Kevin Williamson:

Bernie Sanders, the socialist from Vermont from Brooklyn, has stepped in it and stepped in deep with his praise of Fidel Castro’s brutal dictatorship in Cuba and its fictitious advances in, among other things, literacy. Republicans must be looking forward to watching him defend that in Florida in front of audiences composed of the friends, family, and survivors of those whom the Castro regime murdered, imprisoned, tortured, disfigured, repressed, and terrorized — which, it bears remembering, it continues to do, to this day, under Raúl Castro. The Cuban people desperately need our help, not Senator Sanders making excuses for the men who murder and oppress them.

The analogous cases are, as a rhetorical matter, obvious enough: Mussolini had a really strong public-works program. Hitler was a patron of the arts. Franco was . . . pretty fashion-forward, even for a generalissimo. Etc.

Conservatives are as vulnerable to flights of ideological fancy and political passion as anybody. Even the great F. A. Hayek (who rejected the label “conservative” even though he plainly was a conservative as Americans use the word) found himself hostage to excessive enthusiasm, in his case for the repressive rightist government of Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet’s government did make critical reforms to economic policy in Chile. It also committed horrendous atrocities. “Yes, but what about his entitlement-reform program?” is at the very least morally and intellectually insufficient. And the attraction to the strongman form of government always must be resisted, because there is, finally, no such thing as a benevolent dictator. Hayek was gently chided by Margaret Thatcher for his excessive affection for the Chilean regime. Her advice to him is wise counsel for conservatives today: “Our reform must be in line with our traditions and our Constitution. At times the process may seem painfully slow. But I am certain we shall achieve our reforms in our own way and in our own time. Then they will endure.”

It is not true that the American Left has no interest in “our traditions and our Constitution.” The Left is very interested in our traditions and our Constitution — it hates these and wishes to see them destroyed. The Left’s war on the Constitution goes back to the foundation of American progressivism under Woodrow Wilson, who considered the Constitution outmoded and a hindrance to intelligent administration. The line of thinking extends straight into modern progressivism: Harry Reid’s attempt to gut the First Amendment in order to put political speech under government control, a proposal endorsed by every Democrat in the Senate; other related progressive attempts to destroy the Bill of Rights, beginning with the First and Second Amendments but by no means limited to these; the contention by progressives, typified by Ryan Cooper, that “the American Constitution is an outdated, malfunctioning piece of junk”; Senator Sanders’s call for “revolution”; etc.

The Democrats may shed a few crocodile tears over President Donald Trump’s supposed assault on the Constitution (Trump’s assault mainly has been on American manners, the importance of which is generally overlooked and misunderstood), but assaulting the Constitution is the foundation of their politics and their jurisprudence: Assaulting the Constitution — reshaping it to better fit progressive political preferences — is what Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan were put on the Supreme Court to do. The intellectual and constitutional position that this is impermissible — that the Constitution must be treated as though it says what it actually says rather than as though it said what people invested with transient political power wish it said, which is all the “textualism” of Clarence Thomas et al. actually amounts to — is denounced as dangerous “extremism.” Whatever it is the American Left is on about, it is not the Constitution — not the actual one that has been written down, in any case.

Rather, the Left advocates a new constitutional covenant, one in which the law is written on our hearts — or at least on the hearts of a cabal of left-wing law professors. 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?

American politics has worshipped at the altar of the candidate debate since Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas verbally sparred in debates before the 1858 U.S. Senate election in Illinois.

A century later came the 1960 presidential debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Sixteen years later Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford held debates, and we’ve been stuck with this tradition of dubious value ever since then.

After Tuesday’s Democratic presidential candidate debate, maybe it’s time to end this tradition. Jim Geraghty:

After [Tuesday] night’s debate of angry shouting and incoherent crosstalk, it is time for the Democratic National Committee to recognize that its system and design for this cycle’s primary debates is failing just about everyone, and for the Republican National Committee to take notes for next cycle.

How many candidates entered this cycle thinking, “Sure, I’m not well known nationally, but once I’m up on that debate stage, people will realize what a superstar I am, and the donations to fuel our campaign will roll in”? The problem is that it is extremely difficult to stand out on a debate stage with ten people, and even harder when the party holds two debates over consecutive nights to accommodate the twenty candidates who qualified. Candidates such as Tim Ryan, Michael Bennet, Jay Inslee, and Steve Bullock barely made impressions upon the audience, much less used the debates as a steppingstone to serious contention.

