceral response” to “vile practices” in the country’s health-care system, a response that should be taken as a “warning” not to push people too far. “Violence is never the answer,” she added, “never a justification for murder.” The immorality of murder had to be stated. It could not be taken for granted.
Rage is unleashed among us. Unrestrained anger and furious violence mark our troubled times and signal the broken state of the body politic. This is not history’s first outburst of political rage; thus, it is important for us to recognize the present frenzy for what it is.
What is this scourge?
Rage is raw emotion—a toxic mixture of frustration, fear, anger, and hatred that can trigger uninhibited violence. Fury suppresses reason while focusing narrowly on targets of hatred. More than just an individual aberration, it is a cultural phenomenon, a socio-political breach of existent norms and constraints, the vehicle of demagoguery, the engine of war propaganda, the recourse of political movements that have renounced nonviolence. Once unleashed, fury seeks vengeance by mayhem and annihilation.
Are we about to succumb collectively to a culture of hatred as we incline toward authoritarianism? Can we find a way out of these dark times, out of this neurotic attachment to the hate-driven construction of a scapegoat enemy?
Samuel Wells, in his 2023 essay entitled “The Emotion Standing in the Way of Peace,” depicts vividly the deadly dynamic of rage. In the exhilarating moment of an “intoxication of indignant furor,” when “a red mist descends,” we lose “all rational faculties.” All sense of restraint is abandoned in “our rampaging quest for destruction and vengeance.” We tell ourselves that destroying everything in our path will restore justice. Nuance is absent from this justificative story; the raw narrative reduces to a “bellicose roar”—a scream to resolve every wrong by obliterating an enemy.
Rage carries a mythic charge of avenging injustice. Erinyes were the avenging goddesses in ancient Greece, the personification of righteous justice, known variously as the Furies. Their enduring spirit is a formative expression of rage. “Among all the gods, monsters, and spirits,” Mike Greenburg observes, these goddesses of the dark realm “with their particularly harsh view of justice” were “among the most terrifying.” Their calling was to hunt, punish, and torment wrongdoers until they died in agony and then to continue tormenting them in the afterlife. Orestes, pursued for the crime of matricide, could be saved from the Furies and exonerated only by the intervention of Athena who ordered his trial by a panel of twelve Athenian citizens. The Furies were tempered by a nascent democratic act.
Yet, democracy itself is victim to rage when anger, stoked by political elites, becomes an omnipresent force of politics. Political tolerance, on which democratic society is premised, succumbs to a profound antagonism between “us” and “them.” Rage undercuts the citizenry’s commitment to democratic norms and values (See Steven W. Webster, American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics. Cambridge University Press, 2020; and also Michael A. Milburn and Sheree D. Conrad, Raised to Rage: The Politics of Anger and the Roots of Authoritarianism. MIT Press, 2016).
The mythic force of righteous rage corrupts the pursuit of justice by resorting to means that pervert professed ends. The rhetoric of vengeance whips up an authoritarian insolence. Democratic values are debased, and democratic practices are diminished. Deliberation is silenced. Justice is defiled. The common good is sacrificed. Democratic polity is lost. Violence prevails, except by divine intervention, deus ex machina.
What explains this dysfunction?
The present demagogic moment reflects and exacerbates deep tensions created by economic displacement, demographic shift, and mass migration in a context of divisive new media that breed disinformation and construct opinion silos. The country’s loss of its imperial grip on world order is mirrored domestically in the destabilization of its timeworn racial hierarchy. Faith in the system is stretched to the breaking point. Tearing down a failing establishment feels right to the disaffected public that this November returned an authoritarian demagogue to the White House. Rage is the noxious product of systemic insecurity.
Wrath now dominates American politics. That has not always been the case, nor did it come about suddenly in the present instance. The country gradually changed over decades, argues anthropologist Peter Wood (Wrath: America Enraged, Encounter Books, 2021), from a nation that preferred self-control to one that relies on anger to wield political power. But to assume a national preference for self-control, Wood must overlook a history of national rage that includes, for example, the anticommunist McCarthyism of the late 1940s and the 1950s, the preceding Red Scare of 1917-1920, and multiple outbreaks of Ku Klux Klan domestic terrorism in the 1860s, 1920s-30s, and 1950s-1960s against Black Americans and other minorities. Unfortunately, Wood’s desire to celebrate American Greatness requires him to overlook these malign features of U.S. history.
Wood tells his story of civility’s current decline from the perspective of a scholar who sees the threat of righteous anger as emanating from the political left rather than the right. These are the barbarians, he believes, who use anger to acquire power and pervert American culture. Wood sees himself as a higher-education watchdog because the university is the point of origin, he maintains, for nearly all the bad ideas (such as critical race theory, White racism, climate alarmism, and gun control) that blight contemporary American culture. Wrath is a dangerous weapon of resistance, but in Wood’s view it is justified to save the country and its civilization from the ostentatious anger of progressive ideologues. They are the malignant force that provokes the justified wrath of ordinary Americans who have been denied “a legitimate voice in their own government” (p. vii). Echoing the interwar “conservative revolutionaries” who paved the way for fascism in 1930’s Europe, Wood stands for the defeat, and indeed the eradication, of progressivism in all its forms.
