I'm so mad at goddamn Lenin and Stalin for co-opting socialism. We went from the Paris Commune to the fucking USSR?
Now we gotta deal with shit like China being an authoritarian dictatorial hellscape that commits genocide (and denies the groups ever existed). And because they pay lip service to Marx you get people bowing down to grovel at Winnie the Pooh's gaze, or mummifying Lenin and treating him like a deity or something.
And of course then when you say "Hey, capitalism is unsustainable especially when automation starts replacing jobs en masse" people go "YOU MEAN YOU WANNA BE CHINA YOU TANKIE????" And the fact that there is a subset of people (many of whom are right here in the threadiverse...) who would love to be China and openly spread Chinese-style communism where protestors get run over by tanks and turned into a fine paste really doesn't help matters.
They suck all the goddamn air out of the room and cause serious discussions of socialism to get dismissed out of hand as supporting USSR-style "fascism with socialist characteristics".
If these hardcore authoritarian tankies didn't exist, it would be a lot easier to make the point that capitalism is incompatible with democracy as well. I'm not just talking about how money is speech and bribes are okay as long as you call them "campaign contributions".
But you don't see capitalist defenders pointing to Putin or the Democratic Republic of the Congo as examples of the wonders of capitalism. They're capitalist countries, yet they don't get accepted as such by people trying to discredit socialism. Curious. Yet China, Cuba, Venezuela, and the USSR are always their go-tos for discrediting communism. It's almost as if fascism/democracy is largely separated from capitalism/socialism (a fact that's frequently ignored...).
But it's really hard to make the point of "socialism does not mean authoritarianism, you can have democracy in a socialist state" when the largest group of socialists loudly advocate for an authoritarian communist dictatorship where they silence all dissent.
So now we can't have that discussion at all. Even people who hate "elites" and are class-conscious immediately shut down when hearing the "socialism" word because of how badly the USSR and China fucked Marx up.