JONAH GOLDBERG: Venezuela’s a disaster. Yet socialism’s more popular than ever.

Why the disconnect? For conservatives of my ilk, the most obvious answer is that, for the left, socialism itself is never to blame. One of my favorite guilty pleasures is the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s Twitter feed, which insists daily that the socialist ideal has never been tarnished by real-world socialists. A tweet permanently affixed to the top of their page reads: “Are you about to tell us ‘Socialism was tried in Russia’ or ‘Look at Venezuela’ etc? It has NEVER EXISTED! It comes AFTER global capitalism!”

Even mainstream liberals don’t like to concede any points in socialism’s disfavor. The late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was a murderer and a tyrant, so was the late Cuban Communist Fidel Castro. Pinochet helped his country transition to democracy. Castro, who killed more people, left his country as a police state. But while Pinochet is a demonic figure in the liberal imagination, Castro’s status is far more complicated. He is still a hero to many.

For the last decade, the New York Times has covered the socialism of both Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro with the same sophisticated nuance it long applied to Cuba. Over the weekend, it ran a heart-wrenching story on how Venezuela’s poor children are dying from starvation. But the culpability of Chavism, Venezuela’s brand of socialism, is something the reader has to bring to the page. Such passive detachment between cause (in this case socialist policies) and effect (mass misery and starvation) is rarely found when the Times reports on, say, Republican economic policy.

Dedicated socialists (and their even-more enthusiastic Communist comrades) claim their political philosophy is scientific, yet those doe-eyed adherents remain permanently immune to facts and reason.