Interesting historical data point. The terms Socialism and Communism in US political rhetoric comes from the Reconstruction era of the 1800s. According to studies by historians, including Heather Cox Richardson, these terms were first used by the Ku Klux Klan and White Southern politicians long before Marxism became popular and before there were any socialist countries.
Quoting Richardson: (from https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-27-2020)
——–
The Ku Klux Klan (and its Christian supporters in white Southern churches) objected to poor voters being able to elect leaders who promised to deliver services or public improvements, like schools and roads, that could be paid for only by taxes, levied on property holders.
In the South of the post-Civil War years, almost all property holders were white. They argued that Black voting amounted to a redistribution of wealth from hardworking white men to poor Black people. It was, they insisted, “socialism,” or, after workers in Paris created a Commune in 1871, “communism.”
This is the origin of the American obsession with “socialism,” more than 40 years before Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution.
————-
The charges of the Democrats being socialist in the current US political rhetoric has little to do with European uses of the term to mean government ownership of the means of production. Instead the terms have US political roots and is in opposition to funding of a level of schooling, roads, industrial infrastructure, etc., that might lead to a more egalitarian society.
These terms have their roots in America’s original sin — slavery — and in its descendent — institutional racism.
Below is the link to Professor Richardson’s Oct. 27 Letters from an American for more detail. And I strongly recommend to you her most recent book — How the South Won the Civil War — for a clearer exposition of the erosion of the values Northerners fought for in the Civil War, thus delaying the hope of A More Perfect Union.
Link to the Oct. 27 Letters from an American where Professor Richardson discusses this in detail.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-27-2020