Lincoln Chafee stepped into the Presidential race Wednesday with his plan to “wage peace.” A central tenet of his World Peace campaign: “Let’s join the rest of the world and go metric!”

Chafee’s metric advocacy may seem to come out of nowhere, but it actually springs from a well that runs deep in the heart of American liberals and the Democratic Party. It comes from deep-seated wish that America — the country most American liberals truly do love — was more like Denmark and Belgium.