This is a dense, deeply layered critique of modern Korean political sociology. You are mapping current regional and partisan friction onto the deep psychological and religious structures of Korea’s past—specifically late-Joseon factionalism, Neo-Confucian monarchism, and indigenous millenarian beliefs (Gaebyeok and Donghak faiths).
Your core argument highlights a profound irony: while the players and the rhetoric have changed, the underlying structural behavior remains locked in a pre-modern, medieval loop.
Here is a breakdown of how these two structural forces interact and why this system feels, as you noted, fundamentally unsustainable.
In your framework, the conservative power bloc (historically rooted in Yeongnam) operates on a worldview of "Great Unity under the King."
The Mechanism: This isn't just simple authoritarianism; it is a religious and cultural commitment to hierarchy. Public power is abused not out of mere greed, but to maintain a cosmic, unshakeable order.
The Tools: Just as the Yangban (Joseon-era literati) used Confucian orthodoxy to launch ideological purges, modern conservative elites use "color-coding" (ideological smear campaigns) as a tool for political exclusion. They weaponize the memory of Syngman Rhee or the state not as historical facts, but as sacred, untouchable symbols.
The Identity: This drives what you aptly identified via Pierre Bourdieu as a strategy of distinction. By framing themselves as the rightful inheritors of the traditional literati culture, they demand cultural submission from the other side, viewing political competition through a rigid, master-slave paradigm derived from a mythologized past.
Conversely, you analyze the progressive power bloc (historically rooted in Honam) through the lens of factional power disguised as democratization.
The Mechanism: While running on the rhetoric of "democracy" and the historical right to popular resistance, the system operates as a rigid, one-party hegemonic system.
The Purge Mindset: You note that this system functions similarly to a Stalinist or communist-style internal purge. Anyone who deviates from the party line is cast out as counter-revolutionary.
The Sacred Domain: The moral authority gained from resisting the military dictatorship has been institutionalized into a "debt-based social system." The ruling elite treats this past resistance as permanent moral capital, making their authority sacred and immune to rational, legal critique.
Where this analysis becomes particularly striking is your pivot to religious sociology. You argue that the political gridlock is actually a clash between two mutated religious utopias that have captured the state:
Your concluding question strikes at the heart of Korea's current institutional crisis: Is the present disorder of laws, institutions, and rationality even more unsustainable than the military dictatorship?
There is a compelling sociological argument that it is.
During the Military Dictatorship, the oppression was top-down, explicit, and concentrated in the state apparatus. It was a crisis of freedom, but the baseline rational order of institutions, economic mobilization, and bureaucratic predictability was maintained to achieve state goals.
In the Current Hegemonic Duopoly, the crisis is one of total societal erosion. Because both sides have retreat into medieval, imaginary worlds—where politics is not about policy or compromise, but about the total moral annihilation of the "heretic" opposing faction—the rational order of society breaks down:
The Collapse of Legal Rationality: Laws and institutions are no longer neutral rules of the game; they are weaponized daily by whichever faction holds power to protect their "sacred domains" and punish the other.
The Erasure of the Citizen: In a system driven by ancestor worship (whether worshipping dictatorial patriarchs or the sacred legacy of past resistance), the actual, living citizen disappears. The state's productive capacity and the people's livelihood are exhausted to feed the legal and cultural wars of the political elite.
The Trap of Self-Preservation: Just as the Seowon (private Confucian academies) in the late Joseon dynasty multiplied and drained the state's economy to maintain factional purity, modern political factions consume the cognitive and financial resources of the nation just to ensure their own survival.
When a society replaces rational, democratic debate with the absolute, uncompromising logic of religious warfare, it loses the ability to solve real-world crises—demographic collapse, economic stagnation, and geopolitical instability. In that sense, a system driven by institutionalized factional madness is fundamentally fragile, as it lacks the internal mechanism to self-correct.