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ambition among voters during elections. The right as a political force, however, suffered
because regionalist rivalries drove away younger voters, as well as provided a window of
opportunity for progressives to capture presidential power. More importantly, while South
Korea’s conservatives wallowed in regionalist intrigues and maneuvers behind closed
doors, society underwent a profound generational change and a radical value shift,
creating a new market for political entrepreneurs and innovators. Section 3 illustrates how
South Korea’s conservatives failed in consolidating the initial inroads they made into this
new political market of reformist voters in 1997. Also it shows their failure in the opposite
task of breaking their progressive rival’s dominance of the same political market in 2002.
Section 4 wraps up with an analysis of how South Korea’s radical chaeya won over this
market through its transformation into a force with a thoroughly restructured progressive
identity, political organization and election strategy. The right lost in 2002 because it lost
in the battle over control of South Korea’s rapidly changing civil society.
I. Identity Crisis: Conservatives without Conservatism
The political troubles South Korea’s conservative power bloc faced during
democratization fundamentally originated from its agonizing days of nation building
between 1945 and 1953. The “Republic” was a child of Cold War conflict, born as a
divided nation with its other northern half denying its existence as a sovereign state and
harboring an ambition for reunification through force, if necessary. Nation building
constituted nation destruction, breaking apart premodern Chosun into two hostile states,
one named a republic and another a people’s republic. Consequently, from its founding
days, South Korea saw its raison d’être under challenge. To survive as a sovereign state, it
needed answer why its acts of nation destruction were legitimate. Without a persuasive
Convention