The American Left believes, and always has believed, that American society is fundamentally corrupt, that American power is a cancer, that American prosperity is a sham enjoyed only by the undeserving, that American business is great barrier to happiness at home and abroad, that the American way is dangerous hypocrisy, that the American foundation is not the story of liberty but the story of slavery and genocide, and that the shortest way to utopia is making common cause with those who oppose this stockpile of wickedness. And so the American Left has found something to love about every monster it can go abroad to find: Lenin and Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, Mao, the Castros, the ayatollahs, the Sandinistas (Greetings, Mayor de Blasio!), every tinpot tyrant and posturing revolutionary from Mussolini to Che. Even when it comes to al-Qaeda or the Taliban, the Left feels compelled to reinterpret history so that the crimes of Osama bin Laden et al. ultimately can be laid on the Pentagon, Wall Street, Main Street—if Americans are dying in Benghazi, it must be because some crazy American Christian stirred up the locals. If there are crack addicts in Los Angeles, it must be that the CIA was behind it. That is really what Senator Sanders’s weird little rape-fantasy literary œuvre is about — the unshakeable conviction of the Left that American society is fundamentally corrupt, an abomination that only can be saved — if it can be saved at all — by means of “revolution.”

By “revolution” Senator Sanders means investing a great deal of political power — including extraconstitutional power — in him as president. Power to what end? He already has told us, if only we would listen. He hasn’t spent his public career as an aspiring Thorvald Stauning but as an apologist for the likes of Fidel Castro and the Soviet party bosses who kept the gulags stocked with fresh souls.