In the 1980s, Korea’s liberal democracy was understood only as a conservative political ideology, but in conjunction with changes in the Cold War order, liberal democracy revealed a diverse spectrum and was sometimes combined with radical ideas. This paper addresses the question of what discursive function South Korea’s liberal democracy performed in the mid-to-late 1980s, when the tectonic shift and dissolution of the Cold War and changes in inter-Korean relations were turbulent, through the flow of three separate but related subjects. While the Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo regimes and ruling ideologues paid little attention to the substantiation of democracy, they used liberal democracy as a means of defending the system against the offensive of radical resistance movements. Some ruling ideologues focused on creating capitalist subjects by criticizing existing anti-communist policies and attempting to correct liberal democracy in a positive direction. Kim Dae-jung was a self-described ‘moderate reformist’ who advocated ‘non-violent democracy, unification of North and South Korea through non-communist relations, and non-anti-American national independence’, and was basically a liberal who advocated a market economy. He can be seen as an alternative liberal democrat in that he actively raised economic democratization to realize distributive justice and was critical of the breakdown of liberal democracy caused by the Cold War and division. Moon Ik-hwan, who argued for people’s democracy, shows traces of the strong influence that the radical leftist movement of the 1980s had on resistant liberal democracy. His post-Cold War and post-colonial attitude evokes the people as suffering beings of the times, and at the same time reveals that the problem of democracy is not free from the problem of uneven relations with the powerful countries surrounding the Korean Peninsula.