RUTHFULLY YOURS

We wish that were true. But we’ve been reading the work of Bernie’s senior political advisers, and their words deserve more attention. Take speechwriter David Sirota, who joined the Sanders campaign in March, though he had been attacking the Vermont Senator’s Democratic opponents on Twitter for months.

Mr. Sirota wrote an op-ed for Salon in 2013 titled “Hugo Chávez’s Economic Miracle.” Mr. Sirota conceded, Chávez “was no saint” and “amassed a troubling record when it came to protecting human rights and basic democratic freedoms.” Those pesky disclaimers aside, Mr. Sirota suggested that there’s plenty to learn from Chávez.

“For example, the United States has adamantly rejected the concept of nationalization and instead pursued a bailout/subsidy strategy when it comes to rapacious banks and oil companies—and those firms have often gone on to wreak economic havoc. Are there any lessons to be learned from Venezuela’s decision to avoid that subsidization route and instead pursue full-on nationalization?” Mr. Sirota wrote. “And in a United States that has become more unequal than many Latin American nations, are there any constructive lessons to be learned from Chávez’s grand experiment with more aggressive redistribution?”

He wrote this in 2013, nearly 15 years after Chávez took power. Mr. Sirota has also opposed nearly all U.S. military actions abroad, and he blames the U.S. for inciting terrorism. Days after the Boston marathon bombing in 2013, Mr. Sirota wrote that “with America having killed thousands of civilians in its wars, we should be appalled by acts of terrorism—but we shouldn’t be surprised by them.” His disclaimer: “Noting this is not to argue that such attacks are justified or that we deserve them.”

Mr. Sanders’ political director, Analilia Mejia, spent part of her childhood in Venezuela and told the Atlantic in 2016 that “it was better to live on poverty-level wages in a shantytown in Venezuela than on a garment-worker’s salary in Elizabeth, New Jersey.”

Mr. Sanders’ senior policy adviser Heather Gautney visited Caracas in 2006 to attend the World Social Forum. The event featured a two-hour speech by Chávez lauding Karl Marx and Fidel Castro and pledging to “bury the U.S. empire.” Ms. Gautney admitted the event had “a militarized feel” but wrote about how Chávez had “implemented a serious [sic] of programs to redistribute the wealth of the country and bolster social welfare.”

She defended Chávez’s nationalization of private industry and efforts to rewrite the Venezuelan constitution on grounds that Chávez’s “proposals advocated for a system in which the presidency would be decided via popular vote.” She also wrote that “today’s neoliberal capitalist system has become utterly incompatible with the requisites of democratic freedom.” And she says that “as it stands, US representative political and economic institutions are not structured as representative bodies in any real sort of way.”

As a sociology professor at Fordham, Ms. Gautney has written admiringly that the U.S. Occupy movement was “based on the belief that some places, institutions, forms of property, and rights, should be collectively owned and enjoyed.” So “if neoliberal forces of privatization and deregulation have indeed dispossessed people of these forms of social wealth, then occupation should be understood as an act of repossession in which persons or groups take back what was once common.”

Redistribution of wealth and property is a major theme among the Bernie brigades. In a column for the Intercept this year, Mr. Sanders’ national press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, wrote: “There will be no racial equality under capitalism. . . . voters should be clear that ‘recognizing’ disparities and doing something about them through aggressive, redistributive polices are not the same thing.”

Claire Sandberg, national organization director for the Sanders campaign, praised U.K. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn for going “beyond even what Bernie called for in saying that we need to have a robust public sector, that we need to in the UK bring the railways back under public control, and to really fight back against the privatization. That’s something that we’re not even talking about here: How do we undo all of the privatization that’s occurred over the last 30 years?”

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Mr. Sanders isn’t a gadfly on the fringes of the Democratic Party. He’s a leading candidate for its presidential nomination, and these are the people who would staff his White House. Voters need to understand that they don’t merely admire Venezuela. By their own words, they want America to emulate it.