Crafting a Populist Narrative in South Korea: Left Ideational Entrepreneurs and Historical Memory

Activist-intellectuals in South Korea played an important role in crafting left populist discourse that drew heavily upon historical memory. I argue that this discourse is more accurately characterized as populist rather than nationalist because it established a clear antagonistic binary between “the people” and “the elites,” who represented sharply contrasting moral qualities. Using a “logic of equivalence,” the activist-intellectuals sorted “elites” and “the people” into sharply delineated blocs, in which the former repeatedly violated the latter’s dreams of national sovereignty and democracy throughout the arc of modern Korean history. In harnessing historical evidence to support this narrative, the activist-intellectuals “thickened” populist discourse. The left populist discourse’s discrediting of not only the elites but also their institutional legacy generated a powerful rationale for remaking the institutional apparatus inherited from preceding authoritarian regimes. This escalated the stakes of the partisan battle between the left and right.