What do self-proclaimed socialists really believe in?

A lot of chatter recently from self-proclaimed socialists, and I've realised that when people in the U.S. claim they support socialism, they're typically talking about one of three different things.

A proven system?

If by socialism you mean a Nordic-style social democracy, then sure, I'm already mostly on board with you guys. I just find it a little weird that you call it socialism. The Nordic countries are actually more capitalistic than the U.S. in a sense: they have universal healthcare and a stronger welfare system, but they also have less regulations and less government involvement in the market. That sounds like a great deal! I'd much rather have minimal regulations and a lot of welfare than have a lot of regulations and minimal welfare, like we do now. I'd take it even further and say that we should just have a universal basic income instead of the clunky mess of a social safety net we have now. And if we can get the money for it by trimming bureaucratic excess, cutting the military budget, and ending corporate welfare instead of raising taxes on the middle class, then I whole-heartedly support you guys.

The idealistic version

If by socialism you mean some kind of left-libertarian or anarchist or syndicalist system that's never actually been tried on a large scale, then by all means, go for it. I basically see you guys the same way I see the really staunch and uncompromising free-market libertarians: well-intentioned idealists with some interesting ideas that may or may not actually work in practice. I'm skeptical that they could be feasibly implemented any time soon, and even more skeptical that they'd work as intended, but I'm open-minded and genuinely want to learn more about them. (Also, some of them seem more viable than others: a syndicalist system of worker-owned collectives competing in a capitalist-style market seems feasible enough once you get past the tricky business of bringing it about, while an anarcho-communist gift economy with no monetary system doesn't seem like it could ever work at all.) If it was up to me, I'd give you all your own little micro-nations to see which ideas worked and which ones didn't, because I really think some of the more practical ones should at least be tried.

The evil version

If by socialism you mean a violent revolution against the state and the capitalist class that involves the execution of investors and landlords, culminating in the establishment of a USSR-style authoritarian communist dictatorship, then I consider you no better than the kinds of people who promote fascism or theocracy or monarchism. If you try to whitewash the atrocities of Stalin and Mao - or worse, argue that those atrocities were justified - then I consider you no better than the Neo-Nazis who deny or celebrate the Holocaust. Oh, you think it's all historical revisionism and capitalist propaganda? That's literally the exact same argument the Neo-Nazis make, and it's no more convincing when you say it. And if you're a social democrat or a left-libertarian idealist who still defends the Marxist-Leninists and Stalinists and Maoists because you think they're on your side, then you're either wildly misinformed, seriously lacking perspective, or being intellectually dishonest. Same goes for all the people making clever jokes about sending Jeff Bezos to the guillotine, or sending centrist liberals to the gulag. When you say you're only joking, that's about as believable as when alt-rightists say they're only joking about hating Jews and Black people.

It's incredibly frustrating to me that the same term is alternatively used to describe a pretty good system that's been proven to work, a set of idealistic theories that have never been tried, and what I consider to be one of the single greatest evils in all of human history. That really makes it virtually impossible to have any kind of meaningful discussion about socialism without extensively clarifying the terms first. And what makes it all the more frustrating is that a lot of socialists seem to actively conflate the three and vacillate between them, either out of ignorance or as part of a deliberate bait-and-switch strategy.