Democracy worked as it supposed in South Korea, as a president who abused power was peacefully removed from power. It’s a lesson for all of us. In 2021, Republican senators failed to protect democracy by not convicting Donald Trump and barring him from ever holding public office again.
On Dec. 3, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol invoked martial law, under a rationale that remains somewhat nebulous. Friday, the nation’s highest court upheld the parliament’s impeachment of Yoon and ordered him removed from office, capping a lightning collapse of the conservative rising star in just the four months since he took aim at the country’s democracy.
South Korea might be a very different culture than ours, but the political circumstances of this debacle don’t sound wholly unfamiliar; Yoon’s supporters maintain that he was protecting the country from nefarious North Korean-aligned political enemies, or even that shadowy figures have subverted the country’s elections, spurred on by right-wing influencers on YouTube and other social media.
Yoon’s critics point out that he made the bizarre moves while facing long-running questions about his wife’s alleged corrupt dealings and in a politically delicate moment for himself, apparently in a short-sighted attempt to hold onto power.
The Occam’s razor explanation is that the brash president gambled on a plan to subvert the country’s democratic process and save his own skin by fanning the flames of conspiracy and refusing to accept political realities, and lost. South Korean legislators, including those from Yoon’s own People Power Party, understood the gravity of the situation and moved quickly to quash his coup and oust him.
We had no such luck in Washington, where in 2021, Republican senators refused to hold Donald Trump accountable after his Jan. 6 insurrection and following the House’s indisputable findings during its impeachment trial.
Many GOP senators probably figured, wrongly, that Trump, having been defeated at the polls and relinquishing the White House, would be handled by the normal criminal prosecution system. The subsequent investigations were hampered by friendly courts, including the Supreme Court, which issued a jaw-dropping immunity ruling shielding Trump from the potential for any prosecution at all for broadly-defined official acts. Then he was reelected and the prosecutions were dropped.
The Senate’s failure to convict has led us here, to a moment when Trump is not only back in the White House but learned that he can assault our democratic systems with practical impunity. He’s tried to wrest the power of the purse from Congress, targeted political opponents for speech, had people flown to a foreign prison without trial, ignored court orders and generally taken it upon himself to test the limits of our constitutional order.
During Yoon’s declaration of martial law, legislators famously faced off against armed police and military, scaled walls and evaded security forces to vote down his attempt. It was not a political slam dunk to impeach him. But they understood that this was necessary to preserve their own democracy.
Yoon supporters will rage and call it a rigged system and a coup by the opposition and so on, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that, in the face of a leader who tried to grab power for himself, the South Korean parliament and courts did what was necessary to safeguard themselves and their democracy.
Hopefully, our democracy will also prevail.