Incel nationalism
By 
A friend sends along this summary of what’s been going on in South Korean politics lately:
PPP openly appealed to incels (“idaenam”) even installing a vituperative, combative 32 year old incel as their Party spokesperson and a 36 year old incel as Party Leader. They ran a hyper-male focused campaign that ended up creating one of the craziest youth vote splits ever. 18-29 year old men voted 59%-36% for Yoon, 18-29 year old women voted 58%-34% for Lee (the center-left guy). What’s crazy is that there was no gender split above 39 years old. As in, men 40-49 voted Lee 61%-35%, women 40-49 voted Lee 60%-36%.
The exit polling indicated that the two biggest issues for Yoon voters were high housing costs and opposition to the “Me Too” movement, and female equality in general.
South Korea doesn’t have simultaneous presidential and legislative elections, so the PPP didn’t have a majority in the legislature. However, people assumed they would after this year’s legislative elections. However, Yoon stepped on rake after rake. He tried to increase the maximum weekly working hours limit from 52 hours to 80, then to 69. That actually led to significant backlash from the young males who are the base of the PPP. Then he pissed women off even more than they already were by saying that boys deserved a “handicap” on national placement tests because girls have been severely outscoring boys over the last few years. He also said that the answer to SK’s fertility crisis is for young women to “change their standards”, presumably meaning dropping careers and marrying shitty loser incel guys and becoming baby factories. Then he pissed off doctors by doubling the number of spots in medical schools and lowering reimbursement rates for doctors who care for the elderly, leading to a Doctor’s Strike. Then he pissed everyone off by having a grocery store stunt with artificially low prices for green onions. He then got his election commissioners to ban discussion of green onions on social media and ban bringing green onions to polling places. The same day, he proposed cutting the national R&D budget by 15%, and proposed firing 1/3 of the professors at state run universities in order to finance a tax cut. He also has tried to prosecute everyone involved with the previous administration as “agents of communist North Korea.”
All that combined with influence peddling scandals involving his wife and family members have caused Yoon’s approval rating to crater. When the April 2024 legislative elections occurred, his net approval rating average was -48 , as in 25% approved, 73% disapproved. With that backdrop, the PPP stunk it up in the legislative election, and the center left Democratic Party kept an outright majority (173/300 seats). Yoon was referred to as a “lame duck” in the aftermath. polling for the 2027 Presidential election. Heading into today’s self-coup, the likely Democratic Party candidate had an average 24 point lead over everyone in the 2027 presidential election polling.
And then….today Yoon snapped, imposing martial law against the will of his own Party (the entire legislature voted against it) and the country (a snap poll has it supported by 6%, opposed by 82%).
Yoon’s electoral support looks like a more extreme version of what happened here last month. Trump of course explicitly targeted the incel and incel-adjacent (manosphere/bro culture) vote as well.
The situation is South Korea appears to be quite radical in this regard, however, with a total fertility rate of 0.72 (!), and a feminist counter-culture that includes the radical 4B movement.
Meanwhile it appears that Yoon’s attempted autogolpe has already failed.