Megan Romer, a national co-chairwoman of the Democratic Socialists of America, has drawn attention for her refusal to call Cuba a dictatorship. Instead, she claims that “Cubans have access to their democracy in a way that we do not.” Romer additionally opposes continued U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, saying that the DSA “do not believe in pouring U.S. money, military weapons into anything” because “we don’t think it makes it better anywhere.” She then dodged the question of how Ukrainians are supposed to defend themselves.
The DSA’s reputation for ill-considered foreign policy positions was further fueled on what would have been former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s 100th birthday this month. The DSA praised the dictator as a “stalwart symbol of anti-imperialist struggle and self-determination for the Global South,” while accusing Secretary of State Marco Rubio of waging a “genocidal war” against the Cuban people. When one of DSA’s national co-chairs was subsequently pressed on CNN about the tribute, he defended it by pointing to inequality before Castro’s rule, the Communist regime’s healthcare system, and the effects of American sanctions. He acknowledged the regime’s repression only in passing.
The challenge is that these individuals represent a rising political force rather than the whims of a college protester. DSA candidates have won numerous primaries. Indeed, one of its members, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, now governs New York City! The DSA is clearly ascendant.
It’s a notable change from the past. Traditionally, left-wing Democrats had sought to replicate Scandinavia’s example of prosperous democracies with private property protections and generous welfare states. Socialism, they insisted, meant universal healthcare and stronger unions, not Marxism or one-party rule. Today, however, in their praise of Castro, anti-imperialist language and deep hostility to capitalism, the DSA is moving the goalposts.
On paper, it’s odd that this movement has momentum. After all, its imperfections notwithstanding, the U.S. remains the freest, richest, and most socially mobile society ever built.
Yet, this temptation for leftist authoritarianism is hardly new. In the 20th century, European writers pondered why intelligent people in free societies fell in love with political systems they would have found intolerable at home. George Orwell attributed this dynamic to the luxury of liberalism. The British intellectuals drawn to Soviet communism had grown up in what he called the land of habeas corpus, where purges, secret police, and imprisonment without trial were remote enough to enable romanticization of the broader Soviet project. “They can swallow totalitarianism,” Orwell wrote, “because they have no experience of anything except liberalism.” He noted that “Hunger, hardship, solitude, exile, war, prison, persecution, manual labor,” were only words for these individuals.
The appeal for communism isn’t ultimately about the policies it entails, however, but rather communism’s emotional charge. French philosopher Raymond Aron called it the “poetry of revolution,” where the upheaval feels noble and thrilling compared to the dullness of American democracy. Once older sources of meaning, whether country, church, or family, had been discredited, radical ideology could step in as a substitute faith.
Anti-Americanism is essential in this framework. Israel is judged as an evil American project, while Hamas is explained as a product of just grievance. In the U.S., DSA viewpoints and the partner of anti-American rhetoric also offer a potent form of virtue signaling self-promotion: a way of proving that one is not like ordinary Americans, that one is unblemished by their capitalist assumptions or tolerance for unjust government action. It offers moral distinction that allows its purveyors not to rise within the country, but to rise above it. Again, it is easy to hold that view in a society where questions of survival are largely abstract. And crucially, where the luxury of rejecting the existing system depends, in significant part, on being protected by it.
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But the blunt reality is undeniable.
America is a much, much better place to live than Communist Cuba. Cuba’s healthcare system is decrepit, and its people lack basic goods and services. And while the U.S. embargo has certainly made these conditions more pronounced, the ultimate cause of Cuban misery is not America but the corrupt authoritarianism of its geriatric regime.
Still, what is saddest about Romer’s blindness is her lack of true compassion. While she insists that compassion drives her politics, the lives of those who live — or have lived — under communism attest to a very different reality.