[colinmhayes]

This is clearly the democrats biggest problem. Biden just lost Florida largely because Trump falsely called him a socialist. Democrats are absolute losers when it comes to successfully getting people to understand their message.

[o_class_star]

"Socialism" may be a word we need to retire, not because it's an invalid concept, but because it means different things to different people.

Democratic socialists largely want a saner version of a market economy, where power resides with labor and government aggressively combats capital's worst tendencies, but they aren't calling for old-style command economies like the USSR, Communist China, or Castro's Cuba.

AOC is a fantastically talented politician with a lot of good ideas, but I think she needs to replace the word socialism with something that has less baggage.

This is the general disadvantage socialism has relative to capitalism in terms of appealing to others. Socialism and communism have more than a hundred years of history, including a lot of mistakes we've had to learn from. Capitalism has no memory and therefore on its own terms has no history.