Sanders’s Speech About Socialism Was Deeply Unserious

All four of my grandparents were sent to prison for their socialist convictions at some point in the 1920s or 1930s. When I was growing up in Europe, democratic countries from France to Italy were ruled by self-declared socialists. As a young activist in the Jusos, the youth organization of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, I sang along wholeheartedly when my comrades would intone “The Internationale” at the end of rallies, rounding off each rendition with a loud shout of “Long live socialism and liberty!”

Given my background, I am baffled by both the fear and the fascination that the socialist label now evokes in the United States. To someone who has grown up in a democracy that provides its citizens with universal health care and (virtually) free higher education, the idea that such policies are dangerously “socialist” is at