Here, boldly set out, is wrath’s circular raison d'être of rage on rage. Fury is acceptable in the service of the right cause, Wood insists, in response to the adversary’s perceived hostility. Those on the left, whom he accuses of taking sadistic delight in thwarting the popular will and harming the republic, deserve the wrath of the Furies. Yet, this harsh measure of justice is based on the troublesome premise of an absolute distinction between good and evil, a judgment at odds with the ethos of contingency, fallibility, deliberation, and the tolerance of a broader, more nuanced perspective that is at the heart of any meaningful democracy.
Taking the measure of social rage, sociologist Bonnie Berry observes that besides violence, per se, it encompasses “selfishness, rudeness, short-sidedness, aggression, intolerance, and narrow-mindedness.” The expression of rage, “replete with absolutisms and over-simplification,” is fraught with distortions and distractions irrelevant to addressing serious social problems. Demagoguery prompts a disenchanted public to target scapegoats based on their nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and other markers of difference. The distraction of these socially created enemies leaves the ultrapowerful in charge and unaccountable. All of this makes social rage appear bigger than it is, Berry argues. Its “vociferousness, exaggeration, loudness, and vivid imagery” is a matter of “impression management” that makes it seem “pervasive and powerful”—and thus beyond resistance (Social Rage: Emotion and Cultural Conflict, Taylor and Francis, 1999, pp. x, 13-14).
Yet, questions remain: Are we about to succumb collectively to a culture of hatred as we incline toward authoritarianism? Can we find a way out of these dark times, out of this neurotic attachment to the hate-driven construction of a scapegoat enemy?
The country’s thin veneer of democracy has not held up well to the surge of tyranny’s rage, a rage that has intensified.
Such questions are better raised than answered by Willard Gaylin with his focus on individual psychosis and paranoia, but he does point to social conditions, economic factors, and religious and political institutions that cultivate and exploit rage more broadly. The great danger, Gaylin concludes, lies with those who “cynically manipulate and exploit” the misery of people suffering “a sense of deprivation,” agitators who “organize and encourage hatred for their political ends” (Hatred: The Psychological Dissent into Violence, Public Affairs, 2003, pp. 215-15, 239-40, 246-7).
Rage over a deep sense of loss can be turned inward when a people no longer recognize one another as such, when they cannot empathize across differences and divisions, do not identify with the Other, and choose to render diversities in dehumanizing and demonizing terms to the point of losing sight of a shared humanity.
Domestic rage is akin to rage in international relations when the image of the enemy within reflects the projected image of the foreign enemy as the savage, the barbarian, the cause of trouble. The ancient Greeks protected their own polities from civil war by dedicating temples and altars to the Furies, which meant rage in hard times was redirected toward foreign enemies. Outsiders took on the bestial form that placed them beyond empathy. Yet, what may have preserved civility and contained rage in the ancient city-state does not hold in a disparate republic of over 300 million, where insiders are more easily marked as outsiders. As Rupert Brodersen suggests, resentment of the estranged Other produces rage without moral restraint or regard—indeed, a sense of moral imperative in an aggressor’s pursuit of justice, which can “plunge entire communities into chaos” when the target of rage is viewed as “undeserving of moral consideration” (Emotional Motives in International Relations: Rage, Rancour and Revenge, Routledge, 2018, pp. 4-7, 37-40). A baseless internet rumor that Haitian immigrants “are eating the dogs … eating the cats … eating the pets” of Springfield, Ohio residents, repeated by Donald Trump in a presidential debate witnessed by 67 million viewers, was an unprompted lie, observed Politifact, that reinforced negative stereotypes and incited dozens of bomb threats, “stigmatizing the town and its residents in the name of campaign rage.”
Where does that leave us?
On the one hand, the present rage promotes authoritarian oligarchy over democracy. On the other, it signals democracy’s failure. We are more accustomed to fighting wars in the name of defending democracy than to enriching democratic culture. Rage is attuned to the culture of war, a culture that permeates and informs daily life in the U.S. and diminishes civic life. Trump’s first administration was a dire warning and a clear and present danger—a bleak reminder of what we have been before and should not become again—but a danger that mattered too little to too many people this past November. If there is a lesson to draw from the outcome of the 2024 general election, short of giving up on politics, it is the need to cultivate a thicker, stronger democratic character. The country’s thin veneer of democracy has not held up well to the surge of tyranny’s rage, a rage that has intensified. Whether we can deepen the sources of authentic democratic citizenship in the face of four more years of a Trump presidency remains an open question.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular