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.