For three months in 1917, Leon Trotsky lived in the Bronx, just south of the congressional district where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently defeated a 10-term incumbent in a Democratic primary. Because she calls herself a democratic socialist, the word “socialism” is thrilling progressives who hanker to storm the Bastille, if only America had one. And the word has conservatives darkly anticipating the domestic equivalent of the Bolsheviks storming St. Petersburg's Winter Palace 101 years ago in October, if there is an equivalent building in the eastern Bronx and northern Queens. Never mind that only about 16,000voted for Ocasio-Cortez's version of “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!”
A more apt connection of current events to actual socialism was made by Sen. Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican, when President Trump decided to validate the conservative axiom that government often is the disease for which it pretends to be the cure.
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