More recently, Sanders has argued that the U.S. is already “a socialist society” that redistributes national wealth to corporations through tax breaks and subsidies. “The difference between my socialism and Trump’s socialism is, I believe the government should help working families, not billionaires,” he said on Fox News Sunday.

In claiming his victory on Tuesday night, Sanders made no mention of democratic socialism. Still, it’s clear that Sanders is more comfortable with the term than even some of his top backers, who wonder whether its time as a political liability has actually passed. “He can call himself whatever he wants. For most of his supporters, we are not democratic socialists,” Larry Cohen, the chairman of Our Revolution, the progressive organization that spun out of Sanders’s 2016 campaign, told me. “We don’t use the term, and we don’t use the term because it doesn’t do any good. Again, my friends in DSA would disagree with that. I don’t think the term is helpful.”

When I asked Cohen whether Sanders should disavow the phrase, he replied: “I think that would come off as disingenuous.”

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Republicans have indicated that they plan to target Sanders’s socialist label aggressively if he’s the nominee. They’ve already begun attacking Democratic congressional candidates whom they lump together with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, another progressive who has identified as a democratic socialist. Trump, however, has already gone a step further in trying to tar Sanders’s ideology as fundamentally un-American. “I think he’s a communist,” the president told Fox News’s Sean Hannity in a pre–Super Bowl interview. “I think of communism when I think of Bernie. You could say socialist, but didn’t he get married in Moscow?” (Sanders did not get married in Moscow, but he and Jane Sanders did take their honeymoon in the Soviet Union in 1988.)

While some Republicans, including the president, may salivate at the prospect of facing Sanders in November, his rise within the Democratic Party is alarming to conservatives who fear that the concept they have spent their entire professional life trying to discredit is suddenly catching hold again. “I view it as really dangerous,” David McIntosh, the president of the conservative Club for Growth, told me about the prospect of Sanders winning the nomination. “Don’t assume that if Bernie gets the nomination, it’s a layup and you’re going to beat him. All of us have to redouble our efforts.”

In 2016, many Democrats were rooting for Trump to win the GOP nomination on the grounds that he would be an easy opponent in the fall. Conservatives should not make the same mistake with Sanders, McIntosh told me. As for socialism, he acknowledged that the term was not as resonant with voters as it was during the height of the Cold War. “Is it enough to just say socialism is bad?” he asked. “We do have to explain to the American people why it’s bad, why we think freedom is a better alternative. We need to do a better job of that. Bernie hopefully will be a wake-up call to all of us on the conservative side as well.”