President Trump has called Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a communist. Former Vice President Joe Biden warns the Democratic party that it must not become socialistic under the influence of Sanders, or it will surely lose the presidency to Trump. Both clearly believe, first, that the terms socialist and communist both name something evil and un-American, and, second, President Trump believes that socialism and communism are one and the same. However, both of these beliefs are wrong.

We need to know and understand the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) to correct these beliefs. Eleanor Roosevelt was the driving force in its creation.

Socialists like Bernie believe that every human has, by nature, the right to food, clothing, shelter, a job with a living wage, vacations, medical care, security in sickness and retirement and education. And each and every human has the justified claim to that amount of each of these which allows the full development of that person’s potentialities. These are the rights in the second part of the UDHR and they are in the document because they define socialism, for they were proposed by Eastern Europe’s socialistic countries in 1948.

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But socialists like Bernie are democratic socialists. This means that they believe that every human has, by nature, the rights to freedoms of speech, movement, religion, political persuasion, freedoms to assemble, organize, protest and share in their own governance and the freedom from fear of the criminal law. These rights are roughly the protections of our Constitution’s Bill of Rights. These rights are in the UDHR because the Western democracies put them there. They roughly define democracy.

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So, a democratic socialist like Bernie is one who especially wants those persons who lack adequate food, shelter, employment, education and medical care to be guaranteed them through democratic political processes like the ones in our Constitution.

A communist is also a socialist but is an autocratic socialist rather than a democratic one. Autocrats want government of the selfish, by the selfish, for the selfish. The autocrat is often only one but surrounded and supported by well-compensated bullying adherents. The Soviet Union was autocratic and socialistic. Yes, the USSR guaranteed everyone a job, an apartment, free medical care and good education. But the guarantor was a dictator like Josef Stalin, who ran roughshod over the democratic freedoms of religion, speech, the press, assembly, dissent and protections from arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and death. Thus the autocrat Stalin and his privileged Communist Party commissars provided some measure of material security to the people but at the horrible price of the erasure of their democratic freedoms.

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So, to be a socialist like Bernie is to act to provide the satisfaction of the basic needs of all, especially of those now lacking them, and to do so in our familiar American democratic way. That he is a socialist is thus a good thing about him, and that he is a democratic socialist makes him even better. This is because he would provide for disadvantaged people’s wants by working with them and their opposites, giving all of them the freedom to dissent, modify, even reject his means to his ends for them. A communist, in contrast, like Fidel Castro in Cuba, might provide jobs and education and medical care to an admirable degree. But the citizens who enjoy these benefits do so at the cost of losing their freedom to dissent or organize or seek an alternative government.

Ordinary Americans – please listen to what Bernie wants for those like you, and listen to how he would achieve it for you. Then, please, please, read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, especially Articles 22 to 27, and be assured of his energetic commitment to realizing those rights for you.