Retired Air Force guy buries MAGAt in facts and it's a lovely thing to see.

[JHB]

46. The thing that changed back then was the collapse of the obvious counterexample

Conservatives have demonized the word for over a hundred years, and they got a lot of help with that by the authoritarian nature of other countries that loudly advertised themselves as "socialist."

Conservatives have always, among themselves, called government programs that benefit the general public "socialist," but as long as the Soviets were around, in front of the general public they had to couch it in more tentative terms, like "creeping socialism." Otherwise they were up against a wall of perception: "You're being waaaay over the top. That's not like how things are in the USSR, so no, it's not socialism."

But when the Soviet Union dissolved the counterexample went away, and conservatives had forged an entire, separate media ecosphere that nowhere had "moderation" in its business model, so they broadcast their version from the housetops... and cable tv stations, and 50,000 Watt radio stations all over the country, with no pushback.

And thus what had once been a definition that marked the user as a ranting crank became normalized.