Some of the Democratic candidates in the 2018 mid-terms, most prominently Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are referring to themselves as socialists, which is freaking some people out.
Although this is a huge problem, it's a purely semantic problem.
Part of the problem is that anti-socialist propaganda has been extremely successful in the US, and Americans have been very effectively cut off from news of socialism in the rest of the world, so that people in the US often lose their minds as soon as they hear the word "socialism." Socialism has functioned perfectly well in the UK (where it's called the Labour Party), France , (West, and then reunified) Germany, Italy and the rest of Western Europe, but in the US, it faces unique obstacles. For example, all of the Americans who "hate Marx" without ever having read anything written by Marx. Many Americans "hate socialism" without knowing what it is. It's basically what the Democratic Party stands for: good wages, health care, a clean environment, good and affordable (or free) education, etc. It's help for people who actually need help, instead of for the rich people who already own most of the US and are outraged that they're not allowed to pollute more and pay their workers less.
Part of the problem is that for the moment, in the US, the term "socialist" has been partially monopolized by Bernie Sanders, who is no more socialist than the left wing of the Democratic Party, and whom people dislike for all sorts of perfectly sensible reasons which have nothing to do with socialism. Basically, Bernie is the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party since Ralph Nader. Bernie, a socialist? It's a joke! He's too anti-social to have belonged to a political party for most of his career, until he joined the Democratic Party in time to ruin things for Hillary, to help Trump get elected, and, above all, to feed his seemingly insatiable ego. He moved from multi-cultural Brooklyn to lily-white, affluent Vermont, where they use a lot of green power, which is good, but don't participate very much in the actual socialist (that is, working-class) struggles going on the US.
Socialism is as American as FDR and LBJ -- even though both of them, unfortunately, avoided the label and left it to be used as a weapon against them by their libertarian rivals. It's as American as FDR's cousin Theodore breaking up the biggest companies in the US in order to stop them from taking over the US. Hopefully, soon, Americans will finally learn what the word means, and realize it's something they know and have been voting for all along.
