The splitting image: Yoon verdict will deepen divisions

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1:05Rosie Blau:The Economist

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2:04But first...

2:12Alexandra Suich Bass:South Korea's disgraced ex-president, Yun Suk-yeol, finally had his big day in court today in connection with his failed attempt to impose martial law on the country just over a year ago. Noah Snyder is our East Asia Bureau Chief. The death penalty was on the table, but in the end he received only a light sentence of life imprisonment for his role as the leader of an insurrection. He's likely to appeal the verdict, but neither his appeal nor this sentence will resolve the deeper fissures that his actions have helped cause in South Korean society.

2:55Rosie Blau:So let's wind back a bit, Noah, to get a history of how we got to this point.

3:00Alexandra Suich Bass:The story really begins late on December 3rd of 2024, when then-President Yoon appeared across TV screens in South Korea and declared martial law.

3:14Alexandra Suich Bass:He sent troops to seize the National Assembly, the country's parliament, and also to raid the National Election Commission. And the opposition forces in parliament, the left-leaning Democratic Party, mobilized very quickly to try to stop him. Lawmakers rushed to parliament. They pushed past the soldiers with guns who had surrounded the building. and they made their way into the chambers to vote at 1 a.m. to overturn martial law. The military thankfully withdrew without any shots fired, without any violence in the streets. Protesters came out by the thousands to support the opposition and to push back on the president's power grab.

3:58Alexandra Suich Bass:And by around 4 a.m., Yoon was back on TV, reluctantly accepting the parliament's decision and agreeing to back down. But that was, of course, just the beginning of this process, which has now led us all the way to this court verdict.

4:12Rosie Blau:And what about between then and now? When last we spoke to you, you said this had magnified or at least cast some light on some divisions in South Korean society.

4:22Alexandra Suich Bass:That's right, Jason. This incident always showed two sides of South Korea's democracy. On the one hand, there was this resilience, this ability to mobilize in defense of democracy and institutions that proved able to withstand this kind of assault on the very democratic foundations. But at the same time, on the other hand, this was both the product of and has helped to fuel really deep polarization in South Korean society. Both sides of the political aisle have come to see each other as kind of mortal enemies locked in existential combat. And far from resolving those divisions, again, this incident and the fallout from it has really exacerbated them.

5:10Rosie Blau:That is to say that Mr. Yoon still has his supporters. There are still people who think that what he did was right?

5:16Alexandra Suich Bass:Yes, Jason, there are still supporters and a rather large number of them on the South Korean right. In the wake of the martial law, Yun's former party, the People Power Party, the main conservative party in South Korea, has essentially split into two warring factions of its own. There's a camp that really defends the former president that says that his actions were justified because the opposition, the Democratic Party, had been so obstructionist in parliament. And these folks, they call themselves quite literally the Yoon Again crowd. And then there's also another faction, you might call them the Yoon Never Again faction, which is saying this is just fundamentally wrong, what the former president did.

6:03Alexandra Suich Bass:And even if he's on our team, we need to stand up for some underlying principles. And this is a red line that we can't cross as a party. And so this split has essentially created an identity crisis within South Korea's conservative movement. And it's left a huge open space for maneuver for the Democratic Party, the left of center party, which now controls both the presidency and the legislature.

6:28Rosie Blau:So this has become the story of the ruling party becomes a fractured opposition. But do you have a sense of whether the pro-Yoon, the Yoon-again types have the upper hand or the other way around?

6:38Alexandra Suich Bass:So far, the Yoon again types have had the upper hand, Jason. Right after Yoon declared martial law, the then leader of the party, a man named Han Dong-un, came out and opposed the president. He broke with the leader of his own party and in fact played a pretty important role in stopping martial law on the night it happened. But the vast majority of the lawmakers in the PPP boycotted the vote to overturn martial law and opposed Yoon's impeachment. And when it came time to select a candidate to run in the snap presidential elections last June, they chose not Mr. Han, who had come out again to oppose martial law, but a former minister from Yun's government who'd been largely apologetic.

7:24Alexandra Suich Bass:And since then, since they're drubbing in that presidential election, they've chosen as the leader of their party, another member of this Yun-Again faction. And the party has chosen to go in this direction because there's a really loud and influential kind of far-right fringe that's emerged. A lot of online commentators, YouTube rabble-rousers, who've managed to demonstrate that they can bring people to the streets and that they can swing support from the base of the party. It's kind of a surreal world, a noxious mix of ideas about election fraud conspiracies and anti-communist rhetoric around China and North Korea and a sprinkling of evangelical Christianity.

8:10Alexandra Suich Bass:And when they get together in person, as they do for regular protests in central Seoul, they adopt a lot of the imagery of the MAGA movement from America. Things like, you know, make Korea great again hats and chanting stop the steal. And so in a lot of ways, it looks like martial law has become a bit like January 6th in America's Republican Party following 2020. There's a flank of the party that wants to make the defense of martial law a kind of a litmus test for the party's leadership. And again, so far they're holding the upper hand.

