Americans in general don't have a coherent definition of political ideologies. That's my experience being from the islamic / socialist paradise / hell hole of Sweden.
When Americans talk about “socialism” neither side is talking about modern Sweden. American “democratic socialists” have a distaste for markets and a love of centralized federal power that is really quite different from Social Democrats in Sweden: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/bernie-sande...
A good example is healthcare. Sweden has universal healthcare, but it’s highly decentralized and managed at the municipal level. Sanders is not proposing something like that. He rejects the ACA, which has state-run exchanges that could be expanded to provide universal coverage. Instead, he supports a single centrally administered federal insurance system. As noted in the article above, this love of centralized power is quite different than the countries Sanders invokes as models:
> Although Sanders often justifies his plan by referring to Canada and European countries, they generally achieve universal coverage without the degree of centralization he is calling for. The Canadian system is financed and run at the provincial level. Many European countries have multiple insurance funds and institutionalized bargaining among stakeholder groups, with power devolved on regional bodies. As in the case of tax policy, Sanders’ policies are more traditionally socialist than those of most of the countries he invokes as models.
> If Sanders and Ocasio‐ Cortez really want to turn America into Sweden, what would that look like? For the United States, it would mean, for example, more free trade and a more deregulated product market, no Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the abolition of occupational licensing and minimum wage laws. The United States would also have to abolish taxes on property, gifts, and inheritance. And even after the recent tax cut, America would still have to slightly reduce its corporate tax. Americans would need to reform Social Security from defined benefits to defined contributions and introduce private accounts. They would also need to adopt a comprehensive school voucher system where private schools get the same per‐ pupil funding as public ones.
> If this is socialism, call me comrade.
Sanders is a left wing populist, not a Swedish social Democrat. While Swedes are cutting corporate taxes, Sanders is demonizing Wall Street and saying “billionaires shouldn’t exist.” His political is a politics of class warfare: unlike Sweden which taxes everyone broadly to pay for social services, Sanders promises to make “the rich and corporations” pay for everything. Sanders is ideologically much closer to someone like Jeremy Corbyn, who admired Cuba and the USSR and largely missed the boat on the market-oriented revolution in thinking that distinguishes Sweden circa 1970 from Sweden today.