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Don't really think it's worth it to dunk on that dumb tweet but if you were paying attention from 2007-2016 you know that saying that you and your policies are not socialist has literally no impact on whether your political enemies claim the opposite.
Going further, my sense is that the right spent a long time characterizing big-government liberalism as "socialism" because they thought it was a good political tactic, and now the left has also started doing that.
The definition of "socialism" is pretty vague in U.S. political discourse! There are no prominent political figures calling for, say, elimination of private property and government control of the entire economy, which is what critics tend to be hinting at.
Some of (not all) of the debate on the left seems to me to be semantic/branding: When accused of being a socialist, do you say, "I am, but that means I want government lelvels like in Western Europe" or "I'm not, I just want government levels like in Western Europe."
Some of it is tactical: Do you say the best health care solution is single payer and propose a plan to achieve it, or do you say (as Obama did) that the best solution is single payer but you don't think you can get it and propose something else?
This is what I'm talking about. You can choose to describe these policies as a socialist platform, or you can choose to not to, depending on your tactics.
tl;dr the Democratic response to endless right-wing accusations of socialism has traditionally been "no, but," now some are trying "yes, and."
