President Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong Un, Feb. 27-28, reminds me that North Korea is officially the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. That, in turn, recalls days of my sports-mad boyhood when, watching the Olympic Games, I noted that athletes, especially swimmers, deformed by steroids tended to come from a country called the German Democratic Republic. In those days, my father’s work sometimes took him to Zaire, now known as Democratic Republic of the Congo.
See the pattern? When a country needs the word “democratic” in its name, it virtually guarantees an absence of democracy in its government. The Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste is a flawed exception. In general, the word is a lie.
Which brings me to democratic socialism, all the rage now on the American Left. Socialism is a system of central command. Those who call themselves democratic socialists do so to distinguish themselves from more obviously unpleasant forms, such as Soviet socialist and National Socialist, but there is a defensive quality about the name that points to the core problem of the belief system itself.
Socialism is antithetical to democracy, which is partly why Americans, steeped in their founding values, have long anathematized socialism as intrinsically evil, and use the word as a slur. Like the system itself, it destroys what’s around it. In the phrases “social democracy,” “social market,” “social justice,” and others, the adjective “social” negates the noun it is ostensibly only supposed to modify. Add the word “social,” and there is little “democracy” and no “market” or “justice” at all.
A feature in this week’s magazine examines what social democracy really is, and the discomfort of modern Democrats who, like everyone else, are watching socialism destroy Venezuela in real time, not at some point in history but right now. It’s so much harder to trip out the facile “true socialism has never been tried” when fellow socialists are defending their socialist pal President Maduro and blaming his plight on Yankee imperialism.
Our cover story, “The Karma of Kamala,” by Fred Barnes is about Sen. Kamala Harris, a front-rank candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Early polls in Iowa, which she recently visited, have had her trailing, but her aggressive anti-Trumpism, ethnicity, sex, and charisma mark her as a serious contender.
Elsewhere in the mag, readers will find what health-conscious menus call “lighter fare.” Eric Felten writes about eating in a time machine in Phoenix, we look through the lens of the Daytona 500 at Joe Gibbs’ triumphs and tragedies, and Trent Reedy recalls Pie Heaven.
Your Land ponders the Mona Lisa’s air buds, examines the wacky world of school snow-day tweeting, and explores the phenomenon of “offense archaeology.” That last touches on the famous 1945 picture of a sailor kissing a nurse on V-J Day in Times Square. It’s hero, George Mendonsa, died last week, and his obituary can be found in this edition.
