This line of thinking is increasing and dangerous (and no doubt intentional from at least some of the popular examples that come to mimd). It will make it that much harder for authentic candidates to talk about legitimate change and ideology.
Many of these people literally believe that "free lunches for school children" inevitably turns into "those socialists will force me to eat bugs in an Orwellian nightmare".
For them, Sweden and North Korea are on the same spectrum of communism and will end up the same.
Meanwhile they somehow don't see wealthy and powerful people using their political connections to enrich themselves by garnering favorable treatment from powerful government officials as an essential part of how things worked in the USSR.
The problem with the saying "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" is that a lot of people haven't forgotten history; they simply never learned it in the first place.
