I don’t know about other people, but pretty much the only reason that I didn’t become a socialist earlier than I did is because I just didn’t know what socialism really is. Someone has to be straight up evil in order to understand socialism and still oppose it.
I know this is probably pretty obvious for most people but I only became conscious of it recently.
On many instances interacting with liberals and conservatives, they always assume that socialism is whenever the government does stuff. They put this premise to basically confirm their biases, so that they can exclaim: “You know that the government giving free healthcare is socialism? And you seen the experiments of socialism in the past which ended in failure, you don’t want to have socialism do you?”
So yes, you’re right. Many people who criticise socialism don’t even know what socialism is. But they don’t care. They’re willing to criticise not the definition itself, but the experiments that occurred within legitimate socialist nations. Only a few of the capitalist bootlickers know what socialism is. And those who do know usually possess fascistic tendencies, subverting the proletariat using socialist rhetoric.
I’ve been rambling for too long already, but I hope that’s enough explanation.
Not rambling.
So it goes, e.g.: USSR bad, USSR = socialism; national healthcare = socialism; therefore national healthcare will lead straight to the USSR. It’s a kind of slippery slope argument, riddled with logical fallacies but it suits the ruling class, which wants to profit of healthcare and to avoid USSR-type socialism. Two birds, one stone.
Those two guys did once say ‘the ruling ideas of the epoch are the ideas of the ruling class’.