I think any discussion of North Korea as it exists today is pointless without considering the historical context it was born in, of which the most important aspect is the denial of a locally sovereign political process.

[1]

> The 38th parallel, meant as a line of convenience for two armies' temporary operations, immediately took on characteristics of a political boundary, infuriating the divided people. Just two weeks after his troops landed in Korea on September 8, the US commander, Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, sent a message to General MacArthur in Tokyo: "Dissatisfaction with the division of the country grows."
[...]

> Even before reaching Korea, he had instructed his officers to view the Koreans as an enemy. When his 78,000 troops began landing, he ordered Japanese police to keep local welcoming crowds away. The police shot and killed two Koreans in the process.
[..]

> In the fall of 1946, the US military authorized elections to an interim legislature for southern Korea, but the results were clearly fraudulent. Even General Hodge privately wrote that right-wing "strong-arm" methods had been used to control the vote. The winners were almost all rightists, including [Syngman] Rhee supporters, even though a survey by the American military government that summer had found that 70 percent of 8,453 southern Koreans polled said they supported socialism, 7 percent communism, and only 14 percent capitalism.
[...]

> Chung Koo-Hun, the observant young student of the late 1940s, said of the villagers' attitude: "The Americans simply re-employed the pro-Japanese Koreans whom the people hated."
[...]

> Seventy of the 115 top Korean officials in the Seoul administration in 1947 had held office during the Japanese occupation.

Of course the Soviets were offering support in the north, but:

[2]

> [They] never established a full-fledged military government, moving quickly to local control.

The US even horrifically fumbled what minor concessions it was willing to offer to leftist sentiment:

[3]

> The US military government had pleased the farmers by decreeing a limit on the "rice rent" of 30 percent of the crop. That was on paper. In reality, enforcement was lax, landlords still gouged tenant farmers and the military government did actual harm with a related ordinance lifting price controls and imposing a "free market" on rice. That set off a binge of speculation, corruption and smuggling of Korean rice abroad, which left subsistence rice farmers and other poor southerners with little to eat. They exploded with resentment.

> In the southern city of Taegu, people verged on starvation. When 10,000 demonstrators rallied on October 1, 1946, police opened fire, killing many. Vengeful crowds then seized and killed policeman, and the US military declared martial law. The violence spread across the provinces, peasants murdering government officials, landlords, and especially police, detested as holdovers from Japanese days. American troops joined the police in suppressing the uprisings. Together they killed uncounted hundreds of Koreans.

And this is all before the war. In which the US killed millions of people in the north with mass bombing, attacks with biological weapons, and annihilation of the north's industrial capacity. US troops even indiscriminately slaughtered thousands of refugees fleeing to the south, the same people they were supposedly protecting!

It's the same old colonial playbook, rehashed again and again. It's not like the US learned anything from this experience either.

[1][2][3] - The Bridge at No Gun Ri, pp. 47-53