Myerson’s muddled screed might not merit a second thought if it his defense of communism was just a personal eccentricity. Unfortunately, toned-down versions of such whitewashing are fairly common not only on the left but even in mainstream liberal opinion. In 2005, reviewing the book, Mao: the Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff chided the authors for their overly negative view of the subject: “Mao, however monstrous, also brought useful changes to China. … Mao’s legacy is not all bad.” This rose-tinted view also explains why Westerners who dote on mass-murdering dictators of the left, such as folksinger and onetime Stalin devotee Pete Seeger, tend to get a pass from the media as misguided idealists with their heart in the right place.

The motives behind the reluctance of the left, including many liberals, to fully acknowledge communism’s evil are stated with startling candor by the late leftist writer/journalist Daniel Singer in a 1999 essay in The Nation reviewing The Black Book of Communism, the monumental study of communist terror and repression compiled by a team of historians. Such a one-sided account, Singer lamented—missing the good bits such as “enthusiasm, construction, the spread of education and social advancement”—makes it impossible to understand why so many Western leftists were drawn to communism and willing to overlook its crimes. Besides, he wrote, communism’s record of atrocity was being used to discredit “the possibility of radical transformation” and force people to resign themselves to the status quo. In other words: coming to grips with communism’s true nature makes the Western left look bad and discourages the quest for utopia.