Bret Stephens, whom the New York Times hired from the Wall Street Journal after Trump’s election, woke up in a Cold War mood on Saturday. After reading journalist Anne Applebaum’s new book, Red Famine, on Stalin’s starvation of the Ukraine, Stephens began to seethe at early 1930s Times reporters who bought Stalin’s excuses. Soon he was righteously asking whether anyone today recalls the depredations of Peru’s Shining Path, or feels “even a shiver of inner revulsion at hipsters in Lenin or Mao T-shirts?” So, he asked the public from his rather bully pulpit, “Why is Marxism still taken seriously on college campuses and in the progressive press?”

Why indeed? Because of “a permanent and dangerous state of semi-denial about the legacy of communism” on the “progressive” left. Thanks to this “semi-denial,” Stephens writes, Jeremy Corbyn now threatens Britain with economic catastrophe from his woolly headed egalitarianism. But it gets worse. Because Bernie Sanders hasn’t learned that “class hatred” is morally equivalent to “race-hatred” or that “Buchenwald and the gulag” are a paired set of catastrophic historical destinations, Sanders indulges in “efforts to criminalize capitalism and financial services,” which will “have predictable results.”

No, Stephens doesn’t actually say that aggressive financial regulation and running against Wall Street will lead to mass murder. He, is after all, a Reasonable Man, and the idea, spelled out that way, is absurd — and egregiously disrespectful of the history he invokes so casually.