To the editor:

Mona Charen slanders a lot of leftist intellectuals in her column of Aug. 14 when she says that they were “seduced by leftist authoritarian regimes.” It is true that people such as Lincoln Steffens, William Sloan Coffin, Susan Sontag and even Bernie Sanders were inspired by the spirit of equality in communism as an economic system, but they were also appalled by the brutality of the dictatorships that were created to deliver an “equality of condition.”

We should be clear that communism is a socioeconomic system consisting of both the communal ownership of the means of production and a classless society in which everyone receives an equal share of what is produced. On the other hand, communist dictatorships, like those in the former U.S.S.R. and in the current People’s Republic of China, are political systems designed to force communism onto a society and, however idealistic the vision with which these dictatorships may have started, they quickly became corrupt, repressive regimes in which the goal of equality was abandoned. Mona Charen is smart enough not to conflate these two things and she should know that leftist intellectuals distinguish between them.

Maggie Childs,

Lawrence