[I]n a confederation the South must accept the ultra-nationalist Kim Il Sung cult, whereas the North must acknowledge only the South’s superior prosp… - Brian Reynolds Myers

Foreign traders were being restricted to certain parts of the peninsula well before the Korean people learned from the Japanese how to look at the world in racial categories. This makes it harder to figure out whether discrimination against foreigners in South Korea has more to do with xenophobia or nationalism. There still seems to be, as in Japan, a common sense of a certain racial hierarchy, with Koreans and perhaps the Japanese too at the top. But it's a moral hierarchy without much serious conviction of intellectual, let alone physical superiority. For all the loud professions of hostility towards Japan, the Japanese are considered the least foreign of foreign races.

Has the Republic of Korea ever been more obviously unloved than in this year of "Hell Chosun"?

Nationalism is about putting the (ethno-)nation above liberal-democratic and leftist values alike. Once one takes that step, one is not separated from other nationalists by anything irreducible.