(Credit here to Andrew Tobias, whose thoughts I am tailoring for our local cast of characters)

Trump’s current line, which [Dopey] dutifully repeats, is that Democrats are communists. (Also: deranged radical lunatics.)

Yesterday, I asked whether [Dopey] even knows what a communist is.

He began his response by quoting a Republican congresswoman, Nicole Malliotakis, who says “Socialism is communism light — the first step to communism.”

And yet when you think about it, socialism is actually what prevents communism.

Cuba, Russia, China — they did not gradually morph from ever-increasing socialism to communism — they exploded via revolution from extreme wealth inequality.

Was czarist Russia socialist? Anything but.

Was pre-revolutionary China socialist? No — and it banned the communist party.

Was pre-revolutionary Cuba socialist? Check your AI. Mine opines:

Wealth inequality in Batista’s Cuba was extreme — among the worst in the Western Hemisphere — and one of the core drivers of the Cuban Revolution. The country had a small, ultra‑rich elite concentrated in Havana and a vast rural population living in deep poverty.

Extreme wealth inequality, not socialism, is what precedes communist revolutions — or else, in the alternative, precedes “populist” takeovers like Hitler’s or Mussolini’s or Trump’s.

(I know it irks to keep repeating it, but for years Trump – no avid reader – kept My New Order, a book of Hitler’s speeches, by his bedside. I have a copy. He needed only to read the foreword and the introduction, by western journalists, to understand how Hitler was elected.)

It’s not socialism that precedes communism or fascism; it’s extreme inequality — where one guy’s worth a trillion dollars while those, like me and most Democrats, who want to raise the $7.25 minimum wage are called communists. Where the ruler enriches his family by billions his first year back in office and guts the Internal Revenue Service of the staff needed to collect taxes due from the billionaires and large corporations whose tax rates he’s cut.

Socialism, by preventing such grotesque inequality, prevents communism.

And socialism, it’s always worth noting, is a matter of degree.

The U.S., with its publicly owned and run roads and schools and police and fire departments, its progressive income tax and social safety net, is socialist.

The rest of the developed world goes further, especially when it comes to health care, but it’s only, as I say, a matter of degree.

MAGA Americans want Social Security and Medicare and affordable health care (be patient: after ten years of diligent thinking, Trump has come up with a secret concept of a plan).

They want public roads, public parks, unemployment insurance and clean water.

They just hate the elites and see the press as “the enemy of the people” because Trump has persuaded them it’s the elites and the press — and the radical deranged lunatic communist Democrats like Clinton, Obama, and Biden — who are to blame for their difficulty in getting ahead.

When in fact the blame for that, if one looks at it objectively, falls mostly on Trump and the Republican elites.