Over the weekend, in an interview with Anderson Cooper for 60 Minutes, Democratic presidential front-runner Bernie Sanders was asked about old video clips in which he praised the achievements of the Cuban Revolution without endorsing the island nation’s undemocratic political system. Sanders’s response to Cooper was a nuanced evaluation of the pros and cons of the Cuban model from a democratic socialist point of view.

“We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba,” he said, but “it’s unfair to simply say that everything is bad.” He then cited the enormously successful literacy program that Fidel Castro initiated immediately after the revolution, noting that it would be absurd to say the policy was “a bad thing” because “Castro did it.” Finally, answering Cooper’s follow-up question, Sanders unequivocally condemned the Cuban government’s jailing of political dissidents.

These manifestly reasonable comments were immediately denounced not just by conservatives like Kevin D. Williamson, who wrote a piece on the controversy for the National Review entitled “Bernie Sanders is a Moral Monster,” but also by Democrats like Florida congresswomen Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Donna Shalala, former Democratic National Committee head Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and most of Sanders’s rivals in the race for the Democratic nomination.