For decades, American liberals denied they were actually socialists, and accused conservatives of engaging in "red-baiting" for saying that they were.
Now that they have finally 'fessed up and enthusiastically embraced the label, they are involved in a concerted effort to try to define it in such a way that it proves palatable to an American public that has historically been averse to it.
In short, that which was for so long denied is now being admitted, but with the caveat that what they are admitting to isn't so bad after all, just the warm and fuzzy kind of socialism allegedly found in Oslo and Copenhagen (as opposed to the nastier version once found in Moscow, Warsaw and Bucharest).
Because this can all be a bit confusing, it might be useful to remember where socialism actually came from, beginning with the most influential socialist theorist of the 19th century, Karl Marx.
In his more rigorous works Marx depicted socialism as a transitional stage between capitalism and the final stage of history, communism. Alas, and like most other theorists of his time, in casual discourse he also tended to use the two terms interchangeably.
It was only in the decades following Marx's 1883 death that a split developed between "revisionary" and "revolutionary" socialists that would eventually make the socialist-communist distinction clearer.
Within this context, the "revisionary" socialists began arguing that socialism (defined as public ownership of the means of production) could be achieved incrementally by working within Europe's emerging liberal democratic systems, while the "revolutionary" socialists continued to hew to the Marxian idea of a violent revolution that would "expropriate the expropriators" (the bourgeoisie) and install a "dictatorship of the proletariat" thereafter.
Roughly by the end of the Great War (which gave Lenin, Trotsky and their revolutionary socialist colleagues the opportunity to put their dictatorship of the proletariat in place in Russia), this split became permanent, with distinct communist and socialist parties.
The "social democratic" parties of Europe, including the British Labor Party, the German Social Democratic Party, and the French Socialist Party, are the descendants of the revisionary socialist faction, having long ago dispensed with most elements of Marxism and even made their peace with many elements of capitalism.
In contrast, the communist parties placed in power in various East European countries by Stalin after World War II, as well as their West European counterparts like the French Communist Party (PCF) and the Italian Communist Party (PCI), sided with the Soviet Union during the Cold War and adamantly rejected both liberal democracy and capitalism (as did the American Communist Party, CPUSA, of Earl Browder and Gus Hall).
There isn't much left, of course, of the Marxist-Leninist version of socialism, just pathetic embers in Cuba and North Korea and communist parties incongruously presiding over increasingly capitalist economies in post-Mao China and Vietnam, along with that embarrassing meltdown known as post-Chavez Venezuela.
So when we discard what Leonid Brezhnev called "real, existing socialism" (i.e., the nasty kind), what we are left with is an ersatz form called "social democracy," which isn't really socialism at all.
All "social democracy" means today is a larger welfare state ("Medicare for all"), a more progressive tax code (a 70 percent or higher marginal tax rate) and somewhat greater regulation of the economy and labor markets (that $15 minimum wage).
What it most certainly doesn't mean is what socialism once primarily meant--public ownership of the means of production, the abolition of private property, central economic planning, and establishment of any kind of proletarian dictatorship.
Indeed, the hunch is that most of the people now claiming to be socialists have never read Marx or Engels, know nothing about Mao's Cultural Revolution or the Moscow show trials, and don't even know what "proletariat" once referred to. Like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they are as ignorant of the content and history of socialism as they are of political theory and basic economics.
Additional evidence for such ignorance, as if any were still needed, actually came recently in Ocasio-Cortez's comparison of Donald Trump's proposed border wall and the Berlin Wall, suggesting a lack of intellectual capacity to distinguish between barriers designed to keep people out and those designed to keep them in.
People want to come to countries like America because of our economic freedom. People wanted to desperately leave the misnamed "German Democratic Republic" because it lacked such freedom.
On a broader level, our contemporary would-be socialists even lack sufficient knowledge of the places they claim represent the socialism with a human face they desire--Scandinavian countries like Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
Far from socialist nirvanas, such states have economies in which the means of production are in private hands, property rights are rigorously protected and market forces overwhelmingly determine wages and prices. They don't even have minimum-wage laws, let alone $15 per hour.
In short, they are capitalist states, nothing more, nothing less, with large welfare states financed and only made possible by the very capitalism the left despises.
The problem for the Bernie bros is that real socialism is invariably ugly and bloody, while the nice kind exists only in their ignorant minds.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 02/25/2019