Socialism - Once and For All
Dedicated to those here who oppose socialism and yet have not the slightest idea what socialism is. When asked, the answers ranged from outright refusal to say, to cliches without supporting detail, to a strange explanation describing capitalism as socialism.
The following may help.
The myth of Democrats being Soviet-style or radical socialists is still widely believed. Socialism is against the private ownership of the means of production (capitalism). That is not the position of the Democratic Party, the Democrats in Congress, or of Biden, Harris, or even of Sanders. What almost all Democrats advocate is a capitalist economy with proper regulation of business and social programs to provide healthcare, education, and economic security to their citizens. Not radical stuff at all.
Of course, in the minds of the far-right all Democrats are far-left radicals and Soviet-style socialists. The Democratic Party is made up of a much broader coalition of political views than the Republican Party. Within the Democratic Party there is a broad range of views on healthcare, gun control, national defense, reproductive rights, education, taxes, etc. - and all those views are openly debated. For example, while all of the Democratic presidential primary candidates advocated healthcare coverage for all, there were differing policies on how to best achieve that. The Republicans had basically one position, repeal Obamacare.
Diversity of thought on policy began to dwindle (and has all but vanished) in the Republican Party in the 1980s after the Party adopted, without compromise, Reaganomics and the social agenda of the evangelical Christian Right: cut taxes no matter the deficit, deregulate business regardless of consequences, oppose abortion, oppose gay marriage, allow evangelical Christian beliefs preferential treatment above other religions, oppose all gun control, repeal civil rights reforms, and basically erode federal authority so states can roll back reforms in civil rights and equality for minorities in education, housing, and employment.
The Republican Party has no large counterpart in any other free, democratic, industrialized nation. It is an anomaly in modern politics, stuck in a time warp that conservative parties in other free democracies left in the early to mid twentieth century.