Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members and sympathizers (today's version of the "fellow travelers") are now either (a) denying that they're really socialists (party name notwithstanding); or (b) admitting they are socialists but redefining socialism in such a fashion that everyone would want it.

Because they are abusing language in order to conceal intention, let us clear away some of the conceptual underbrush.

First, and reflective of yet another triumph of hope over experience, is the claim that this time things will be different, because true "socialism hasn't really been tried."

Which is, of course, the exact opposite of the truth, since it is difficult to conceive of any ideology that hasn't been experimented with in as many diverse places with as many possible permutations. It has been tried and failed and produced dictatorships and mounds of corpses in Europe, Asia, Latin America and even backward Africa (in Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana, Siad Barre's Somalia, and Mengistu Haile Mariam's Ethiopia, among other impoverished hellholes).

Socialism has been a project within wealthy and poor and in-between states on the economic development scale (although, tellingly, Karl Marx's predicted proletarian revolution has never happened where he said it was most likely to happen first, advanced capitalist states). The result has been precisely the same in every instance,........

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