Democracy isn’t doing so well around the world. One poignant sign of democracy’s decline is that it’s cherished most fervently in places where it effectively doesn’t exist — in Venezuela, for example, among voters protesting a stolen election.

In existing democracies, meanwhile, voters don’t hold their defining political institutions in high regard. In the United States, less than 20 percent of Americans think Congress is doing a good job. In the European Union, only one-third of citizens on average trust their national governments and only one-fifth trust their political parties.

Familiarity breeds contempt, which explains why voters have elected anti-democratic candidates to high office in country after country. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has won four straight elections in Hungary. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been consolidating power in his own hands for over a decade in India. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has somehow survived at the top of the Israeli political system for 17 out of the last 28 years. A chainsaw-wielding rogue economist, President Javier Milei, now presides over Argentina.

And, of course, the profoundly anti-democratic US President-Elect Donald Trump is returning to the White House.

Many of these right-wing leaders used the ladder of democracy to reach office, and they’ve been trying ever since to knock down that ladder so that no one can follow them into power.

These autocrats in democratic clothing have met with political opposition, some of it quite intense. In the most extreme cases, like Russia, that opposition has been jailed, exiled and assassinated. Elsewhere, autocrats have simply declared martial law. In Tunisia, Kais Saied suspended the constitution in 2021 and put an end to the only example of democratic governance produced by the Arab Spring.

Then there are the leaders who over-reach. Donald Trump tried to find a way to stay in office after he lost the 2020 election. He attempted to overturn the results in the courts. He marshalled a crowd of agitators to pressure the vice president and Congress to withhold certification of the election. There was even talk of martial law inside the Trump White House in December 2020.

Ultimately, without the US military on his side, Trump grudgingly vacated the White House.

The decision by South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol to declare martial law on December 3 was, by comparison, a shock. To be sure, Yoon was frustrated by the considerable opposition he faced in the South Korean parliament. He promoted figures from the New Right Movement, which telegraphed his own more favorable views of the Japanese colonial period and the authoritarian modernizers of the post-Korean War era. But few expected such a brazen power grab.

Yoon probably figured that, unlike Trump, he could succeed with his martial law declaration because he had the military on his side. Indeed, Defense Minister Kim Yong Hyun confessed that martial law was all his idea. But Yoon and Kim had probably been discussing the timing of such a declaration since the summer.

Fortunately, South Korean democracy has proven remarkably durable. Perhaps because the last martial law period is still in the living memory of many people, including a generation of parliamentarians, Yoon’s opposition moved quickly to block his attempted seizure of total power. The guardrails of democracy — political institutions, courts, civil society — held firm. Yoon was impeached less than two weeks after he declared martial law.

Another key guardrail is cultural. Shame is an integral part of Korean society. A number of Korean politicians — former president Roh Moo Hyun, former Seoul mayor Park Won Soon — have committed suicide because of what they perceived to be their own shameful conduct. Defense Minister Kim also tried to commit suicide in his jail cell. Short of killing themselves, Korean politicians will also make elaborate apologies, as Yoon has done.

Compare that with politicians like Donald Trump, who never admits wrongdoing or ever apologizes. It is impossible to shame Trump, no matter what he has done, from sexual misconduct to flagrant violations of the law. Indeed, his campaign to regain the White House was largely an effort to prove to the American people that he was innocent of all charges, legal and otherwise.

Right-wing politicians generally lack shame. Russian President Putin has destroyed Ukrainian society, ruined the lives of millions of Russians and hobbled his economy for generations to come, but he would never admit that he ever did anything wrong. Even in a country like India, where shame is an integral part of the culture, Modi has pushed an anti-Muslim agenda, fumbled its response to the COVID-19 crisis and criminalized dissent — but he sees no reason to apologize for any of his actions.

This absence of shame is real and troubling, but the issue here is not cultural. Rather, it’s the refusal of leaders in putatively democratic countries to engage with their opposition, respect political institution and take responsibility for their mistakes. Yoon did what many right-wing leaders have done — Trump, Putin, Modi — but he wasn’t clever enough to figure out a way to concentrate power in his hands without declaring martial law, which is an obvious red line in Korea.

According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, which rates democracies according to their relative strength, democratic standards have been eroding over the last decade. Less than 8 percent of the world’s population now live in “full democracies.” Another 50 countries, including the United States, are “flawed democracies.”

South Korea ranks as a “full democracy,” but just barely. Its overall score is dragged down by poor marks for “political culture,” the worst of any other full democracy. Indeed, its grade is exactly the same as the United States. In the Economist’s next report, the ability of South Korean to defend against Yoon’s declaration of martial law and the failure of US voters to prevent Donald Trump from lying and bullying his way back into office will surely produce more divergent results for the two countries in the Democracy Index.

The sad truth is that South Korean efforts to save the country’s democracy — which, of course, is still an ongoing procress — is increasingly anomalous in the world today. Political polarization, growing economic inequality, persistent military conflict, the stresses of climate change and periodic shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic have left the institutions of democracy much weaker.

In some places, like South Korea, cultural attributes like shame still exert some kind of restraint. But shame, as Donald Trump is proving, is fast becoming anachronistic.

People power in the form of right-wing appeals to populism is destroying democracy. But people power like what South Koreans have done after Yoon’s declaration of martial law can still save democracy.

[Hankyoreh first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.