To The Editor:

I agree with “The New York Times” when they warn Nancy Pelosi not to give too much power to the new House Democrats who call themselves “Democratic Socialists.” They are a minority of the Democrats in the new House of Representatives.

I don’t enjoy being unkind or insulting toward anyone, even the Republicans in the Congress, a sizeable minority of whom are really scary “Survival-of-the-Fittest” Social Darwinists. They have a dream and it is to abolish all of the safety-net programs, but, to me, you have to be completely off the grid and out of touch with the mainstream to call yourself a “Democratic Socialist”, and that includes Bernie Sanders who I like and agree with 90 percent of the time. Do you really want to invite Conservatives to call you “Pinko-Red Socialists”?

First of all, they are not true socialists because they do not advocate abolishing our capitalist economic system.

Second of all, if you believe that anyone can be elected President of the United States who calls herself/himself a “Socialist,” then you must live in DreamLand and have drunk the Kool-Aid.

Third of all, where I DO agree with them is in their belief that our federal government should do more and spend more to help the poor, the near-poor, the lower-middle-class, and the middle-class who are struggling to survive and to pay their bills.

They need to INFORM and EDUCATE the public to the FACT that almost every single one of our traditional allies (if not all of them) have federal governments that do more and spend more (in proportion to their population sizes) to help their citizens than we do in the USA.

And, to paraphrase Al Pacino in the movie “And Justice For All”, for us in the USA to be right about this, all of these many other countries have to be wrong.

As a retired college professor of Sociology and Social Work; teaching at West Virginia University, Slippery Rock University, and SUNY-Brockport, I don’t think that America is 100 percent correct in that logic while the remainder of the countries on Earth are 100 percent wrong.

Stewart B. Epstein

Rochester, New York