Nation swayed by extreme hardliners

Moon Hee-sang, chairman of the New Politics Alliance for Democracy’s emergency committee, told a recent meeting of its veteran politicians, “There are too many lawmakers who go to extreme among the first- and second-term lawmakers these days. I will correct their manners.” In a media interview, Moon said, “About 10 people who are in leftist and rightest extremes are spoiling and killing the party.” It is apparently a warning against some hardliners with extreme stances including those who used abusive language against the president amid confrontational politics over the purported enactment of a special act for investigation of the Sewol disaster, and those who demanded defection of Floor Leader Park Young-sun who had reached agreement twice in negotiations between the ruling and main opposition parties, denying the party leadership’s authority.

Nonetheless, what Moon did in connection with the Special Sewol Act was to telephone Kim Young-oh, a bereaved family of a victim in the Sewol disaster who is dubbed the “party leader above the opposition party” after conducting a hunger strike at Gwanghwamun in Seoul, and to say “my service to you.” Even after vowing to sever ties with extreme hardliners, Chairman Moon has continued to display the practice of going after an extremist outside the party.

A forum meant to discuss reform of the civil servants pension on Monday foundered even before opening due to systematic obstruction using abusive language by a civil servants’ union. A meeting hosted by the government and the ruling party at the National Assembly to fix a tariff rate on imported rice turned into a chaos, as members of the National League of Farmers’ Association stormed in and threw eggs and sprayed red pepper powder. The revised National Assembly Act, which has been improperly called the National Assembly Advancement Act, is guaranteeing a faction of minority hardliners the "right" to bring to a complete halt deliberation of all different bills by citing a single bill that they are opposed. A country where extreme hardliners nullify rational debate and institutionalized democratic decision-making process cannot be considered a normal democratic country under rule of law.

Song Bok, emeritus professor of Yonsei University, said, “Members of the Korean National Assembly, who inherited DNA from the Joseon Dynasty’s neo-Confucianism that values dispute and justification, only insist on their demands, and engage in struggle without having a process of persuasion.” In his book entitled, “Korea, the Politics of the Vortex,” former U.S. ambassador to Korea Gregory Henderson said, "Korean politics shows factionalism and opportunism centered on individuals, and has an environment conducive for forming rational compromises or cohesion that is dilapidated." This situation results from the fact privileged forces, who are familiar with packaging their own interests. They separated people into democratic and undemocratic and rightists and leftists for a long time, divided the world into good and evil, and denounced compromise as betrayal and lethargy.

The fallacy of collective thinking that people with similar thoughts are apt to fall into is called “group polarization.” This term best fits for civil servants’ union that does not care about the silent public, and the forces that stage extreme protests outside the National Assembly by taking the Special Sewol Act hostage to paralyze state administration. Until when can the Korean public afford to let the distorted practice in which a minority force of extremity behaves as if they are majority and drives the nation into a vortex? Is the democratic vote that was wisely and gently used at Scotland’s independence referendum merely a story of a distant country?