It's weird that boomers tend to strawman us as responding to criticisms of AES with "that's not true socialism." Maybe socdems who think Norway is socialist but Cuba isn't would say that, but anyone who's reading Marx and is actively participating in discussions about socialism above a high school level probably understands that real socialism has been tried and has succeeded.
Which brings me to my next point: Socialism's biggest success story is China. It defies every trope yet it looks like most Western leftists are too afraid to claim it as the success it is, evidence that without sanctions, coups, and blockades socialism is a system that can take us to the future capitalism is currently killing. For every rags to riches story in America, there are thousands of people who received dignity, employment, and an economy that worked in their favor thanks to Chinese socialism. It's the best example of what socialism can achieve without being sabotaged, a country that went from a feudal backwater with tyrannical landlords, where the local warlords could claim the peasants' daughters as their property, where famines would routinely come and kill several million people, to the largest and most advanced economy in the world in less than a century. And they accomplished this by taking on Western capital and beating them at their own game.
