Why is Mr. Biden not making more of an effort to distance himself from violent leftist radicals?

To this point he’s been notable for going further than any Democratic nominee since George McGovern in 1972 in embracing nonviolent political radicals. For decades, leading Democrats blocked the anti-liberty advocate Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont from any influential role in policy making because the party and its voters embraced liberalism, not Marxism. Four years ago, Hillary Clinton defeated Mr. Sanders in a relatively close presidential nomination contest, but she never asked him to co-author her policy agenda. Long an admirer of the impoverished health and education systems of communist dictatorships, Mr. Sanders now describes himself as a “democratic socialist.”

Democrats voting in this year’s primaries were no doubt aware of the horror that “democratic socialists” have inflicted on places like Venezuela. The regime has somehow managed in a country with the world’s largest oil reserves to run out of fuel—along with everything else. The Journal’s John Otis reports, “A recent U.N.-sponsored report described Venezuela as having the fourth-worst food crisis in the world, behind only war-ravaged Yemen, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.”