Ricardo Hausmann says the national tragedy unfolding in Venezuela is being weaponised in the upcoming US elections by Trump, who is urging Americans not to vote for the Democrats, dubbing them “radical socialists.” Trump has been warning the Americans about “socialism,” ranting about the US meeting the same fate as the oil-rich Venezuela, whose economy had collapsed after years of flagrant incompetence, gross mismanagement, rampant corruption and chronic kleptocracy.

The author believes Bernie Sanders bears a fair share of the blame that he does not separate the wheat from the chaff. By touting his brand of “democratic socialism,” Sanders has not sought to reassure voters that he knows how his coveted Nordic-style "socialism" differs from “Chavismo.” He needs to assuage fears that he does not intend to model America’s economy after Venezuela, which is engulfed in an unprecedented economic and humanitarian crisis, with people fleeing the country due to hunger.

Delivering a speech in June 2019 Sanders articulated what he meant when he called himself a “democratic socialist.” His message was crystal clear: “Political freedom in the absence of economic freedom is not real freedom.” He decried the rule of “a small number of incredibly wealthy and powerful billionaires”, and argued that the future belongs to either rightwing nationalism or democratic socialism, which he defined as a bedrock set of economic and social rights.

Sanders’ decision to call himself a “democratic socialist” has been controversial. The label strikes some as an anachronism – an echo of the Cold War era. Indeed, Sanders first found his ideology and political voice in the Young People’s Socialist League, the youth section of the ailing Socialist Party of America, which he joined in the 1960s. Since then he came to an understanding of the rich from which he has never departed: they have a vested interest in protecting their wealth and power and keeping millions of others at their mercy.

Critics say Sanders is not actually a socialist in traditional term, because he does not want to nationalise major industries and replace markets with central planning. He has expressed admiration, not for Venezuela, but for Denmark. He is basically what Europeans would call a social democrat, and social democracies like Denmark and other Nordic states are all ranked among the top countries in the world for quality of living in 2019.

Sanders’s misleading self-description is unhelpful, given Americans’ aversion to socialism. His trips to the Soviet Union and Nicaragua in his youth, and his decades-long support for the radical left will be a gift to the Trump campaign. So will his ambitious policy proposals – free health care, a federal jobs guarantee, universal forgiveness of all student debt, and radical expansions of nearly every government programme from Social Security to housing subsidies.

This agenda is not socialism per se, but a blueprint for a social democratic safety net in the US. While die-hard socialists might scoff at Sanders’s summoning of Roosevelt as a proto-socialist, but his supporters claim the core of his call for democracy and justice resonates with millions. Indeed, he is extremely popular among young people. Now it is up to the Democrats to decide whether they want to nominate him as their candidate to run against Trump in November. Most of all, Sanders will have to convince swing voters, that despite his socialist agenda, he is still the lesser of the two evils. At least he will not plunge the country further into an abyss, dividing the society, destroying America's Constitution and institutions