Some have "United".

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Fascists, and by extension authoritarians, hate education and vocabulary, so they use the language to lie as much as they can.

Marxist-Leninist theory judges democracy by class content, not procedure. The key question is "democracy for which class?" Liberal democracies are seen as formally free but substantively controlled by capital (bourgeois democracy), while one-party socialist states claim to be "people's democracies" because the state (in theory) represents the working class/peasantry against capitalist and landlord classes. Popular will, in this framework, isn't expressed through multiparty competition but through the party as the organized vanguard representing proletarian class interests — elections, if held, ratify this rather than allow contestation between competing class programs.

This is in contrast to Liberal democracy defines democracy procedurally: competitive multiparty elections, freedom of speech/press/association, checks on power, peaceful transfer of power. By this standard, one-party states with suppressed opposition and concentrated power fail regardless of their self-description.

So on the naming question, This is genuinely contested. Two views exist:

Official/Marxist-Leninist justification: These states claim genuine "people's democracy" precisely because it excludes bourgeois parties and concentrates power to defend workers' interests against capitalist restoration — so from their own theoretical framework, the name isn't false, it's just a different definition of democracy.

Critical/liberal view (widely held in the West and by many scholars): The names are propaganda — legitimizing branding for authoritarian, often personalist or elite-controlled, rule with little actual popular participation or accountability.

Which framing is "correct" depends on which definition of democracy you accept as valid — that's ultimately a normative/philosophical dispute, not a factual one.

They fool nobody. They're taking the piss.

US uses that radical leftist "United" word though.

Hey get this, evil people lie. On purpose

Phony legitimacy

Same reason as OpenAI, Microsoft, Fox News, etc

Any entity involved with food which explicitly claims to be gourmet is objectively not.

Same reason nazis put socialist in name but promptly killed off socialists and trade unions.

Authoritarians love nothing more than to deny others the correct language to make progress and to write history.

They're fraudsters.

Feat of mental gymnastics. They consider themselves a looser sense of democratic that isn't a liberal multiparty democracy with competitive elections. With a twist of idealization, they rationalize that their dictatorship of the proletariat headed by a one-party leader serves the people: their bottom-up hierarchy of councils culminates to their single-party leadership whose final decisions (that close discussion and demand absolute obedience) somehow reflect the collective/people. They might call it democratic centralism or dress it up in more elaborate pseudotheoretical jargon.

Can't believe you'd ask this question and leave out the People's Republic of China.

Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria would like to talk with you.

Same reason the USA has 'United' in its name.

The more corrupt the leaders of a country are, the harder they protest that the country is anything but.

You can just say whatever you want, words dont mean anything and people will just go with it. Its just marketing

It’s a reflection of the state’s earlier aspirations—the justification it used to overthrow the preceding authoritarian state.

The problem is, the more drastic the social and political changes are that the new regime is trying to enact—and the more entrenched the preceding regime was—the more tempting it is to lean on authoritarian vanguardist methods to cut through the pushback. But once they start down that path, the means inevitably become the ends and everything winds up back where it started.

Like Citizens United bringing the division and destruction

It's the same as when a food item says "gourmet" something. 100% it's crap.

They want the people to feel like it's for their own good. DPRK and China aren't oppressive, they're PROTECTING you from the evils of the world by controlling every aspect of your life.

Shit was comical when China officially came to the US to protest the banning of TicTok and acted like they didn't own it indirectly. Then talked about how America is oppressive, while TikToc is blocked in their own country along with anything Google, FB, encrypted messaging, the Internet in general. It's like Hitler trying to prostitute a shop lifter on the basis they'a worse person.