On Tuesday night, New Hampshire Democrats handed down their judgment on socialism: a soft yes. They want to give it a try, even if they have no idea why.

Realists understand socialism. They joke: How did socialists light their homes before they used candles? Light bulbs.

For those living under the boot of a tsar or a Chinese emperor, in a long-ago era when socialism had never been tried, socialism might have sounded attractive. But today, two things have changed. One is that humanity has a century of universally negative experience with state socialism. It has never worked, and it never will. The other change is that free markets have brought unprecedented and widely shared prosperity to Western economies — not through exploitation but through specialization and the free flow of goods and services. Markets work. Socialism doesn't.

In the United States, even the working poor enjoy luxury, convenience, and choice that no tsar or Chinese emperor ever did. This makes socialism the answer to a question that no thinking person alive today would ask. Simply witness how, in once fully socialistic economies such as those of China and India, the introduction of free markets and free trade are rapidly doing something that decades of foreign and charitable aid never could: eradicating world poverty forever.

So-called "democratic socialism" is not social democracy or center-left politics. It is, in fact, incompatible with the modern Western model of an open, liberal society and a market economy with progressive taxation and a generous welfare state. Rather, socialism is a revolutionary system of thought that would abolish America’s republican system of government and its free market economy. It condemns private property and profit as exploitative. It demands their curtailment and eventually, their destruction; it pushes for nationalization of industries including but not limited to banking and healthcare.

Going into Tuesday, Bernie Sanders already arguably won Iowa and had overtaken Joe Biden in polls as the national front-runner. Now, New Hampshire Democrats have just put Sanders one step closer to the presidency. Meanwhile, Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, once Sanders's biggest challengers, were severely wounded.

In elevating Sanders, New Hampshire voters risk being represented on the ballot by an apologist for some of the worst socialist tyrants of the last century.

Republicans would be wrong to become complacent over Sanders’s rise, the way Democrats did when Donald Trump began winning in 2016. They thought Trump couldn’t win, and he did. Well, Sanders can indeed win the presidency, and the threat that he poses is deadly serious.

Although he no longer actively supports the Cuban, Sandinista, or Venezuelan models of socialism, Sanders did so when it mattered. He praised and defended them. He excoriated and accused of lying those who spread the actual truth about those regimes’ ghastly atrocities against dissenters, the poor, and the environment.

The most charitable interpretation, which avoids questioning motives, holds that socialist ideology simply blinds Sanders to reality. This is a credible explanation, considering the profound ignorance required to disparage the U.S. economy for its multiplicity of deodorants, and to somehow claim that this phenomenon is tied to children going hungry. Someone please tell Sanders that consumer choice is a good thing — a symptom of a society’s economic health and wealth creation. It is a sign that people are both self-sufficient and engaging freely in transactions of mutual benefit. In fact, the more deodorants there are in your store, the less likely it is that children nearby are starving.

Sanders’s socialist ignorance exceeds anything Trump has displayed with his deep misunderstanding of trade. When Sanders admits that he doesn’t know how much his single-payer healthcare system will cost, it is because he is as truly, deeply ignorant of the economics of healthcare as he sounds. Meanwhile, even the liberal Urban Institute has estimated the cost at $34 trillion.

Democrats in New Hampshire have made a huge mistake, yoking themselves to an outdated and failed system of ideas about economy and governance from the 19th century. Democrats in other states don’t have to make the same mistake, and we hope they do not.