8:48Rosie Blau:And I suppose then for the you-and-again types, today's verdict just kind of makes him more of a martyr. It sort of entrenches their views that it's them against the rest of the world. I mean, where do you see this going? Will that flank of the party gain more and more power?

9:03Alexandra Suich Bass:I don't think this verdict is going to change the minds of the people who have been supporting the president all along. What might finally change it is experiencing defeat at the ballot box. Their agenda may be popular, again, with this fringe of the party's base, but it's not popular with the broader public. The PPP's support ratings are wallowing below 25 percent. by and large the South Korean public thinks that what President Yoon did was wrong. The party will face a verdict at the ballot box for the first time in June when South Korea elects its mayors and governors and local legislators and many political analysts expect a huge defeat for the PPP.

9:51Alexandra Suich Bass:So that may be a moment when the party is forced to reckon with the course it's taken and start to reform itself from within. But the process of resetting the party from within will take a lot of time. And in the meantime, I think it means two big things for South Korean politics. One is that the lack of an opposition means that there are a few checks and balances on the current ruling party, the left of center Democratic Party and its president, Lee Jae-myung. So they have both a free hand to pursue their agenda, but also no one to blame if they can't deliver results to voters. And the second is a worsening of this polarization problem that we've been discussing, Jason.

10:34Alexandra Suich Bass:I think it's going to be hard for the country or for the two parties to start healing the divide and bridging the gaps between them if there are still divisions within the parties themselves. Noah, thanks very much for joining us. Thank you for having me, Jason.

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12:11Jason Palmer:When ChatGPT arrived in 2022, it excited and terrified in equal measure. For many of us, it's brilliant to be able to outsource or speed up some of the daily drudge of a job. But it's worrying too. If a machine can do it and they don't even need to sleep, what's the point of us? The head of the IMF recently warned that AI is hitting the labor market like a tsunami. Some reckon that half of all entry-level white-collar jobs could be wiped out.

12:44Noah Sneider:There's a lot of fear right now about what AI is going to do to the white-collar workforce, and it's true that it could wreak havoc, but I think it's much more likely to reshape jobs rather than to erase them altogether.

12:56Jason Palmer:Alex Domash is our economics correspondent.

13:00Noah Sneider:I think the proper way to think about this is that the future white-collar office is going to look less like a robot and more like a cyborg, where AI and humans are jointly working together.

13:13Jason Palmer:We've heard so much about an AI apocalypse. Where's your optimism coming from?

13:18Noah Sneider:So I think it is useful to do two things. First, it's useful to actually look at the data and see what's happened over the past three years. And then second, it's useful to look at past technological revolutions and what happened during those. So if you actually look at the data over the last three years and what happened to white-collar jobs, you actually see that white-collar employment has increased by three million jobs, whereas blue-collar employment has stayed relatively flat over the first three years. Certain occupations that have often been casted as the victims of AI, think software developers, paralegals, radiologists.

13:51Noah Sneider:These are occupations that share a lot of overlap with the capabilities that AI can do. And yet we've actually seen that these jobs, too, have seen massive employment increases over the last three years. Software developers are up 7%, radiologists are up 10%, and paralegals have actually seen employment increase by 20 % over the last three years. So there's been large employment gains, but then wages, too. we see that white-collar workers continue to earn one-third more than blue-collar workers, which says that there is something distinct about office work that continues to command a wage premium over blue-collar work.

14:23Jason Palmer:What has been the impact in the past of technological change?

14:28Noah Sneider:With new technologies, there are always dire predictions for what the future of work is going to look like. Even during the computer age, you had Nobel Prize economists predicting that the white-collar workforce was going to be completely eradicated. Obviously, that's not what we've seen. What we've seen instead is that computers, the internet, have been a boon for white-collar workers. Since the early 1980s, employment in white-collar work has more than doubled. Real wages have increased by a third for white-collar workers since the early 1980s. I don't want to oversimplify. There has been some job displacement because of computers.

15:05Noah Sneider:Usually this is in routine work that is easily codifiable. Think typists, which were completely wiped out. But that has been completely overcompensated by two other effects. The first is the reshaping of work. So very rarely were full jobs completely amenable to automation. And what you saw instead was that certain tasks would be automated and workers would then take on new roles that were actually higher productivity, higher value ed, a canonical example of this is air traffic controllers, where flight data could easily be automated by software, and that allowed air traffic controllers to actually focus more on higher value-added activities, such as judgment, such as coordination.

15:48Noah Sneider:The second effect has been the creation of new work in new jobs altogether, and this has been overwhelming since the early 1980s. And it's important to emphasize that these new jobs do not just occur in roles that are quote-unquote computer roles. Instead, what happens is the entire white-collar workforce is adjusted. And so you have things like e-commerce, which spawns all types of new jobs in logistics and supply chain coordination in digital payments. And you see new roles that you couldn't even think about 30 or 40 years ago.