Back in the day when I had to go to Sunday school, my favorite teacher was Hart Beaver. He was a lawyer and an Assistant District Attorney for Lebanon County (as I wrote about in my Murder in a Small Town series).

He led some interesting discussions from time to time. Like when we were discussing whether Jesus’s philosophy could be applied to governing a nation. Our conclusion was that Jesus, with his notion of selling all one’s possessions, giving all one’s money to the poor, and being easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter Heaven (Mark 10:17-31), was essentially a communist, and Hart Beaver, both a devout Christian and a Republican, did not disagree with our conclusion.

This was back in the mid-1960s when the Republican Party was hurling communist as an insult at vulnerable Democrats, a trick they had learned from Joe McCarthy.

It seems that once again with the success of Democratic Socialists, Republicans have dusted off the communist label and are planning to use it with a vengeance this campaign season. Or perhaps they never really stopped using it.

Here’s a helpful Q&A from one of my favorite sites. 

A.J. in Ames, IA, asks: As you wrote, “they are all Communists,” coming from the GOP, is going to be the preferred campaign slogan this year. So how does a rational intelligent person explain to the average non-political person (I used to say “explain it to me like I’m a sixth grader” but I sometime wonder if that might be too advanced) the difference between the Democratic Socialist candidates versus your good, old-fashioned communist?

(Z) answers: Here is what I say to students when addressing this question, which I always do during my Cold War lecture:

In the early 1950s, Joe McCarthy proved that accusing Democrats of being communists works. And Republicans have been using that trick ever since (show slides that support this observation).

There is no officeholder in America today who is communist. And if you talk to someone who claims otherwise, I suggest you ask them: (1) Can you explain communism to me in a few sentences?, and (2) Can you explain to me how [PERSON X] qualifies? I think you will find that the person will be unable to answer one or both questions.

Now, communism is the most extreme/pure form of socialism. Just like all salmon are fish, but not all fish are salmon, it is also the case that all communists are socialists, but not all socialists are communists. And indeed, whether they realize it or not, all Americans (or virtually all Americans) are socialists. In communism, the government owns and controls the entire economy. In socialism, the government owns and controls parts of the economy. And in the U.S., and virtually the entire rest of the world, there is universal agreement that some things work best when they are socialized. Examples include fire departments, police departments, public libraries and public schools. In the U.S., it also includes Social Security, which is the single-most-popular program the U.S. government operates, with over 90% approval.

The great majority of the disagreement over socialism comes down to a handful of sectors of the economy, most obviously healthcare (at least in the United States). Socialists, and in particular Democratic Socialists, think the government should be in the business of guaranteeing healthcare to everyone. Many Americans think otherwise. However, this policy perspective does not make the Democratic Socialists into communists. If it did, nearly all of Europe would be communist, as nearly all of Europe (and much of Asia, incidentally) has some form of government-backed healthcare.

Socialists, including Democratic Socialists, also tend to favor higher taxes on the wealthy. However, this does not make them communist, either. If it did, then General and Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower would be a communist, because he oversaw the highest income taxes in American history.