The whole thing is rather baffling to me as I have often felt far more "constricted" in the US during the 30+ years I have lived here than I ever did in Denmark.
Of course, the elephant in the room is that Denmark isn't actually socialist, at all! It's a Social Democracy," and actually very pro-business and free market.
Yes, when I’m teaching my students about socialism, I insist on clear definitions. We adhere to the strict definition of socialism as “state ownership and control over the means of production.”
Spending a large portion of GDP on social programs is welfarism, NOT socialism. The two often go hand in hand, but not necessarily.
The big difference between socialism and not-socialism is entrepreneurship. State ownership and control of the means of production is antithetical to entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial action. And where there is no entrepreneurship there is no innovation and no economic growth. That’s the truth about socialism our young people need to learn.
I do find it interesting that many U.S. politicians who call themselves “Democratic Socialists” point to the Nordic countries as their “socialist model” but then promote policies that truly are socialist (and that would likely never be supported by the citizens of Denmark or Sweden or Norway).
I lived in Texas for many years where one of the popular political saying was "Don't confuse me with FACTS when my mind is already made up."
I am not sure how you experience this from the perspective of teaching, but it seems to me that simple curiosity about your world and your surroundings is often frowned upon in the US of A. Maybe a rewriting of the above idea as "Don't confuse me with REALITY when my doctrine has already been burned into my brain!"
Maybe that's unkind, but sometimes I just end up rolling my eyes at what some people insist is factural/real.