Are you a socialist? You aren’t

To the editor:

The reason why I am so focused on getting Democrats to expose the dishonest political strategy used by Republicans of calling Democrats names like “socialists” is because I agree with Barack Obama when he said that this name-calling lost a lot of votes for the Democrats in 2020, and also lost what would have been additional gains in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate.

Compared with our allies, a lot of Americans are afraid of words like “socialist.” They don’t know what a socialist really is and is not. Most people in the news media also do not know. I also believe that even most of the Democrats in Congress do not know.

That is why they have been silent on the issue — They are incapable of giving a good definition of it.

The only well-known Democrats who have stated “I am not a socialist” are Elizabeth Warren — a former college professor — and Maxine Waters.

Why haven’t the others? Because they don’t know if they themselves are socialists or not. What the national Democrats need to do is to keep telling the American voters to read the 2008 Nobel Prize-winner in economics Paul Krugman’s New York Times article, “Bernie Sanders isn’t a socialist,” because he does a masterful job explaining the differences between a “social Democrat” (which most Democrats are), and a “socialist” (which no Democrats are).

This all is an example of the concept known as “pluralistic ignorance,” which is a situation in which most people are not aware of that which is the truth, and that which is false.

Stewart Epstein