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In early 2019, several progressive Democratic politicians who were frequent headline subjects — including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Sen. Bernie Senators of Vermont, and Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota — were often tagged by critics with the word socialist, used as a pejorative. At the recently concluded Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), for example, Republicans warned of radical Democrats embracing socialism. News accounts proclaimed that Republicans are determined to paint Democrats as out-of-control, out-of-their minds socialists. That political climate touched off the online circulation of a memetic quote from 33rd U.S. President Harry S. Truman, who purportedly fended off similar attacks on Democrats in 1952 by declaring that socialism was a scare word [Republicans] have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years: The circulated meme was an accurate reproduction of a portion of a campaign speech Truman delivered from the rear platform of a train in Syracuse, New York, on 10 October 1952. (Truman himself was not a candidate for re-election that year, but he stumped for the Democratic ticket, headed by Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson II). Much of Truman's speech was a caustic rebuke of Republicans (and their presidential nominee, General Dwight D. Eisenhower), whom Truman characterized as having opposed almost all our programs to help the economic life of the country and having blindly turned [their] back on the tradition of public action for the public good: Truman had earlier touched on the idea of socialism as a Republican scare word during an address he delivered at a Better Business Bureaus dinner on 6 June 1950, leading into a sardonic joke about New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey (the unsuccessful Republican presidential nominee in the 1944 and 1948 elections):
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