Is this the end of dialectics, or can society meet in the middle?
Sara Kim, Staff Writer
South Korean protesters during the April Revolution of 1960, rallying against electoral fraud. Photo source: getarchive.net
EVERYONE TODAY can feel the following: in a conversation that turns cautious, in the silence that follows a passing remark, in the way people hesitate before speaking or opt not to speak at all.
In many places, politics, gender, and identity are no longer just matters of opinion as they turn into battlegrounds. And across democracies, it’s becoming harder to talk transparently across the divide without raising one’s voice or retreating altogether.
Sun Ryung, a PhD candidate from the University of British Columbia, defines polarization as “a divergence from the center,” and says it can be measured both at the elite level and within the general population.
Among political elites, parties increasingly refuse to recognize each other as legitimate competitors. Among the public, polarization shows up in voting patterns, partisan media habits and growing mistrust between ordinary citizens and opposing sides.
In a democracy like South Korea, this no longer looks like a simple disagreement as voters indicate deepening distrust toward those who vote differently from them.
Echoing Sun Ryung’s definition, Katya Andrusz, a spokesperson for the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, notes how in today’s climate, democratic politics begins to operate like a zero-sum game: “I have to win, otherwise I lose.”
While polarization is not new, democratic societies have always contended with disagreement.
What distinguishes polarization today is the speed, scale, and structure of its spread. It entrenches itself rapidly through mass media ecosystems and the digital echo chambers. It’s a feedback loop not just in how people think, but in what they believe to be true about political and social realities.
Natalia, a PhD candidate from the University of Łódź, describes how social media actively deepens existing divides and creates a climate where “antagonism rather than debate” defines public life. Polarized opinions thrive in feedback loops that reward and amplify outrage rather than dialogue.
So what does it mean to live in an era where division is actively fostered and spread as a political contagion? Democracies today are not only struggling with disagreement born from organic fractures; rather, they grapple with divisions catalyzed by political elites who leverage identity-based discord for political opportunism.
Such battlegrounds are neither accidental nor symptomatic of modernity. They reflect strategic choices in which polarization is weaponized, trust becomes undermined, and democratic cohesion is intentionally fractured.
The Case for Polarization: South Korea, a Nation Divided
The symptoms of polarization are clear in South Korea, where recent elections revealed sharp generational and gender divides. Gen Z men and women voted in opposite directions by wide margins.
Sun Ryung describes the mood among Gen Z and millennials as something closer to hopelessness than frustration amid South Korea’s political instability.
“They face rising inequality, stagnant wages, incredibly high housing prices… one of the most competitive educational systems in the world,” she says. “These combined factors breed resentment, not just frustration or disappointment.”
The economic pressure felt by younger generations is compounded by what Natalia describes as a lack of institutional responsiveness.
For many, the country’s two dominant parties feel equally removed. “Unfortunately,” Sun Ryung notes, “South Korea’s two dominant parties… often support polarization rather than mitigate it. Their strategies frequently rely on mobilizing loyal voter blocs through antagonistic rhetoric.”
The Culture and Gender Wars
No social division is more pronounced right now in South Korea than the gender gap.
According to age-and-gender exit polls by major broadcasters in the recent election, 58 percent of women in their 20s and 57 percent of women in their 30s voted for the liberal candidate Lee Jae‑myung, while the majority of their male peers backed conservative candidates such as Kim Moon‑soo and Lee Jun‑seok.
In fact, approximately 74% of men in their 20s backed conservative candidates in the 2025 election, while around 58% of women the same age voted for the liberal camp. This marked one of the most pronounced gender divides across generations for the nation’s election.
According to Sun Ryung, “Young men feel that affirmative action and gender equity initiatives disadvantage them. But many young women feel deeply unsafe at work, in public, online.”
Such grievances take place against a stark reality of persistent gender and wage inequality in South Korea. Women earn significantly less than men (the largest pay gap among OECD countries), and about 76 percent of women report facing discrimination in promotions and placements driven by male-centric workplace cultures, according to a study by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre.
Gendered grievances in South Korea are shaped by a society still rooted in patriarchal norms, but their political salience emerges when such feelings are intensified, oftentimes selectively, through media and campaign rhetoric that thrives on division.
Online, this tension has taken on a life of its own. “Misogyny and misandry have become normalized,” Sun Ryung says, referencing South Korean online spaces like Daum and Naver where “Nam-hyung” (misandry) and “Yeo-hyung” (misogyny) are now common framing devices.
Women’s anger in these spaces often stems from entrenched structural inequality and systemic discrimination against women in the country, making misandry less a mirror of misogyny than a reaction to it. Furthermore, much of the polarized criticism of feminist movements in South Korea is rooted in a broader misunderstanding that feminism inherently equates to “man-hating,” rather than recognizing the structural imbalances that continue to shape gender polarization within the nation.
