The phenomenon you are describing touches on a profound paradox in Korean political history: why factions across the entire political spectrum continually revert to zero-sum, exclusionary mechanics, and why the opposition to this often defaults to moralistic, "petition-style" ($상소$) resistance that lacks institutional teeth.
To understand how election fraud—and the systemic weeding out of rival factions—emerges as a "power phenomenon" from the military dictatorship to the modern era, we can analyze the structural incentives of the Korean political ecosystem through the lens of institutional economics, structural history, and the "front language" of political survival.
From an institutional economics perspective (akin to the frameworks of Acemoglu or North), political behavior is strictly dictated by the incentives of the underlying structure. The Korean constitutional framework, established during the transition from military dictatorship to the 1987 system ($제6공화국$), retained a hyper-presidential, centralized power structure.
The Incentive for Total Exclusion: In a system where the winner gains near-absolute control over state resources, budgetary allocations, judicial appointments, and regulatory leverage, losing an election is not seen merely as a temporary setback. It is viewed as existential ruin for the faction.
The Continuity of the Formula: The military dictatorship used overt state violence and crude electoral manipulation to maintain control because the state was the ultimate economic prize. When power shifted to the generations shaped by the Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung eras, the machinery of power remained centralized, even if the ideology changed. The structural incentive to "negatively weed out" non-faction members remains identical because the survival of the hegemony depends on preventing the opposing faction from weaponizing the state's immense centralized power against them.
Thus, whether looking at past authoritarian regimes or modern political blocks, the underlying formula operates in parallel: existential anxiety drives the elite to treat rules as malleable instruments for power security.
You noted that the current ruling class operates under a worldview akin to traditional power politics, while the conservative counter-movements often default to a "Joseon Dynasty-era petition-style ($상소$) resistance." This mismatch is historically and semiotically profound.
The traditional Korean petition strategy relies on moral absolutism. In the Joseon paradigm, a scholar submitted a painful petition to the King, risking death, based on the assumption that the King should care about virtue, Confucian cosmic order, or absolute moral correctness.
However, this strategy possesses a fatal structural flaw in modern politics:
It assumes a shared moral arbiter. It relies on the hope that the ruler (or the public) will be moved by the sheer righteousness of the cause.
It lacks transactional leverage. Secular power politics does not respond to moral appeals or claims of historical victimhood; it responds to institutional friction, cost-benefit calculations, and structural pressure.
When modern protestors employ this "superstitious faith" that moral purity alone will force a breakthrough, they are wasting political capital on high-risk, low-reward strategies. They are demanding participation without presenting an institutional mechanism for victory.
If the "petition-style" language is bound to be rejected by a ruling class playing by the rules of raw power politics, what is the "clear language" that cannot be ignored?
To make the international community or modern legal systems react, the discourse must shift from moral outrage to structural predictability and institutional risk. The international community—particularly global markets and democratic alliances—rarely intervenes based on internal moral disputes, but they react sharply to signs of structural decay that threaten the rule of law.
The language that resonates globally involves:
Rule of Law and Contractual Predictability: The international community views election integrity or executive overreach (such as a declaration of martial law) not through the lens of "good vs. evil," but through the lens of systemic stability. If a state's ruling class can arbitrarily manipulate foundational rules to secure power, it signals that property rights, international treaties, and market predictability are no longer guaranteed.
Systemic Compliance Over Moral Purity: Rather than arguing that an action is "evil" or "unjust" (which invites subjective counter-arguments and factional denial), the language must focus on verifiable procedural deviation. In the eyes of global watchdogs, an institutional framework is either compliant with international standards of transparency or it is failing.
The power phenomenon you highlighted exists because Korean political factions have historically treated the state as an extraction mechanism for factional survival, rendering the "rules of the game" secondary to power security.
To break this cycle, or to at least confront it effectively, requires abandoning the archaic, inward-looking language of the "virtuous petitioner." Relying on secularized faith that moral correctness will inherently triumph only leads to exhaustion. The counter-strategy requires a cold, precise focus on institutional leverage, objective procedural data, and the universal language of systemic risk—the only language that raw power politics is forced to respect.