Before Tuesday’s debate at the Fox theatre in Detroit, Michigan, Bernie Sanders slipped over to Windsor, Ontario, Canada, home town of this writer. The Vermont socialist led a delegation of American diabetics seeking cheaper insulin, but Sanders failed to note that Canadians Frederick Banting and Charles Best invented insulin during the early 1920s, long before Canada adopted government monopoly health care, which did not start in Canada.

Citizens have the right to “free medical service,” proclaims the Soviet Constitution of 1936, also known as the Stalin Constitution, which also offers the right to “free” education, and a “system of state stipends” for students. Those rights of free speech, assembly and so forth, are only formal “bourgeois” rights.

None of the ten Democrat debaters in Detroit – Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke, Amy Klobuchar, John Hickenlooper, Tim Ryan, John Delaney, Marianne Williamson, and Steve Bullock – showed any knowledge of what Molotov called “socialist democracy.” And from the audience’s reaction to the Democrat stars, it appears few understood that socialism had been the biggest failure in human history. One could say the same about CNN, which introduced the debaters in the style of an NBA playoff game, on a set that looked like something from the film Network.

The contest kicked off on health care, which Sanders, who honeymooned in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, touted as a right. He acknowledges his Medicare for all plan would raise taxes, and that troubled other candidates. Elizabeth Warren, no longer running as a Cherokee, said only billionaires and the wealthy would pay more.

A moment of clarity came from candidate John Delaney, of the few Democrats troubled by the prospect of taking away health care the workers already have and like. “Social Security didn’t make pensions illegal,” Delaney said, but that was “the equivalent of what Warren and Sanders are proposing.” Delaney wants universal care, and also individual choice. Nobody pointed out that you can’t exactly have both.

In similar style, candidate Tim Ryan said it wasn’t about left or right, and challenged Sanders on some points. Then he said that as president he would create a “chief manufacturing officer” so America could dominate the global electrical vehicle market.

Like “free” health care and ‘free” college, that too was an echo of the Stalin Constitution, which proclaims “the economic life of the USSR is determined and directed by the state national economic plan with the aim of increasing the public wealth, of steadily improving the material conditions of the working people.” It didn’t exactly work out that way.