When people start praising those countries’ foreign policy, criticize away. Ditto if the topic is something like participation in the IMF.

But when those countries are used as examples of functioning public healthcare, a less barbaric criminal justice system, or better working conditions, all those are legitimately good policies and are exactly what a socialist state should start with. Holding those policies up as positive things to associate with socialism is not an endorsement of everything those states do.

Besides, without a leftist pipeline this whole conversation is moot. We can’t purity test our way out of ever getting big enough to do anything.

What’s the alternative, though? Say you’re talking to someone who reflexively, unthinkingly believes any communist country is a horrible dictatorship. They’re not some chud who isn’t worth bothering with – they’ve just been told that from every reputable source, at every level, and through all sorts of “apolitical” media, too, for their entire life. How do you go about challenging that unchallengeable orthodoxy?

I don’t think telling those people that the USSR was cool and good, actually, will work. It’s never worked before on any significant scale. And making the leftist case in the abstract – without any real-world reference point – inevitably leads to “well that pie-in-the-sky stuff sure sounds nice, too bad it’d never work.” What’s currently producing results on something approaching a mass scale is pointing to “Nordic socialism” as a realistic improvement, then pulling people further left once their hardline anticommunism has been softened up.