When the Democratic Socialists of America aren’t praising Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Mao Zedong, agitating on behalf of communist policies, and resurfacing the forgotten wisdom imparted by self-described communists, they and their allies pretend to be deeply offended by the charge that they are, in fact, communists. Even if the rank-and-file DSA aren’t strict Marxist-Leninists, they and their fellow travelers festoon themselves with the aesthetic trappings of Marxian movements and ape their shibboleths. At the very least, they seem to enjoy participating in a nostalgic reenactment of the kind of political activism that was relevant when the hammer and sickle flew over the Kremlin.
That explains the far-left activist class’s sudden burst of quaint enthusiasm for the Cuban model. It explains their sympathy for the theocrats in Tehran (where the old red-green alliance left behind a cult of Che Guevara that survives to this day inside the Islamic Republic). And it explains the zeal with which they’ve embraced and promulgated old Soviet narratives about the incompatibility of the “neocolonialist” Zionist scheme with proletarian civilization.
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