I read with satisfaction and great hopes your piece on Professor Baer’s seminar looking for what socialism is (On the Campus, April issue). I am so sick of the far right using that word as a dog whistle to attempt to smear the slightest attempt to bring true social justice to our country. The Wall Street Journal has been pathetic in that cause, floating dictatorial Venezuela as if proof of the iniquity of a system whose creation in the 19th century was launched to combat savage early capitalism. Unyielding in their corruption of the term to serve their cause of political and economic exploitation of the greater population, the far right deliberately ignores the example of true democratic socialism installed in post Second World War Britain by the Labour Party under Clement Attlee. Not perfect by any means, still, its target was humanity over soulless profit.
In Response to: Class Close-Up: Using Literature to Examine Socialism