Conservatives have a long, disreputable history of conflating any attempt to improve American lives with the evils of “communism.” When Medicare was first proposed, Ronald Reagan called it “socialized medicine,” and he declared that it would
destroy our freedom. In 1961, America faced what conservatives considered a mortal threat: calls for a national health insurance program covering senior citizens. In an attempt to avert this awful fate, the American Medical Association launched what it called
Operation Coffee Cup, a pioneering attempt at viral marketing.
Here’s how it worked: Doctors’ wives (hey, it was 1961) were asked to invite their friends over and play them a
recording in which Ronald Reagan explained that socialized medicine would destroy American freedom. The housewives, in turn, were supposed to write letters to Congress denouncing the menace of Medicare.
These days, if you call for something like universal child care and rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure, conservatives accuse you of wanting to turn America into the Soviet Union.
It’s a smarmy, dishonest political strategy, but it’s hard to deny that it has sometimes been effective.
What does the OP and conservatives in general, mean by “socialism” and “communism”? The answer is, it depends.
Sometimes it means any kind of economic liberalism. Steven Mnuchin, Trump's Treasury secretary, lauded the Trump economy and declared that “
we’re not going back to socialism” — i.e., apparently America itself was a socialist hellhole as recently as 2016. Who knew?
Other times, however, it means Soviet-style central planning, or Venezuela-style nationalization of industry, never mind the reality that there is essentially nobody in American political life who advocates such things.
The trick — and “trick” is the right word — involves shuttling between these utterly different meanings, and hoping that people don’t notice. You say you want free college tuition? Think of all the people who died in the Ukraine famine! And no, this isn’t a caricature: The strange, smarmy report on socialism that Trump’s economists released in 2018 is pretty much how its argument goes.