It’s fascinating to me how the same people who like to do purity tests for China or Vietnam claiming they’re not actually communist are also the ones who’ll defend places like US or Canada saying yeah it’s not perfect, but it’s the ideal of the system that matters.
It’s such an incredible example of cognitive dissonance. These people able to recognize that their own system doesn’t live up to the ideal they have in their heads, but still treat it as a valid interpretation of the idea, but when it comes to a system they dislike then the same logic doesn’t apply all of a sudden.
As a Nordic person, let me say that nobody here thinks our system ever was “socialist”. Welfare state, yes, social democratic, yes, but no socialism. I don’t know who came up with the idea.
Besides, even the social democratic welfare state has been stripped down by neoliberal reforms since the 90s and is a shadow of what it used to be. The rhetoric is always the same: we can’t afford this, we can’t afford that, we have to privatize, we have to make cuts to save our welfare state, there’s no alternative etc.