Progressive ideas and their realisation

Are you for or against socialism? While this sounds like a simple enough question, once you discuss with people it turns out that the people who are for socialism generally talk about the progressive idea of collective ownership reducing inequality, while the people who are against socialism talk about the history of countries that call or called themselves socialist. I am from West Germany, but I grew up with the constant presence of East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, a country claiming to represent "real existing socialism". In the 41 years that country existed, it became rather obvious that their socialism hadn't in fact eliminated inequality, and had led to lower living standards. The GDR famously built a wall to keep its people from fleeing to West Germany, and shot people trying to do so.

The country I now live in, Belgium, I jokingly sometimes call a socialist paradise. Belgium is a democratic and capitalist country, but has a number of progressive social policies that don't exist elsewhere in Europe. For example Belgian salaries and pensions are automatically inflation adjusted, and Belgians enjoy extremely strong workers protection rights. And while all that certainly has its problems, it also has huge advantages: Belgium has a low Gini index of 26.8, compared to over 30 for France or Germany, or over 40 for the USA, meaning Belgium has less inequality. Although GDP per person is lower than in Germany, median household wealth in Belgium is over 4 times the German number.

By comparing different countries, it can easily be shown that for example health care systems have much better outcomes if they are organized around "socialist" principles, while mostly "capitalist" health care systems cost more and achieve less good outcomes in public health and life expectancy. So to answer my initial question, me personally I am much in favor of for example "socialist medicine", but much against the "real existing socialism" of the GDR. The most successful country calling itself socialist is China, and that only since it injected a good amount of capitalism into their system, to form a so-called "socialism with Chinese characteristics". History to me suggests that the countries that have the best outcome for the common people have all adopted a mix of capitalism and socialism, while countries with extreme capitalism or extreme socialism have done a lot less well on various measures.

Now the idea of socialism is nearly two centuries old by now, and a lot of people (mostly outside the USA) are able to make the distinction between socialism as an idea, and possible partial solution to problems, and socialism as a failed system to run countries. But with newer progressive ideas, we can observe the same gap in the discussion: People liking certain progressive ideas generally talk about the advantages of the concept, while people hating that same progressive idea talk about the failures of implementation.

For example I have seen a lot of social media posts with people expressing their astonishment that anybody could oppose DEI, because diversity, equity, and inclusion are all obviously good things. But the people that do oppose DEI don't actually oppose the idea, they oppose the implementation. There is sufficient evidence and data that for example DEI programs in US academics has led to exclusion instead of inclusion, with a demonstrable discrimination against Asians and White Americans. That has led to weird events, like White people falsely claiming to be Black, seeing that as their only means to have an academic career.

The same gap in discussion between a positive progressive idea and people opposing the negative points of its implementation exists for "wokeness", on which Americans are divided whether that is a compliment or an insult. That is mostly because the people who consider woke to be a good thing define it as being informed, while the people who consider woke to be a bad thing define it as the resulting censorship due to political correctness. Like with socialism, it is impossible for people to agree on something they don't even share a common understanding of the definition.

I generally think that we should discuss more and fight less. But that discussion requires a certain openness to what exactly the concerns of the other person are. Otherwise we get two people who are both in favor of tolerance calling each other intolerant, because they simply have very different definitions of a word describing a progressive idea.