The DNC faces a catch-22 situation: The more they try to make a debate process fair to lesser-known candidates, the more an increased number of lesser-known candidates will qualify for the debates, making it harder for all lesser-known candidates to stand out and rise in the field.

Most of these candidates seemed inexplicably oblivious to the fact that their debate answers sounded a lot like everybody else’s debate answers. The point of a debate is to draw contrasts, even though that is apparently upsetting to some news columnists who complained about “divisive questions.” The purpose of a debate is not to assure nervous Democrats that all of their candidates are terrific and that everyone in the party gets along and mostly agrees with each other.

One of the reasons that the Las Vegas debate was so refreshing and almost riveting is that for once, the candidates spoke bluntly about why they didn’t think the others should be nominated. Elizabeth Warren really believes that Mike Bloomberg was a creep to his female employees and offers far too little contrast with Trump. Mike Bloomberg really believes that Bernie Sanders is a Communist and unelectable. Amy Klobuchar really believes that Pete Buttigieg is insufferably smug and unsubtly condescending to everyone else around him.

For most of these debates, just as two Democrats started exploring a contrast that might actually be useful to undecided primary voters, someone would jump in and say, “this kind of infighting is just what Donald Trump and the Republicans want to see” — trying to play the role of the mature peacemaker, the “only adult in the room” pose that Barack Obama loved so much. Cory Booker was the worst offender, believing he could advance to the top tier by repeatedly arguing that leaders of a diverse party representing a variety of viewpoints should never disagree in public.

The DNC’s system of ten candidates per night meant that the top-tier candidates couldn’t believe they were sharing the stage with Marianne Williamson talking about “dark spiritual forces” and obscure members of Congress such as John Delaney. This cycle we’ve seen jokes that the debates need a “play-in round” such as the NCAA basketball tournament, a preceding contest that determines the lowest-ranked seed in the main tournament of 64 teams. Maybe when there are 20 candidates, something like that makes sense. This entire cycle, the DNC flinched when accused of being unfair and hesitated to tell candidates and their supporters a hard truth about campaigning and life: You have to earn your place on stage.

As this cycle’s debates went on, it became clear that the moderators were not interested in ensuring that each candidate got roughly the same amount of time. I believe the greatest disparity came in the second debate, where Joe Biden spoke for 21 minutes and John Hickenlooper, Andrew Yang, and Marianne Williamson spoke for 8.7 minutes. An imbalance like this is fundamentally unfair but also a recognition of a cold, hard fact: The audience is just not as interested in what the longshots have to say.

The presence of the audience in the auditorium or hall is a mistake, as some of us have been emphasizing throughout this process. It creates all kinds of bad incentives, most notably to aim for applause lines instead of answering the question, and an attempt to get your supporters in the hall to cheer as loudly and wildly as possible, no matter how anodyne the answer. The presence of a large audience also allows for hecklers and protesters — one more discordant note to disrupt whatever rhythm the candidates had established.

Then there are the moderators’ questions. There is a time and a place for broad, open-ended questions such as: “What changes would you make to the American health-care system?” Given a minute and 15 seconds to respond, a candidate can’t get into many specifics. The answers usually turn into a list of goals — “I will make health care more affordable for everyone, and I will make sure every American gets the care that they need” — with little sense of how to get there or what specific changes to law would be made to try to bring about that outcome. It reflects badly on the primary and general electorates that they are so easily satisfied with a wish list instead of a plan with specific details.

This cycle’s debates have intermittently acknowledged that almost every idea discussed on stage would require passage of a bill through Congress, and the votes aren’t likely to be there unless there is a historic Democratic landslide in this year’s Senate races. Some candidates have pledged to get rid of the filibuster in the Senate, even though the president doesn’t have any power over that. Few of the remaining candidates have much of a record of creating bipartisan coalitions. (If you ask Senate Republicans, Biden and Klobuchar are the ones who have actually reached out to hammer out deals.) Most of these candidates are setting themselves up to lament, “Well, I wanted to enact my agenda, but I thought I would have more Democrats in the Senate, and I just didn’t have a backup plan to figure out how to handle a GOP Senate majority.”

