I’m not skeptical per se. I’ve just been propagandized so fucking much—I grew up watching those propagandocumentaries on the National Geographic Channel about the DPRK, etc., fr that was what I watched instead of cartoons lol.
Pretend I’m a lib who you’re trying to convince, or something. In addition to calming this feeling in my gut like something isn’t making sense, I want to be able to make this argument, myself.
To oversimplify, the US virtue signals as democracy, which muddies the term when you try to map the details and rhetoric and the theory and what the US actually does (at home and abroad) together. Socialism is about expanding democracy to the workplace and the economy. The US is about democracy for the rich.