"Socialism" in the American political vocabulary

My own summary version of the main meaning of the word "socialism" in the mainstream American political vocabulary would be: a one-word way to say, "any public policy that doesn't mainly benefit the wealthiest is evil, bad, really bad."

Here is a great historical account of the mainstream meaning of "socialism" from the historian Health Cox Richardson, who has a talent for explaining precedents of this kind, History and Politics Chat: May 19,2020:

The part about the Paris Commune and the trans-Atlantic cable is an interesting twist.

Here's a shorter and more lighthearted version of it from Francesca Fiorentini AJ+ , Socialism: Republicans Keep Being Forced To Love It AJ+ 10/17/2020:

She concludes with, " So remember, when a Republican calls something socialist, it's not just a tactic to scare you. It means that that something might actually just save your life."

Of course, there has been a strain of political thinking that considers itself socialist, and not in the Republican meaning. Bernie Sanders advocates what is probably the most famous version at the moment, one that he calls "democratic socialism". Here is a description of Sanders' version from Heather Gautney from the Jacobin site that shares the same general perspective, Defining Bernie’s Democratic Socialism 03/14/2020.

Someone who is mainly familiar only with the stock American political-polemical meaning of "socialism" who then decided to research its broader meaning in the world for the last couple of centuries would quickly stumble on the disorienting fact that there are easily ten thousand version of "socialism." And I'm only thinking about the United States!

I took a shot at a big-picture description of socialism as the classic critical alternative to capitalism in "Socialism" and US politics in 2019 (and also 190 years before that) 07/01/2019.