Last night, CBS partnered with Twitter and submitted a question from user Casey Pennington:

“How will your policies address and ensure affordable housing and education equity for minimum wage workers?” There’s nothing inherently wrong with that question, but again, you’re not going to get many specifics in 75 seconds. Even if candidates can remember the specifics of their plans in the heat of the moment, they and their debate coaches have little faith in the audience’s ability to follow the fine details of federal policy.

Any candidate who does get into policy details runs the risk of being mocked as an out-of-touch Washington insider; in the second debate Williamson mocked “this wonkiness” as insufficient to address the challenge of Trump. Her criticism was simultaneously unfair — this is a debate about what the next president should do, of course the solutions are going to focus upon federal policy — and will probably be a reflection of the views of many voters.

Thus, most candidates answer policy questions with variations of, “this is important. I have done a lot on this issue. I have led the fight on this issue. We will do a lot, including achieve these goals. Visit my website for more information.” Here’s Klobuchar’s answer:

KLOBUCHAR: Thank you. This is one of the first times we’ve talked about housing. And I put forward an extensive policy. I think — when I’ve looked at this both in my job in local government and in the Senate, one sure way we can make sure that kids get a good start is if they have a roof over their head and a stable place to live. So the way you do that is, first of all, taking care of the Section 8 backlog of applicants. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people waiting. And I have found a way to pay for this and a way to make sure that people get off that list and get into housing.

Secondly, you create incentives for affordable housing to be built and, third, to help people pay for it. And I want to make clear, given South Carolina and the rural population, as well as urban, that this isn’t just an urban problem. It’s a big urban problem, but it’s also a rural problem, where we have housing deserts and people want to have their businesses located there, but they’re not able to get housing. So for me, it’s building a coalition. And I actually like to get these things done and to — the way you do it is by building a coalition between urban and rural so you can pass affordable housing and finally get it done.

Last night, one segment of the debate addressed an important and under-discussed matter: Bernie Sanders proposed more than $50 trillion in new spending and has only laid out about $25 trillion in new taxes. Norah O’Donnell asked, “Can you do the math for the rest of us?”

I’ve never missed Andrew Yang more.

I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to follow a discussion of numbers auditorily. It’s easier to understand differing amounts of money when you can actually see the numbers visually. In a better world, during this part of the debate, the candidates would have had to literally add up the numbers of their plans on a whiteboard or giant touchscreen with an Excel spreadsheet or something, or at least had charts. Visualize the scale of the gap for us.

Klobuchar tried: “Nearly $60 trillion. Do you know how much that is, for all of his programs? That is three times the American economy — not the federal government — the entire American economy.” At another point, Bloomberg said, “Let’s put this in perspective. The federal budget is $4.5 trillion a year. We get $3.5 trillion in revenue. We lose $1 trillion a year. That’s why the federal budget — deficit is — right now, the debt is $20 trillion, going up to 21. We just cannot afford some of this stuff people talk about.”

Sanders’s answer on how he would fill that gap was a 7.5 percent payroll tax on employers.

Here’s the Tax Foundation’s calculation of how that tax would play out:

Sanders’s proposal to levy a new 7.5 percent payroll tax on employers with a $2 million payroll exemption for each employer would result in a 0.90 percent decline in long-run economic output, according to the Tax Foundation General Equilibrium Model. The capital stock would be about 1.02 percent smaller, and employment would drop by 1,190,000 as a result of the tax.

The combined effect of the 7.5 percent payroll tax on employers and extending the 12.4 percent Social Security tax on wages would lower economic output by 1.17 percent over the long run. It would also reduce the capital stock by 1.33 percent, with about 1.5 million fewer jobs.

While the 7.5 percent payroll tax is formally levied on employers, employees would bear the full burden of the new payroll tax. Employees would earn lower wages, lowering the return to labor.

Enacting tax hikes that would eliminate 1.5 million jobs and lower wages is a terrible idea. Too bad you need a white paper to show the consequences to people.

