Like the Reagan generation before it, the Kim generation exploited a popular sense of crisis and diminished national status to push reform. I attach Kim Dae-jung’s name to this generation because he was arguably the most impressive change agent in the group. Kim had only a vocational education and hailed from the poor southern provinces long neglected by the northern power center around Seoul. A charismatic populist, he became one of the leading dissidents against South Korea’s authoritarian regimes of the 1970s and ’80s, when he was jailed repeatedly. Kim finally won election at the height of
...more
