It’s election season, and madness is in the air. Besides the usual questions in a midterm election — who will carry the House and Senate, and how many seats will the incumbent president lose — the word socialism, rarely heard in American politics, is out in the open. A few candidates are actually running for office under the socialism banner. But what does that mean for the 2018 elections and beyond?

For starters, we can say with confidence that there will be no socialist sweep into office in 2018. All the hype is really about a mere handful of candidates, most notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez running for Congress in New York and Cynthia Nixon who is running so far behind in the race for governor of New York that we would not pay attention but for her earlier role in “Sex and the City.” There are also candidates for the state house in Pennsylvania. This hardly portends an electoral boom for socialism, but the fact that they are running at all is news.