The East is Rod

Dreher's next authoritarian adventure

I went to a garden party tonight over in the Buda hills. I met there a journalist who writes about national security and defense for a Hungarian magazine. He said to me, “It really upsets us to see what’s happening to America. It’s not the America we knew. I was at Georgetown not long ago, and met this student from the Midwest who wanted to go into the foreign service. I asked him what he wanted to do with his career. He said, ‘Destroy white supremacy.’ He is as white as I am! These are the people who will be running America one of these days. Your country is tearing itself apart, and this is hard for us to see. We loved America. We looked up to it.”

The man seemed genuinely sad, and uncomprehending. What could I say? — Rod Dreher, “What’s Happening to America?”

Sometimes one has to travel far away to see what is happening in one’s own home. I experienced this living in Budapest under the enlightened (if misunderstood) leadership of Viktor Orbán and talking to the many deeply conservative and traditionalist Hungarians I constantly encountered in cafes there. And I am certainly experiencing it in a very powerful way in Pyongyang, my new temporary home.

There are not many cafes in this city — though rich in heritage and values, its people are poor in the merely financial sense that is so important to materialist liberals, and the price of a cuppa is well beyond the means of all but a few residents and Western visitors with special clearance. But every time I take my morning latte and bland but filling “Korean croissant,” it seems, a North Korean goes out of his or her way to approach my table and say, “You are Rod Dreher, author of Live Not By Lies and a visiting scholar at the North Korea Traditional Conservative Institute — we have much to discuss!” (I must also say that they always address me in faultless English — a testament to how badly we have been misinformed about the North Korean education system, which does not waste its students’ time on “woke” subjects and racialist folderol.)

Today my visitor was a young woman who works in a nearby factory — she is, understandably, forbidden to say what they make — who is also studying international relations at Kim Il-sung University. She is well aware of the political correctness and rejection of basic values that plagues the United States, and she marveled that our leaders allow it to continue. “The Marshall” — the North Korean people’s affectionate nickname for Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un — “would never tolerate such nonsense,” she says, shaking her head.

She had me there.

One of the many backwards ideas with which I was indoctrinated as a conservative of the Before-Time was the idea that North Korea was some kind of backward, totalitarian “hermit kingdom” and that its deprivations owed to the failings of communism. Communism is certainly a great evil, but there’s a huge difference between what the North Koreans believe in, “Juche,” and the communism one finds in, say, gay communes and universities in the West.

True, the people are provided for in North Korea — but with great austerity; none of the Joe Biden Democrats’ spendthrift socialism. There is no workers-of-the-world nonsense about each according to his needs in Pyongyang. The other day I saw a man, very emaciated, appear to pass out in the street from hunger; no one stopped to help him, though some passers-by were carrying food. (I certainly wanted to help, but the terms of my visa forbid me from interfering in local matters.) Soon a van came and took the man away. Later one of my new North Korean friends — a well-educated young man who has read all my books in English — explained that the government sometimes has agents go out in public and pretend to collapse from starvation in order to find out which citizens are hoarding enough food to share with strangers. “It is very similar to how your red states go after welfare cheats,” he told me. Yes, I thought, and so much more effective!

So Juche is less like what the wokesters call communism and more like the nationalism of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance — strong values, common purpose, and a helping hand when needed (or when merited by adherence to basic values). You can see its effect powerfully in Pyongyang: The streets are clean, the people orderly and neatly-dressed — a world away (figuratively and literally!) from the filth and chaos of San Francisco and New York. And — a wonderful thing to see — no “pride” flags or sacrilegious transgender cartoons! The very idea of gay marriage, or gay anything, is ridiculous here.

We have much to learn from our North Korean friends. As usual I have written many thousands of words about this, but I can’t post them right now as the internet is very strictly regulated — something that should interest Josh Hawley, who is fighting the pernicious influence of Big Tech back home! I tell you, I’d move here in a second if I could just spend a few months a year on foodie vacations to Europe and Louisiana — and, considering the perks available to North Korean citizens who provide exceptional service to The Marshall, it’s not entirely out of the question! Tramp tramp tramp, the footsteps of our General Kim, spreading the spirit of February!