I guess it's not all in the name

Socialism: *is popular in the early-20th century*

Nazi Party: “yo imma reappropriate that name to gain power and popularity while making a mockery of all its core concepts, plus jail and execute all of you. That cool?”

Socialists: *are now dead*

Given that the end result of living in the Third Reich or the U.S.S.R was pretty similar, I gotta say they're just two sides of the same really terrible coin.

yeah, when you're ruled by authoritarian pyschos who give 0 f**ks about anything other than staying in power, lots and lots of people die.

Socialism had nothing to do with it.

Look at Norway or Sweden.

Socialism and democracy are not mutually exclusive. Just like how democracy and capitalism are not automatically a pair.

Norway and Sweden are not socialist and nobody's tying democracy to anything near as I can tell. I'm merely saying that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, functionally, were very similar. The big difference was the Nazism was a cult focused on race while Communism was a cult focused on class. The differences between how they inflicted their carnage on the world stem almost solely from that distinction.

But you're tying socialism, a system of governance, to those outcomes.

Hitler & Stalin were genocidal thugs that used politics to ascend to the heights of power.

My point was never anything but that, regardless of what people say, the two regimes were functionally almost identical, with the Nazis caring more about race and the Communists caring more about class.

Whether socialism works or not, is bad or good, or any other conversation about it, is beside the point that I was making, at least.

Socialism and capitalism are both present in a healthy democracy. Anyone who leans too far left or right doesn’t understand how America is supposed to work.

Both are misunderstood and maligned, IMO. Capitalism is just people being free to make economic deals they both find agreeable. Socialism is an attempt to make sure everyone has a chance at living a good life.

Definitely a balance between those value sets that is perfectly achievable and good, I'd agree.