2
responsibility for all past crimes and injustice. The survivors of regime change had their
own turn of marginalization when their faction without a politician capable of getting
votes reluctantly acquiesced in Kim Young-sam’s presidential candidacy in September
1992.
The presidency of Kim Young-sam completed a long but partial rebirth of South
Korea’s conservative power bloc begun since 1988. The right put its past behind, or it
thought it did, by banishing Chun Doo-hwan to a remote Solak monastery in 1989. The
issue of historical rectification allegedly cleared away, South Korea’s conservatives,
hitherto divided along an ideological cleavage of authoritarian modernization versus
liberal democracy, could join forces in launching DLP. Heralded as a “Grand Conservative
Coalition,” DLP united South Korea’s moderate wing of civilian chaeya activists and
professional politicians with its military-bureaucratic modernizers. They shared a common
ground in two issues, which historically served as a central basis for ideological
differentiation in South Korea. Figure 1 presents a 2x2 matrix as an ideological map of
postwar South Korean politics, with X Axis identifying alliance with America and
reconciliation with North Korea as two alternative foreign policy objectives, and Y Axis
defining growth and distribution as two competing overarching goals in macroeconomic
policymaking. The launching of DLP constituted a merger of political forces in Q1, a
grand coalition in support of a robust alliance with America and a trickle down strategy of
economic growth. As such, it opposed Kim Dae-jung, South Korea’s progressive who
always went ahead of his time, advocating a reconciliation with North Korea and
championing distributive justice in a close alliance with more radical segments in its
chaeya.
Convention