The so-called Taegukgi rallies of 2016 and 2017 in favor of President Park Geun-hye were telling in several ways, including the appearance, amid the sea of South Korean flags (Taegukgi), of American flags. Although the Stars and Stripes have appeared often in conservative protests over the years, it was usually to commemorate the Korean War or in support of the United States in some way. The American flag's unfurling in rallies that fiercely opposed Park Geun-hye's impeachment seemed more difficult to fathom.

Another interesting feature of these protests was that almost all of the protestors had black hair, although more close-up photos of their faces confirmed that these demonstrators overwhelmingly were senior citizens. This seems highly symbolic: As if to deny that time has indeed passed, these determined marchers were somewhat stuck in the past, and not only by keeping up their hair-dyeing routines. Whether one hears them in news interviews or speaks to them personally, one cannot help feeling that they are gripped by a fixed view from the days of authoritarianism and colonization.

Colonization here refers not only to the period of Japanese rule, from 1910 to 1945, but also to the domination of the United States in South Korea in the decades after liberation. In this system, America served as a model of advancement and source of aid, but also as a global patron of South Korea's developmentalist dictatorship. To these elderly citizens today, the United States stands first and foremost as the nation's savior in the Korean War, when the American-led UN forces helped South Korea escape conquest by the communists. Thereafter in the 1960s, when the United States requested military support from President Park Chung-Hee's government for the Vietnam War, tens of thousands of South Korean troops were sent to Southeast Asia.

To probably the majority from this period, such formative experiences cemented the bond between the United States, anti-communism, South Korea's economic growth out of poverty, and Park Chung-Hee. Park had integrated these components into his program for modernization and to legitimate his rule, which in the 1970s turned iron fisted to keep the people in line in the name of industrialization and the struggle against North Korea.