President Donald Trump used red-scare rhetoric to denounce the progressive winners in New York's Democratic primary last week as "godless communists." Rather than explaining that the progressives are not communists in the vein of the Soviet Union or communist China but social democrats in the vein of Scandinavia, a group of so-called "moderate" Democratic politicians piled on to Trump's red-baiting.

Two days after the primaries, this group of 15 corporate Democrats (let's just call them what they are) attacked the winning Democrats in an open letter drafted by Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York proclaiming, "we are capitalist, not socialist." In an interview with the New York Times, Suozzi added “that message from Tuesday is not the message that I embrace.”

It's one thing for corporate Democrats and progressive Democrats to debate policy differences between them during primaries. But once Democratic voters have chosen their primary winners, it's destructive to continue to attack the winners as some kind of semi-commies. The right-wing will do plenty of that. If they want to win a majority, Democrats shouldn't be piling on. (I would add that after the primaries and before the general election, progressives shouldn't be ideologically attacking moderate Democratic nominees as corporate dupes, either.)

It's ignorant and deceptive for moderate Democrats to declare they are "capitalist." What do they mean by "capitalist" anyway? The US, like every developed democracy, is a mix of capitalist and socialist. Are the "moderates" opposed to such "socialist" policies as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, free public education, anti-trust enforcement, and environmental regulation? If they are, they should say so. If they're not, they should stop declaring themselves as "capitalists" and denouncing "socialism."

Indeed, the Bernie Sanders-styled "democratic socialists" are not really socialists at all. They do not call for government ownership of the means........

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