KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Bernie Sanders Hates America — But he still has a soft spot for Fidel Castro.

Senator Sanders is not an intellectual. He is not a scholar of law or economics or intersectionality studies, and he is not a member of the new administrative class that the American Left has been building since Woodrow Wilson. He is only their John the Baptist, a voice crying in the wilderness and announcing the coming of the new kingdom.

What kind of kingdom is it to be?

There is some indication in history, because Senator Sanders’s parroting Castroite propaganda about Communist Cuba’s supposed successes in literacy and health care are hardly without precedent. The New York Times’s infamous Walter Duranty reportage was straight-up Soviet propaganda. Lincoln Steffens’s celebration of Soviet life — “I have seen the future, and it works!” — required a measure of willful blindness. The New Republic at times functioned as a gentle apologist for Stalin and Stalinism. Noam Chomsky and Pol Pot, the American Left and Ho Chi Minh, the American Left and Chairman Mao, the American Left and Castro, the American Left and Hugo Chávez, the European Left and the Ayatollah Khomeini, knucklehead campus dopes and Che Guevara, etc. — the pattern repeats itself. There is a streak of Leninism that runs from the Soviet enterprise through Mao’s China and into the ayatollahs’ Iran. But what Lenin’s revolution really has in common with Mao’s and with Khomeini’s is that each of those ultimately was directed at the same enemy: us.

Castro was fortunate in one sense: “A decade ago, Forbes estimated Fidel Castro’s personal net worth at $900 million,” a Forbes columnist wrote after Castro’s death in 2016. Just under the wire to avoid the wrath that the millionaire Vermont Marxist has for billionaires.