When Bernie Sanders praised — even a little — the Castro regime in Cuba for its success in raising reading levels and other educational achievements, he stepped on a third rail of American politics. This third rail is that there is no nuance, there's only Bad and Good, and you can't mix them with any kind of interpretive commentary without bringing the entire Cold War legacy down on your head.
Maybe he knows what he's doing. Maybe he expects the right is going to throw his long-ago comments about Cuba and the Soviet Union at him at every chance, so he might as well just go with it, and by refusing to be defensive about it change the common wisdom on it. He may even hope that if he's the nominee, he'll be able to drag the entire Democratic establishment into defending his beliefs along with him, even if it's just for their own political survival.
I think there's a lot to be said for Masha Gessen's comments on the whole debacle. As a Soviet-born journalist, she has some deeper insights:
In making his comments, Sanders stepped into the gap that separates the American-born left from those of us who came here from totalitarian countries. The regimes we fled did their best to discredit Marxism, socialism, and leftist ideas in general. To a large extent, they succeeded. When I was growing up, my parents believed, and taught me, that the attempt to build a state in accordance with Marxist ideals—or, really, any attempt to create a society in which everyone contributed what they could and received what they needed—was doomed to produce a totalitarian dystopia. We longed to escape to a land ruled by the blissful and, it seemed to us, natural union of capitalism and freedom.
In the U.S., some of us commenced the long journey to a more complicated view of capitalism. At the other end of this journey lay the realization that capitalism and democracy may not be a match made in heaven, and the hypothesis, supported by the example of Western social democracies, that socialist ideas may yield a freer and fairer society. These discoveries suggested that socialist ideas can and ought to be decoupled from the totalitarian nightmare of our past—indeed, that those totalitarian regimes, whatever they might have written on their banners, had very little to do with those ideas....
But such is the power of Cold War framing—and such is the power of Soviet propaganda—that the decoupling of totalitarianism from socialism has not happened in American political culture. The right and the left both essentially continue to believe that the Soviet Union and its satellite, Castro’s Cuba, were socialist states. On the right, this has meant equating the ideas with the totalitarian nightmare. On the left, it has led to erasing or minimizing the nightmare....
What Sanders could have said, and should have said, is that totalitarianism, that most horrible of inventions of the twentieth century, is one of the greatest crimes against humanity. But it should not discredit the ideas of common welfare and basic fairness that make up socialism. Totalitarianism can weaponize any ideology; socialism is no more essentially totalitarian than capitalism is essentially democratic. This would have been at once factually true and true to the politics that Sanders has espoused.
Well, that may be too nuanced for American consumption at the general level. But what she's saying is that socialism is not the same as totalitarianism. A capitalist country can be totalitarian as easily as a socialist one can; a socialist country can be democratic as easily as a capitalist one can. And that it's time for America to start realizing that and learn how to more widely share the benefits of its wealth among all its people.
Personally, I think that's too heavy a lift for the current US society.
Bernie shouldn't have said it. Winning against Trump and bringing as many of the down-ballot candidates along with him should be all that matters. And his inability to discipline his own message in that regard hurt that overwhelmingly important mission.