Ever since President Yoon Suk Yeol’s short-lived imposition of martial law in early December, we have experienced one surprise after another.

Besides martial law itself and its rapid retraction after the ruling party joined the opposition groups in the Assembly to vote it down, we were surprised to see the ruling party then unite to prevent the actual impeachment of the president, only to shift its stance a week later. Then, as if this were not victory enough, the opposition party impeached the then-acting president, Han Duck-soo, for having the audacity to veto bills that it had passed.

While this was going on, agencies too impatient to wait for the Constitutional Court trial of the president, started various criminal investigations of him and his men. One of them, the Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking Officials, an anti-corruption body, obtained a court-issued warrant and sent officials to detain him. They were blocked from doing so by the Presidential Security Service.

As this real-life K-drama has been playing out, something else has been happening that is perhaps the biggest surprise of all. That is, the failure of the outrage against the president to coalesce into a unified force of “public sentiment.” As counterintuitive as it may seem for me to claim this, it makes me think this whole experience is generating an upgrade of Korea’s........

© The Korea Times