The only part of Castro’s legacy that the Left is really interested in is his opposition to the United States and its interests. Note the popularity of eulogies declaring him a thorn in the side of the United States.

That is the real root of Castro’s enduring appeal. The last week’s Castro-mania only makes sense if you look at his rule from the perspective, not of what positive things he accomplished for the Cuban people, but of the trouble he caused for the United States.

That is consistent with what the Left really stands for these days. They are very short on models for what the ideal socialist society would actually look like. In the past year, Sen. Bernie Sanders tried to draft Denmark as his model for a socialist utopia, only to have the Danes reject this role. What the Left actually has is a series of failed and mostly abandoned Communist experiments across the world—Russia, China, Vietnam, and so on; a few particularly ugly and retrograde totalitarian regimes that continue to fester (Cuba and North Korea); and a series of semi-socialist European welfare states, which pay for their “ideal” societies with stifling regulations, economic stagnation, and periodic financial crises (in pretty much every Western European country that is not Germany).

But if the Left has no clear idea what they want to create, they still know what they want to destroy. They define themselves in terms of what they are against: they are against capitalism, profit, and “American imperialism.” That is why they are able to continue their love affair with Castro. They don’t really care what he did for or to his own people. All they care about is that he was against the same system they are against.