What does it look like when a constitutional democracy actually behaves like one? I ask because we no longer seem to know, and the answer arrived this morning from Seoul, where eight justices unanimously decided that declaring martial law against your own legislature is, in fact, the kind of thing a country is supposed to do something about.
The ruling took twenty-two minutes to read aloud. The decision was unanimous. The president walked out of the Blue House. I am told this is what people used to mean by ‘the rule of law,’ a phrase we still use here, mostly on commemorative coins and at the openings of judicial conferences where the shrimp is good.
I was at dinner last night with my friend Eliza — she runs a small foreign policy shop that I will describe only as the kind of place that has a Korea desk — and a lobbyist whose firm I will describe only as bipartisan, by which I mean he has never lost an election, because he has never been in one. The subject of Seoul came up between the salad and the lamb. The lobbyist said, with real feeling, that South Korea was ‘a remarkable, mature democracy.’ Then he asked someone to pass the bread. Nobody followed up. Nobody ever does.
This is the part of the column where I am supposed to say something balanced about how every system has its flaws and ours has been through worse. I will not be doing that. South Korea’s president sent soldiers into the National Assembly in December. Within hours, lawmakers climbed walls to vote him down. Within weeks, he was impeached. Within months, a court removed him. Total elapsed time from constitutional crisis to constitutional remedy: one hundred and twenty-two days. We are still litigating whether a sitting president can be charged for things he openly bragged about on a stage in Iowa.
My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives long enough to remember when documents were considered sacred and not, as she puts it now, ‘suggestions,’ called me this afternoon to ask whether I had seen the footage from Seoul. I had. The thing she wanted to talk about was the silence in the courtroom when the ruling came down. Not cheering. Not chanting. A nation watching a procedure complete itself. ‘I had forgotten what that sounded like,’ she said. So had I.
Here in Washington, we have spent the better part of three months congratulating ourselves on our resilience, by which we mean our ability to absorb. Cabinet officials have been confirmed who promised, in writing, to dismantle the agencies they now run. A federal workforce is being cut by people who could not pass its background checks. Lawyers at the Justice Department are being asked to defend things their predecessors would have prosecuted. And the response, in the rooms where I eat dinner, has settled into a tone I can only describe as appreciative bewilderment, the way you might admire a particularly aggressive weather system.
The South Koreans, to be clear, did not enjoy any of this. Their politics is a mess. Their president had an approval rating in the teens. Their opposition is, by all accounts, also exhausting. None of that turned out to matter. What mattered was that when the moment came, the institutions did the boring, unglamorous, procedural thing they were built to do. A legislature voted. A court ruled. A man left a building. The country is now planning an election, which is, I am told, what countries do.
I keep thinking about the lobbyist, reaching for the bread. I keep thinking about how comfortable we have all become with the idea that accountability is something other countries are better at, the way we say the trains are better in Japan, or the cheese is better in France. As if it is a regional specialty. As if a constitutional remedy is a kind of artisanal product we have simply chosen, as a culture, to no longer manufacture.
So I will ask the question the lobbyist did not want asked, and that Eliza, to her credit, was at least willing to look at her plate about. If a court in Seoul can remove a president for one night of overreach, what does it say about us that we cannot remove a library book without three lawyers, a town hall, and a podcast tour? We used to call that civic life. Now we call it civic cowardice, and we serve it with the lamb.
The country is going somewhere. We are not steering.