Along the way, Puryear came to think of himself as a socialist, and while he was vaguely aware that some people might consider his identification outré, in his circles it was pretty acceptable. This was not entirely because of the company he kept; it was also a reflection of his generation. Millennials, he told me, don’t have the same hang-ups about socialism that their parents once did.

Surveys back up Puryear’s impression. A January poll by YouGov found that 43 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 have a favorable view of socialism—nearly double the proportion of those 65 and older. That may be because they didn’t grow up in the shadow of the Cold War. But having come of age in the time of financial crashes and Occupy Wall Street, young people may also be more skeptical of free markets. In the same poll, just 32 percent of young people had a favorable view of capitalism, versus 63 percent of seniors.

Sanders himself never sought to identify as a socialist: Only when his enemies started accusing him of being one did he, in characteristically pugnacious fashion, reappropriate the insult as a badge of pride. Some critics have pointed out that it would be more accurate to call him a social democrat, rather than a democratic socialist. After all, Sanders has said he defines democratic socialism as something akin to the systems in Denmark or Finland—countries with high taxes and a capacious welfare state, but relatively free markets.

“The ideology of the Scandinavian governments is really just a more fair capitalist society,” Puryear told me. True socialism as Marx and Engels envisioned it, by contrast, was intended as a way station on the road to full-fledged communism. “We refer to ourselves as socialists because what we’re trying to promote is the move from capitalism to socialism,” he said. But the ultimate goal is not Finland. It is a fully classless society in which the state has withered away to nothing.

When I asked Puryear about communism’s failures around the globe, he became defensive. The past century’s worth of socialist experiments were limited, he said, and undermined by U.S. meddling. Whatever their flaws, regimes like Venezuela’s don’t, in his view, get the credit they deserve for lifting people out of poverty. (Puryear has been to Venezuela twice, most recently in 2013.) And America, he insisted, is better positioned to implement socialism by virtue of its wealth. Puryear furthermore took issue with my question’s premise. “Capitalism is also responsible for some of the worst crimes in history,” he contended, mentioning imperialism, world war, and the transatlantic slave trade. “Why isn’t that considered discrediting?”

American socialists have never gotten far. Their heyday, insofar as they had one, was in the early 20th century, under the leadership of Eugene V. Debs—whose likeness hangs in Sanders’s Senate office. Debs’s fourth presidential run, in 1912, earned the Socialist Party of America 6 percent of the vote, still the high-water mark for a socialist candidacy; his successor, Norman Thomas, never came close to such popularity in his six presidential runs, and the party fell apart under the scrutiny of the Red Scare. In the 1970s, a few successor parties emerged, among them Socialist Party USA, whose 1976 nominee, the socialist former Milwaukee mayor, Frank Zeidler, got just over 6,000 votes. (While that party today claims to adhere to democratic socialism, it, too, finds Sanders insufficient: In the view of Mimi Soltysik, its 2016 nominee, Sanders’s rhetoric about the middle class is “bullshit.”)