I’ve come to expect pushback on my columns from readers who disagree. I enjoy the back-and-forth. Occasionally, however, I encounter a response so off the wall that I am too speechless to dive into the fray. This happened a few weeks ago, when I wrote about the rising socialist faction stirring up Democratic politics.

“Why are you calling them socialists?” some readers demanded.

Feebly, I responded, “Because they call themselves socialists.” It’s literally in the name of their organization: Democratic Socialists of America.

But isn’t there a difference between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and democratic socialism? That was the question from readers who were scandalized by my remark that “aging Gen Xers who thought that socialism had been decisively refuted by the fall of the Berlin Wall have been refuted ourselves” as DSA members won primary after primary.

Indeed, if we start with the word “democratic,” those differences are interesting to consider.

I stand by my assertion that the Soviet Union’s demise cast a long pall over the word “socialism” — at least for those who had not already recoiled from the purges, famines and censorship. I grew up on the Upper West Side, one of the remaining redoubts of socialism in the Reagan era, and watched as the toppling of the Berlin Wall crushed the last hopes that central planning could work.........

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