Furthermore, digital platforms and their algorithms feed on grievances in South Korean culture wars and politics, as personalization of content walls off dissent. Social media echo chambers have made it easier for users to absorb such grievances.
Additionally, Natalia observes how political debate in the nation has collapsed into mutual delegitimization as rivals are no longer seen as opponents.
South Korean parties have increasingly “treated each other as illegitimate or traitors” rather than political competitors. What emerges from this rhetoric is a zero-sum logic in which the procedures of democracy are used less to mediate difference than to entrench authority.
Sun Ryung traces this dynamic back to the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye’s impeachment in 2016, noting how identity politics began to intensify around that moment.
She mentions that “there’s a very clear gender division [that] has been identified since then, which has deepened polarization… again, now we go back to social media and digital platform[s] that reinforce these cleavages.”
Polarized Digital Chambers as a Political Tool
Both Natalia and Sun Ryung say that platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram have become central to Korean political discourse. “Politicians, influencers, and party profiles all use social media to fuel hostility toward opponents,” Natalia notes.
The mechanisms of content on social media platforms are designed to prioritize emotionally charged content to privilege outrage and grievance in ways that reward division among the people. What may seem like political messaging becomes part of a larger feedback loop as polarization itself is monetized through clicks, shares, and algorithmic boosts.
It is as though when discourse collapses into performance and when performance is optimized for rage, the very conditions for democratic compromise begin to dissolve.
In South Korea, that dissolution reached an alarming point when former president Yoon Suk Yeol, under mounting scrutiny for corruption and plummeting approval, declared martial law—a move that stunned the nation.
“He [President Yoon] kept saying he did for Korea’s democracy, which was not at all right,” says Sun Ryung. “The democratic system was built with people’s blood… but just over a single night, he collapsed it.”
For a country whose democracy was born out of mass resistance against authoritarian rule, that moment marked a suspension of the very system it had fought to build. The reversal felt like more than a betrayal.
Perhaps it was the clearest sign that under President Yoon, polarization had shed any pretense of political legitimacy and become a justification for authoritarian overreach.
South Korea’s current president, Lee Jae‑myung, who succeeded Yoon in a June 2025 snap election, is described as riding “a wave of voter anger” by Reuters, harping on Yoon’s martial law attempt.
Like most political elites, he carries his own baggage of controversies: corruption allegations, factionalism, and a tendency to appeal directly to grievance.
Despite pledging a “renewal” for South Korea, his multiple indictments and political maneuvering have intensified campaign rhetoric and hardened partisan lines.
According to Sun, South Korea’s political elites “have failed to deescalate gender and generational divisions,” and “deliberately courted this division, making inflammatory statements or proposing ideas that just polarized the policies much more”.
Political leaders have often become amplifiers rather than acting as mediators, as they see resentment for political opportunism and as a strategy to consolidate electoral support.
In this context, polarization in South Korea can be seen as both a natural byproduct and a political tool of social fracture. Lee’s presidency may serve as a live experiment for the nation, where short-term, emotionally charged political strategies unfold within a democracy already strained by institutional instability and fragility.
This raises the question that will define the coming years for South Korea: Can President Lee’s governance style help “heal” the country’s divisions, or will it deepen them further?
Can We Contain Polarization?
Can democracies build immunity around polarization? Can consensus still be cultivated in the age of digital tribalism where compromise is too often mistaken for weakness?
There are no quick fixes or answers to such questions, but one notable step forward for democracies is to “engage citizens and ensure they are well informed when they get to the ballot box,” as Katya notes.
Natalia points to the collapse of civil discourse and the rise of antagonistic rhetoric. “Politicians need to move beyond short-term gains and stop using rhetoric based on false claims to attack rivals.”
She suggests that civic education and media literacy are crucial to any long-term repair. Without these, the structures that shape public understanding will remain vulnerable to disinformation and performative outrage.
Moreover, Sun Ryung emphasizes a broader cultural dimension. She notes that platform reform and responsible media infrastructure must go hand-in-hand with emotional awareness, as not doing so causes “emotional extremism,” since “digital spaces feed on resentment. Until that feedback loop is broken, polarization won’t just persist as it will escalate.”
The consensus on containing polarization in democracies seems to be that electoral systems should be designed to incentivize coalition-building, and media ecosystems should accelerate verified information over viral outrage. And most importantly, political cultures should encourage disagreement that is engaged rather than adversarial: where debate is part of public life, not a threat to it.
A democratic society does not need to come to a consensus on all aspects of its political reality. But it does require a shared ground where weaponized difference does not harden into permanent division—a condition without which democracies risk losing the very values that sustain them.
It is apparent with the case of South Korea that such ground is thinning. Whether that ground can be held or slowly restored depends on what both political elites and citizens are willing to protect to preserve their democracy, and what they are willing to rebuild before it begins to erode.
