In the history of the socialist movement, the most cutting epithet ever deployed is not “class traitor,” “counterrevolutionary,” or even “renegade.” It is “dentist.”

In the 1960s, in the course of a debate with some student radicals, Dissent founder Irving Howe famously lost his temper. But it wasn’t the actual yelling that made the event so memorable — it was the particular insult he leveled at the young radicals. “You know what you’re going to end up as?” Howe said. “You’re going to end up as a dentist!”

A few decades earlier, Leon Trotsky had dismissed Socialist Party of America leader Morris Hillquit as “the ideal Socialist leader for successful dentists.” Joseph Stalin didn’t like dentists either. After the assistant of Adolf Hitler’s dentist identified the führer’s burned remains, Stalin had her imprisoned for most of the next decade.