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Comment by KRAKRISMOTT | Hacker News Reader

They were never truly democratic in the first place, I don't see what the problem is. The strategic value of their country lies primarily in their geographic location and the tech oligopolies (similarly for Japan, Japan's democracy story is even more sordid).

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"Strategic value" is hardly the only thing that matters for the welfare of a country -- actually it sounds more like an outsider's perspective on how a country can be useful for some other people. Also, it is totally false that Korea (or Japan) was never "truly democratic". Sure, they've had their issues and continue to, but that's why it is important that they keep moving in the right direction. This has actually been a very common path for lots of countries around the world to have troubled democracies and gradually improve but not without some hiccups.

Look at the opening paragraphs, the author of the article clearly views South Korea from a strategic lens first and foremost. It's the dominoes theory all over again.

No, they are a functioning liberal democratic republic. Irrespective of their geopolitics. They managed to impeach and jail a sitting president.

I won’t claim to know the details of this specific case but removing a leader from power and imprisoning them isn’t unique to liberal democracies. I wouldn’t say that specific event is proof of a functioning liberal democracy without a lot of qualifiers on the circumstances and methods.

Can you point to an instance of a non liberal democratic top leader being removed from power on account of their crimes within the established legal framework

“Within the legal framework” is one of those qualifiers I mentioned. Like I said, I’m not familiar with the details in the SK case.

It just seems unrelated to the concept, frankly. I'd imagine if you wanted to measure democracy you'd have to measure actual representation somehow. This is at best measuring a proxy of a proxy of representation. I find the conflation of "liberal democracy" and "rule of law" to be pretty disturbing.

"LIBERAL democracy" requires "rule of law".

She was removed by the legislative and the judiciary branches according to the constitutional procedure. Her removal was well justified. The relevant qualifiers were present, thus the impeachment is relevant to the discussion and rebuffs the frivolous claim I was replying to.

>They were never truly democratic in the first place, I don't see what the problem is.

I would say they should become more democratic, not less. Democracy itself is a value and a scale of degree and countries becoming more democratic usually correlates with other things people value (various freedoms and rights being respected, happiness and quality of life, and other things).

There are very few/no "true democracies" in the world. Even the USA is not a "true democracy" because a presidential candidate can win the majority vote but still lose the election.

But there are a lot of governments with democratic elements integrated into them, including USA, Japan, South Korea.

>They were never truly democratic in the first place

[citation needed]. What does 'truly democratic' even mean anyway?

>Japan's democracy story is even more sordid)

How so?

> Politics in Japan in the post-war period has largely been dominated by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has been in power almost continuously since its foundation in 1955, a phenomenon known as the 1955 System. Of the 31 prime ministers since the end of the country's occupation, 24 as well as the longest serving ones have been members of the LDP.[4] Consequently, Japan has been described as a de facto one-party state.[5]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Japan

This. Although you are downvoted but that's it.

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