Remember that old nonsensical hippie line from the Vietnam anti-war protest era? “Suppose they held a war and nobody came?” (The Monkees even made a terrible pop song about the subject; people forget how truly desperate things got for America there during the late Sixties.) Okay, so we know that was obviously just stupid tie-dyed fantasy politics, but hear me out for a moment: Suppose they held an authoritarian coup and everyone in the legislature just decided to vote against it instead?
Because near as I can tell, that’s what just happened on Tuesday, December 3 — within the span of a few hours — in South Korea. I’m not quite sure, however, because everybody in the American media had already moved on to more important matters by Thursday morning, such as: Is it wrong to openly cheer when a health-care CEO is brutally assassinated for unknown reasons in broad daylight? (The Left has complicated thoughts on this matter.) Furthermore, I frankly don’t know the first thing about South Korean history or politics and will not pretend to for the purposes of this brief piece. In fact, it was an unexpectedly life-affirming moment on Twitter on Tuesday when everybody looked at the breaking news of the attempted coup and collectively agreed, “Yeah I have no idea what the hell is going on here either.” (Score one for intellectual humility there, social media!)
But apparently South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol, of the right-wing People Power Party, briefly declared martial law on Tuesday in what looked for all the world like a coup of the sort South Korea has periodically seen throughout its postwar history. President Yoon went on television without prior warning to announce he was outlawing all political activity by South Korea’s opposition party, citing the need to protect the country from “North Korean communist forces” and “antistate forces,” and to “rebuild and protect” South Korea from “falling into ruin.”
And then . . . well, it seems that South Korea’s parliament — overwhelmingly controlled after disastrous 2024 elections by said opposition party — simply voted against it. And that was that. Yoon lifted martial law, declared the state of emergency over, and said, “It’s late at night and I’m tired, so never mind.” (I am not kidding about that last part, either: That’s basically what he said.) Of course, it wasn’t over. Perhaps Yoon thought he could slink back to work the next day like George Costanza returning to his job after announcing his resignation, but instead he was impeached by parliament yesterday — and it’s hard to blame them, given that as recently as 48 hours ago they were being barricaded into the capitol building in Seoul by military police. (I hope Yoon offers, “Was that wrong? Should I not have done that?” as his defense.)
If you’re looking for valuable geopolitical insight into all of this, then buddy you came to the wrong place. I know only two things about South Korean politics: (1) This isn’t the first time they’ve had an anticommunist coup, but the others worked; (2) Korean names are written [LAST NAME] + [FIRST NAME] and not the other way around, which I’ll never get used to.
I therefore prefer to focus on the single most wonderful detail of the entire affair, the only part of any of this I actually put any journalistic effort into verifying and confirming, because when I first read it I thought, “No way. They couldn’t have done that on purpose, right?” You see, apparently one well known thing about President Yoon Suk Yeol is that he is a sad and isolated man. The New York Times describes him as “desperate and frustrated” in their headline, as you see them straining mightily to analogize him to Trump circa December 2018: a right-wing candidate who had won a narrow and disputed presidential victory two years prior, then received a midterm pasting in the national legislature.
But me, what I naturally fixated on was the all-too-perfect characterization made by pro-Yoon partisans in the South Korean legislature: “Pro-Yoon legislators argued in the party meeting that the president declared martial law because he was ‘lonely’ and ‘needed a friend to talk to’.”
