The South Korean people prevented a coup. We can too.
As once stable democracies begin to erode, South Korea sent us a message that it doesn't have to as long as there are citizens brave and engaged enough to push back.
On January 6, 2021, the United States of America survived an attempted coup d’etat.
On November 5, 2024, the United States of America chose to return to power the president who nearly pulled off that coup.
That is after he threatened, if re-elected, to invoke the 1792 Insurrection Act that would authorize martial law, deploying American soldiers into American cities to tamp down perceived rebellions or domestic violence.
As Michael Waldman wrote for the Brennan Center for Justice last year:
This time, the thought goes, if he is displeased by protests, he will use the law as a way to crack down and grab more power. Think of the “Reichstag moment” reportedly feared by General Mark Milley three years ago.
As liberal democracies all over the world start to devolve into authoritarian regimes, the fear that the oldest constitutionally limited democratic republic, the original archetype for republics that followed — namely, us — joining them is sending a chill through the global community.
But there was hope last week in South Korea.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday attempted to seize total control of the country by declaring a state of emergency and martial law under the pretext that some insurgent forces were secretly embedded with the totalitarian North Korean government.
Yet the South Korean parliament and citizens were having none of it.
Within hours, parliament voted to nullify the president’s declaration and urged Yoon Suk Yeol to resign. On Saturday, parliament attempted, and failed, to impeach him.
Hopefully the convicted felon preparing to have his old job back here was paying attention — or at least those who might have a chance of influencing him should he try to realize his notion of “terminating the Constitution”.
Preventing the adjudicated rapist from turning us into a strongman autocracy doesn’t hinge on “hopefully he won’t,” though; it hinges on the levers of power holding, and you and I holding them accountable for doing so.
The South Korean parliament could just as easily capitulated. The South Korean people could have just shrugged their shoulders and assumed everything would be fine, or they could have revolted violently.
But none of those things happened.
Instead, the parliament unified around the single principle that it is it — not Yoon Suk Yeol — who gets to decide whether democracy lives or dies. The South Korean people took to the streets to peacefully express their view that they weren’t about to allow Yoon to determine their liberties for them.
US Senate republicans’ pushing back against the former host of Celebrity Apprentice’s cabinet picks has so far provided a glimmer of confidence he isn't going to get everything he wants.
But the Fifth Avenue playboy isn’t in office yet, and it’s easy to stand up to a dictator not yet in power.
Will their courage hold once he’s sitting in the Oval Office again?
Come January 20, he will be a lame-duck president with only the first two years to try to ram through regulation rollbacks, more tax cuts to the morbidly rich, and rejigger the economy with chaotic tariffs before the mid-term election. Depending on how that goes will determine if he is able to follow through on his worst promises to the MAGA faithful. If congressional lawmakers, particularly republicans, keep standing up to him, we have a chance to stanch the worst bleeding inevitably going to ensue.
Of course, he could also come in like a wrecking ball and try to plow through it all in his first 100 days with congressional republicans happy to play along.
Thom Hartmann explained:
Yoon’s rightwing populist People Power Party (PPP) had lost control of parliament in the April elections to the more progressive Democratic Party of Korea (DPK); Trump will not have such a constraint in a few weeks when he takes the White House. Instead of fighting Democrats, Trump must figure out how to deal with opposition to his most extreme impulses from within his own Republican Party.
Thus, his putting forward outrageous, unqualified, and even occasionally anti-American candidates for cabinet positions is Trump’s first big step in the classic strongman move of softening up Republicans in the House and Senate so when the real fights — like over a state of emergency (and the martial law that could accompany it) — happen, his party members and the handful of “problem solver” quislings in the Democratic Party will have already surrendered their ability to resist him.
He further warned:
Trump — if he’s successful at cowing Republicans in the Senate into rubber-stamping his picks or allowing recess appointments — may not have those constraints, since he will have ended opposition in the Senate, and his MAGA-seized GOP now also controls the House and the Supreme Court.
Nonetheless, if he wants to imitate Yoon’s initial declaration and successfully follow through on it, Trump will need to intimidate and bring to heel any Republicans who still think of themselves as more loyal to the nation and our Constitution than to him. Will they still exist by next February?
While we can contact our lawmakers to express our pleasure and/or displeasure with how they’re representing us, and while state legislatures are steeling themselves for the next administration’s anticipated assault on civil liberties and constitutional rights, we as citizens have the most important job — resist.
Do not resist violently lest we provide the pretext for the Insurrection Act’s invocation.
Resist by simply refusing to comply with attempts to seize our civil rights, as scores of South Koreans did last week.
Dr. Timothy Snyder, Yale University history professor and author of Our Malady, On Tyranny, and The Road to Unfreedom, warns against obeying in advance.
Ben Franklin famously said, “A republic, if you can keep it” when asked what kind of government the framers of the Constitution designed.
As reported in The Guardian this weekend:
A video of a young South Korean woman seizing the barrel of a soldier’s rifle during scuffles outside the national assembly in Seoul last week provided one of those symbolic moments when the unending battle between right and might is captured for the world to see. The footage of Ahn Gwi-ryeong, a former TV anchor who is spokesperson for South Korea’s opposition Democratic party, was watched by millions. “Are you not ashamed?” she asked the soldier. Thousands of other people, many young or younger than she is, showed similar courage. They formed protective human chains around the parliament building as lawmakers gathered to vote down President Yoon Suk Yeol’s unjustified and outrageous declaration of martial law.
Protesters did not throw rocks or bottles; they did not shoot at anyone; they did not smash windows or set fire to cars or buildings.
They simply stood up and said, “No”.
As The Guardian continued:
In South Korea, more than 51% of the population is 45 or under, according to the 2020 census, and it was mainly they who spontaneously streamed out of offices and workplaces on to the streets of the capital last Tuesday to stop what opposition politicians called a constitutional coup. They are too young to remember the last time the army took charge — it was 1979, after the assassination of the military dictator Park Chung-Hee. South Korea has been a parliamentary democracy since 1987. They aim to keep it that way.
The piece concludes:
Democracy in America, that shining city upon a hill, is in peril. Who will seize the rifle barrels in Washington DC?
As once stable democracies begin to erode, South Korea sent us a message that it doesn't have to as long as there are citizens brave and engaged enough to push back.
The question is, do we have the will do so before it’s too late?
We, the people.