Yeah, maybe that's all it is. I can see it.
As with everything else controversial or divisive in this country, hatred of socialism has racist roots.
The Origins of the Socialist Slur - The Atlantic
The accusation of “socialism” had sharp teeth in the 1950s, as Americans recoiled from the growing influence of the Soviet Union and the rise of Communist China. But Republicans’ use of the word typically had little to do with actual, Bolshevik-style socialism. The theory that the people would rise up and take control of the means of production has never been popular in the United States. The best a Socialist Party candidate has ever done in an American presidential election was when Eugene V. Debs won about 6 percent of the popular vote in 1912.
Rather, in the United States, the political charge of socialism tended to carry a peculiar meaning, one forged in the white-supremacist backlash to Black civil rights in the 1870s.
During the Civil War, the Republicans in charge of the government both created national taxation and abolished legal slavery (except as punishment for crime). For the first time in U.S. history, voting in federal elections had a direct impact on people’s pocketbooks. Then, in 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, extending the vote to Black men in the South. White southerners who hated the idea of Black people using the vote to protect themselves started to terrorize their Black neighbors. Pretending to be the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers, they dressed in white robes with hoods to cover their faces and warned formerly enslaved people not to show up at the polls.
But in 1870, Congress created the Department of Justice to enable the federal government to protect the right of Black men to vote. Attorney General Amos Akerman oversaw the prosecution of more than 3,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan, winning more than 1,000 convictions. Meanwhile, Congress passed laws to protect Black voting.
Suddenly, it was harder for white southerners to object to Black rights on racial grounds. So they turned to a new argument, one based in economics.
They did not want Black men voting, they said, because formerly enslaved people were poor, and they would vote for leaders who promised to build things such as roads and hospitals. Those public investments could be paid for only with tax levies, and most of the people in the South with property after the war were white. Thus, although the infrastructure in which the southern legislatures were investing would help everyone, reactionaries claimed that Black voting amounted to a redistribution of wealth from white men to Black people, who wanted something for nothing.