As author Simon van Zuylen-Wood writes in a dryly biting essay in New York magazine, the spread of “socialist” politics is changing the way New York’s young people socialize, date, and badge themselves politically. It’s also changed how the word “socialism” gets used: “Until very recently, it wasn’t that socialism was toxic in a red-scare way. It was irrelevant, in a dustbin-of-history way. But then came Bernie Sanders’s 2016 candidacy, then the membership boom of DSA [from about 5,000 to about 56,000,] then the proliferation of socialist cultural products like Chapo, and then, finally, the spectacular rise of Ocasio-Cortez.”

Socialism has no agreed upon public definition in American parlance. One subject quoted in the story “asked that I not use his last name, because his parents fled the Soviet Union and hate socialism.” Presumably it does not mean to him what it does to his parents. But there’s little agreement anywhere.