Brutal autocracies have a peculiar fascination for certain liberals, especially if they write for the New York Times. Walter Duranty once spun paeans of praise for Stalin’s Soviet Union, even as millions were being starved to death in Ukraine, and millions more being rounded up and shot during Stalin’s serial purges — and he won a Pulitzer Prize for it. Our latter-day Duranty is Thomas Friedman, whose admiration for Communist China has pockmarked his column in the Times for more than a decade. “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks,” he wrote in 2009, “but when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also . . . impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward.”
There in a nutshell is the key appeal of the totalitarian system for liberals: It empowers an enlightened elite to impose policies on a people without contradiction, whether by voters or even by the rule of law. It’s obviously why it appeals to our current president, an unabashed China admirer. “Their ports, their train systems, their airports are all vastly superior to us now,” Obama announced during his first presidential campaign, “which means if you’re a corporation deciding where to do business . . . you’re starting to think, ‘Beijing looks like a pretty good option.’”
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