Letter to the editor: Democrats are not socialists

With all due respect to my fellow Americans, most of us simply don’t know that a “liberal/progressive” is not the same thing as a “socialist.”

A true “socialist” is someone who wants all of the businesses and workplaces to be owned and controlled by “the state” or “the government” or “the workers” or “the people” and not by individuals and groups who run them for profit as we have here in the USA.

The overwhelming majority of Democrats want our federal government to spend more on social programs to help the lower and middle classes as they struggle to survive. They are not “socialists. They are “liberals/progressives” who want our market-based capitalist economy to become more humane (and not replaced).

They know that there has never been a truly “socialist” society in which socialism produced enough wealth to meet people’s basic needs. Thus, while conservative-Republicans and the conservative news media do not want the American people to be aware of this, most Democrats want our federal government to be more like those of almost every one of our traditional allies which spend more than we do, in proportion to their population sizes, on helping the lower and middle classes. None of our allies are “socialist,” and they know it.

President Trump and the conservative news media who are calling Democrats “socialists” are either lying to the people, or are poorly informed and just plain wrong.

Stewart B. Epstein

Rochester, N.Y.

The writer is a former Squirrel Hill resident who taught at West Virginia and Slippery Rock universities.