If there is one thing about Democrats I’ve learned, it is this: if you let the most naive of them off the leash, they will wander far and wide. Their ranks contain an element that moves too far too fast. Whether it’s transgender issues or pronouns or defunding the police, their sense of practicality can be challenging, to say the least.

Fox News knows this and loves this. Fox News does not need a solid reason to hyperventilate over fringe Democrat issues. They will take whatever they can get, no matter how small or insignificant the movement is. This is something we Democrats have learned over the years. If you give that propaganda machine the smallest crumb of a reason, you can be sure they will go into overdrive.

For those of us who refer to ourselves as center-left, moderate Democrats, news that a socialist won a mayor’s race in New York fills us with a kind of dread. We know that right-wing media will inflate this issue no matter how insignificant or unlikely it is to catch on. This year the tagline is: beware the Democrats; they are socialists and communists.

We are not socialists, and we are definitely not communists. However, just as the Right has its share of ideological wingnuts, so too does the Democratic Party. It’s a big country.

To young voters experiencing ever-increasing food prices, rents controlled by apps meant to fix high prices, homes that they will never be able to afford, and AI that promises to take, if not radically alter, their job, some form of socialism may look interesting. To young voters dealing with student loans from universities that promised them jobs but only delivered a great, four-year party with a huge price tag, a change in the economic balance may be enticing. Then there’s health care, pet care, HVAC repair, even children’s sports, all uniquely controlled by stealthy venture capitalists who have made sure to buy enough politicians to thwart any regulations that might hold them in check. To this generation, a new deal can look pretty appealing.

But these voters have not delved deep enough into what they are being promised. The Democratic Socialist Party constitution says: “We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality, and non-oppressive relationships.” Only the latter half of those ideas make sense.

Any generation that lived through the Cold War knows that the notion of “popular control” in regard to government should be used exceedingly sparingly. Even the flagship socialist countries such as Finland, Norway and Sweden do not have popular control of resources, production and economic planning. Russia, China and North Korea hold that distinction. These ideas seem under-researched on the part of the DSP founders, and every Democrat I know wants nothing to do with outright socialism and especially communism. (Healthcare is another matter.)

Still, a red scare is a ready-made issue for Fox News; they will sing this song 24/7 for the next two months and beyond if it helps them. So what’s the Democratic rejoinder to this? There are two.

First, the Republicans have their own characters they’d like to keep in the closet as well. There’s the Nick Fuentes cult, the one that wants to turn the clock back to the medieval ages for women and minorities. There’s the Proud Boys, the Patriotic Front, the Nationalist Social Club, the John Birch Society and the Heartland Institute, to name a few. The list goes on and is long. These are groups with truly twisted, extremely narrow-minded logic that only a guy like Trump would give a front-row seat to.

The other more powerful rejoinder is that the math just doesn’t add up. The Democratic Socialists Party counts 95,000 people as members. There are 45 million registered Democrats in America and 75 million people who voted for Kamala Harris. Depending on how you read these numbers, it means that the DSP constitutes between .1 and .2 percent of voting Democrats. The sheer insignificance of this says it all. This is no movement; it’s a fringe, at best, novelty that will always be present in some form but will never have significant sway. And as for communists, the numbers are almost non-existent: 11,000 members equating to 0.01% of those who voted for Harris. They are not worth an explanation.

The stewards of the Democratic Party will say little about these matters because they don’t want to alienate anyone who might tick the (D) box, especially in critical swing states. Under normal circumstances, this would hold true for the fringe right-wingers and the Republican stewards as well. Trump has, of course, upended that; his boys are still out there, standing back and standing by.

As to the Democrats, socialism is a very, very small issue within the party. Any other interpretation is just salivating from Fox News.