Add it all up and you have a system that doesn’t serve the top-tier candidates, the longshot candidates, the moderators, or undecided voters watching at home.

Except that if the debate system ever benefited the voters watching at home, that hasn’t been the case for decades. The media has failed us by focusing on who (they think) “won” the debate instead of analyzing what was said for its substance, not for poor debate performance, as if the candidates were high school forensics competitors. Debating skills have literally nothing to do with what presidents do.

Mona Charen:

According to CNN, Bernie Sanders “has been consistent for 40 years.” Some find this reassuring. Bernie is not a finger-in-the-wind politician who tacks this way or that depending upon what’s popular. On the other hand, if someone has never changed his mind throughout 78 years of life, it suggests ideological rigidity and imperviousness to evidence, not high principle.

Why make a fuss about Bernie’s past praise of Communist dictatorships? After all, the Cold War ended three decades ago, and a would-be President Sanders cannot exactly surrender to the Soviet Union.

It’s a moral issue. Sanders was not a liberal during the Cold War, i.e. someone who favored arms control, peace talks, and opposed support for anti-Communist movements. He was an outright Communist sympathizer, meaning he was always willing to overlook or excuse the crimes of regimes like Cuba and Nicaragua; always ready to suggest that only American hostility forced them to, among other things, arrest their opposition, expel priests, and dispense with elections.

Good ol’ consistent Bernie reprised one of the greatest hits of the pro-Castro Left last week on 60 Minutes. When Anderson Cooper pressed the senator by noting that Castro imprisoned a lot of dissidents, Sanders said he condemned such things. But even that grudging acknowledgment rankled the old socialist, who then rushed to add, “When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing?”

Actually, the first thing Castro did upon seizing power (note Sanders’s whitewashing term “came into office”) was to march 600 of Fulgencio Batista’s supporters into two of the island’s largest prisons, La Cabana and Santa Clara. Over the next five months, after rigged trials, they were shot. Some “trials” amounted to public spectacles. A crowd of 18,000 gathered in the Palace of Sports to give a thumbs-down gesture for Jesus Sosa Blanco. Before he was shot, Sosa Blanco noted that ancient Rome couldn’t have done it better.

Batista was a bad guy, one must say. But summary executions are frowned upon by true liberals.

Next, Castro announced that scheduled elections would be postponed indefinitely. The island is still waiting. Within months, he began to close independent newspapers, even some that had supported him during the insurgency. All religious colleges were shuttered in May 1961, their property confiscated by the state. N.B., Senator Sanders: Castro also found time to knee-cap the labor unions. David Salvador, the elected leader of the sugar-workers union had been a vocal Batista opponent. He was arrested in 1962 and would spend twelve years in Cuba’s gulag.

The Black Book of Communism recounts that between 1959 and 1999, more than 100,000 Cubans were imprisoned for political reasons, and between 15,000 and 17,000 people were shot. Neighbors were encouraged to inform on one another and children on their parents. During the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, Cuba imprisoned gay people in concentration camps. Like other Communist paradises, Cuba’s greatest export was boat people. About two million of the island’s 11 million inhabitants escaped. Countless others died in the attempt. Did Sanders ever wonder why a country that had done such great work on literacy and health care had to shoot people to prevent them from fleeing?

Bernie Sanders has credulously repeated the other great propaganda talking point about Cuba: its supposedly wonderful “universal” health-care system. It’s not wonderful. Even those wishing to give Cuba the benefit of the doubt note the lack of basic necessities. Many hospitals in the country lack even reliable electricity and clean running water. A 2016 visitor found that patients in one Havana hospital had to bring everything with them — medicine, sheets, towels, etc.

Yes, Cuba has high rates of literacy, but the state wanted readers in order to propagandize them. Granma tells people what to believe and forbids access to other sources of information. To this day, the regime controls what people can know. There are two Internets on the island. One for tourists and those approved by the government and the other, with restricted access, for the people.

Bernie Sanders has access to all the information he can absorb, and yet he remains an apologist for regimes that violate every standard of decency. Unlike the Cuban people, he is responsible for his own ignorance and pig-headedness. He claims to be a “democratic socialist,” but as his Cuba remarks suggest, the modifier may be just for show.

Jon Miltimore: