Rhyu Si-min's ABC Theory Through Max Weber: When Classifying Allies Becomes the Enemy
A Venn Diagram That Divided More Than It Explained
On March 18, the writer and former politician Rhyu Si-min (1959– ) appeared on the liberal YouTube podcast Maebul Show and drew a Venn diagram that would fracture the ruling coalition's fragile unity within hours. He sorted those aligned with the Democratic Party into three categories: Group A, the value-driven core who have walked the road from Kim Dae-jung through Roh Moo-hyun and Moon Jae-in to President Lee Jae-myung; Group B, those whose support for the president is ultimately tethered to personal political gain; and Group C, the intersection—people who pursue both values and pragmatic interest.
The taxonomy looked elegant on a whiteboard. Within days it had become an incendiary device. Online communities loyal to the traditional progressive base celebrated it as vindication—at last, a vocabulary to name the opportunists. Meanwhile, the so-called New Lee supporters, citizens drawn to the president's pragmatist governance rather than the party's ideological lineage, erupted in fury. Labels like B-Jun-ho and B-Eon-ju proliferated on message boards, branding specific politicians as members of the reviled B Group. The diagram that was meant to analyze had begun to excommunicate.
The Moral Gradient Weber Warned Us About
Over a century ago, Max Weber (1864–1920) delivered his celebrated lecture Politics as a Vocation and drew a distinction that speaks directly to the fault line Rhyu unwittingly exposed.
All ethically oriented conduct may be guided by one of two fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed maxims: conduct can be oriented to an 'ethic of ultimate ends' or to an 'ethic of responsibility.' This is not to say that an ethic of ultimate ends is identical with irresponsibility, or that an ethic of responsibility is identical with unprincipled opportunism.—Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation (1919)
Weber understood that the person who acts from conviction and the person who weighs consequences are not standing on opposing moral planes. They inhabit the same political field, governed by different but equally necessary logics. The critical point, which Rhyu's framework silently violated, is Weber's insistence that neither orientation may claim inherent moral superiority over the other. To say that A pursues values while B pursues interests is already to collapse Weber's careful tension into a hierarchy—one that awards Group A the halo of conviction and brands Group B with the stigma of opportunism, before any concrete evidence has been weighed.
Rhyu later clarified that his framework targeted politicians and commentators, not ordinary voters. But the Venn diagram had already escaped its author's intended scope. Classification, once released into the arena of political passion, does not describe division. It produces it. Social psychology has long demonstrated that even arbitrary categories—a preference for one abstract painter over another, or the toss of a coin—are sufficient to trigger in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. When those categories carry moral weight, as Rhyu's inevitably did, what begins as description becomes prescription, and what begins as analysis becomes accusation.
Why Now, and Why This Shape?
The timing is structural, not accidental. With the June 3 local elections approaching and the August party convention already casting its shadow, the Democratic Party is entering a season in which the question of who truly owns the party's soul acquires concrete material stakes—nominations, chairmanships, the architecture of power for the next cycle. Rhyu's ABC theory arrived at precisely the moment when the traditional base and the newer pragmatist constituency needed to negotiate their coexistence, and it offered them, instead, a vocabulary of mutual suspicion.
Yet it would be intellectually dishonest to dismiss the anxiety that animated it. Progressive movements everywhere face the same structural tension: when a leader's personal popularity outpaces the party's ideological coherence, a centrifugal force emerges. Newcomers arrive not for the principles but for the momentum, and veterans fear their convictions will be diluted into a content-free cult of personality. This is a legitimate political problem. The question is whether classification solves it or accelerates it.
Toward a Politics of Intersection, Not Partition
What the ABC controversy exposes is less about one public intellectual's misjudgment than about a deeper pathology in how political communities maintain cohesion. The temptation to purify—to separate the authentic from the opportunistic—is almost irresistible when partisan identity functions as a tribal marker. But the history of every durable progressive coalition teaches the opposite lesson: coalitions expand not by certifying the purity of their members but by finding overlapping purposes among people whose motivations inevitably differ.
President Lee's approval ratings, hovering between 61 and 67 percent across multiple surveys, are sustained precisely because the support base is heterogeneous. Some citizens back him out of democratic conviction; others because they see pragmatic competence; still others because the alternative became unthinkable after the trauma of the December 3 crisis. A framework that ranks these motivations on a moral ladder does not strengthen the coalition. It invites each faction to see the others as counterfeit allies rather than as fellow travelers with different but complementary reasons for the same journey.
Weber insisted that the mature politician must hold conviction and responsibility in a single hand, never sacrificing one for the comfort of the other. Perhaps the real question was never who belongs to A, B, or C—but whether we can build a politics spacious enough that the question itself becomes unnecessary.
Has a label ever changed the way you saw an ally—or the way you saw yourself within a coalition? I would like to hear your story.
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