But perhaps the most striking difference is the rationalization, and sometimes full-throated defense, of violence from left-wing elites: the glorification of havoc, the vilification of cops and their middle-class admirers, highfalutin defenses of vandalism. The sense of revolution and class warfare was everywhere this week: the cognoscenti and underclass arrayed against the petty bourgeois shop owners; the elite and those they claim to represent against everybody else.

Gary Saul Morson says he has no special insight regarding police actions and the death of George Floyd. But he does have a provocative thesis about America’s current political moment: “To me it’s astonishingly like late 19th-, early 20th-century Russia, when basically the entire educated class felt you simply had to be against the regime or some sort of revolutionary.”

Mr. Morson, 72, is a professor of Russian literature at Northwestern University and an accomplished interpreter of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy. Obviously we haven’t arrived at anything like what Lenin called a “revolutionary situation,” Mr. Morson says, but we have arrived at a situation in which well-intentioned liberal people often can’t bring themselves to say that lawless violence is wrong.

Some who favor government-run health care are pointing out that the U.S. has fewer hospital beds per capita than other countries, but that’s in part because more surgeries are performed at outpatient centers where patients are less likely to catch infections. A more important metric is the number of intensive-care units, which have sophisticated equipment and a high staff to patient ratio. These are crucial for patients in respiratory distress.

A 2012 review in the journal Current Opinion in Critical Care found that the U.S. has 20 to 31.7 ICU beds per 100,000 people compared to 13.5 in Canada, 7.9 in Japan and between 3.5 and 7.4 in the U.K. Differences in how countries define “ICU” account for some of the disparity, the article notes, and the U.S. needs more ICU beds because it has a higher incidence of chronic conditions like heart disease. But importantly, the article finds that health spending is correlated “with increasing delivery of critical care.”

Countries with socialized systems ration intensive care. “Studies from Japan and the U.K determined that admissions to ICUs are severely limited for the very elderly and patients perceived to have little chance of survival,” the article says. In the U.K., many patients were “denied intensive care due to a lack of beds” and “discharged from the ICU prematurely.” The U.K.’s National Health Service already struggles each winter to provide adequate care during routine flu seasons, as our Joseph Sternberg documented on Friday.

Interviewer Anderson Cooper played a film clip from the 1980s in which Mr. Sanders explains why Cubans didn’t side with the U.S. against Castro: Because he “educated the kids, gave them health care, totally transformed the society.” To Mr. Cooper, he said: “When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing, even though Fidel Castro did it?”

In fact, according to the late historian Hugh Thomas, Cuban literacy was already around 80% in 1958, making it the fourth most literate country in Latin America, in keeping with a relatively prosperous economy. Mr. Sanders’s claims about a “popular” revolution are also guff. A good part of the Cuban population resisted the Communist takeover of the island, and Castro’s gun-toting buddies met that resistance with deadly violence.

Immediately after dictator Fulgencio Batista fled, Fidel and his henchmen began executing policemen and soldiers without trials in a campaign of terror. Cuba Archive, a nongovernmental organization that documents deaths during the revolution, counts 1,003 firing-squad executions in 1959.

The slaughter didn’t end there. Castro turned on his allies, targeting those he suspected of being against his one-man takeover. Cuba Archive has documented another 1,862 executions from 1960-67 and 816 combat deaths.