I wanted badly to like Monopoly: Socialism, I’ll admit. Though released last year, Hasbro’s socialist-parody version of the original board game caused something of a stir last month after it became the subject of a viral Twitter screed by an indignant lefty academic who complained it was “mean-spirited and woefully ill-informed.” “From the tagline ‘Winning is for capitalists’ we can see right away that this game is not going to be friendly to whatever it deems ‘socialism’ to be,” he wrote, somewhat unnecessarily.

The thread, with its tendentious grousing and wet-blanket scolding, and the rhetoric-aping writeups it inspired, was tailor-made to broach a tribal-ideological response, with those on the Right supportive of the game and those on the Left largely siding with the scolds.