By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, February 25, 2020
Bernie Sanders may be on the verge of gaining an
insurmountable lead in the Democratic nomination fight, but he’s not letting
that get in the way of his socialist principles.
Asked in a 60 Minutes interview about old
statements praising Fidel Castro’s supposed achievements in health care and
education, Sanders stayed true to himself.
“You know, when Fidel Castro came into office, you know
what he did?” he told interviewer Anderson Cooper. “He had a massive literacy
program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?”
No, literacy programs aren’t a bad thing, but they
usually don’t require seizing power in a violent revolution, jailing and
killing political opponents, seizing private property, or outlawing the free
press. Teaching children to read is something that happens in free societies,
too. That Bernie continues to believe a literacy program is some kind of
recommendation for a regime that has otherwise oppressed and immiserated its
people for decades is a sign of his skewed view of what’s important and just
for a polity.
Asked by Cooper about jailed Cuban dissidents, Sanders
said he condemns that, but in any rational view, it’s the imprisoning of people
for expressing unwelcome political views that is the foremost thing to know
about the Cuban dictatorship, period, full stop.
The Left has nonetheless always viewed Fidel Castro as
some kind of social worker who happened to take and hold power — or “come to
office,” as Sanders delicately puts it — via force.
Back in 1989, Sanders wrote, “Cuba — the one country in
the entire region that has no hunger, is educating all of its children and is
providing high-quality, free health care — is hated with a passion by the Democrats
as much as Republicans.”
Besides the moral obtuseness of arguments like this, the
factual basis for such claims is dubious. Cuba was already doing well on
measures of health care and education before the revolution. By one estimate,
Cuba’s per capita income in 1955 was about half that of the most advanced
Western countries and on par with Italy’s. By 2000, after the collapse of the
Soviet Union that had provided Cuba an economic crutch for so long, Cuba’s per
capita income was half what it had been in 1955.
Cuba went from being a leader in Latin America on key
economic measures to a laggard by the time Castro was done with it. The Washington
Post has noted that “in terms of GDP, capital formation, industrial
production and key measures such as cars per person, Cuba plummeted from the
top ranks to as low as 20th place.”
Bernie’s perspective on Cuba isn’t an outlier. It is
characteristic of his worldview that has a sympathy for America’s enemies, at
least if they are Communist or Islamist; that assumes the worst of the United
States; and that opposes nearly all U.S. military interventions as misbegotten
or malign. (Sanders voted for the Afghanistan War after September 11 and now
regrets even that vote.)
Electing Bernie Sanders would be almost indistinguishable
from putting the late radical historian Howard Zinn, or the America-loathing
linguist Noam Chomsky, or the tendentious left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore in
charge of American foreign policy. The country would be in the hands of an
opponent of its power with no faith in its goodness. Bernie would make Barack
Obama’s overly solicitous attitude toward our enemies and Donald Trump’s
bizarrely warm statements about foreign dictators look like American
foreign-policy orthodoxy by comparison.
There is almost no enemy of the United States that
wouldn’t be heartened by a Sanders victory and see it as an opportunity to make
gains at the expense of the United States and its allies. If his decades-long
track record is any indication, Sanders would be inclined to make excuses for
our adversaries and look on the bright side of their repression and rapine.
He’s doing it with the Cuban dictatorship to this day.
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