Ronald Radosh explains in a Washington Free Beacon column why “democratic socialists” aren’t as cool as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might lead you to believe.

When it comes to understanding the crisis in Venezuela, the new self-proclaimed democratic socialists revert to the old trope of Stalinist era lefties. In the old days of the Cold War, the horror that emerged after the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe—discussed in great depth in Anne Applebaum’s Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe—was “explained” in this manner by the fellow-travelers of the Old Left: The purge trials, arrests of dissidents, their torture and years of imprisonment may have been harsh, but were all necessary to preserve socialism and prevent a “fascist” takeover from occurring. And if people they knew to be innocent were caught up in the net, they told everyone they were guilty because the “people’s democracies” only arrested the guilty. …

… The old democratic socialists and social-democrats of that era, however, never went along with that warped logic. True to their belief in democracy as the only system of government worth preserving, day in and day out in their small publications, such as Partisan Review and Dissent magazine, they did what they could to bolster the opposition to Communist tyranny and did not let cries that they were helping “McCarthyism” stop them. So, when it came to the Cuban revolution and Castroism, unlike the New Left, they had no illusions about the supposedly wonderful socialist paradise Castro was creating in Cuba. …

… Today’s young and historically illiterate American socialists and leftists do not realize how they are echoing the apologias for Stalin’s defenders so many decades in the past. They take pride in their reflexive anti-Americanism, tweeting and arguing that America is trying overthrow a revolutionary democracy.