I'll give a metaexplanation: liberalism, socialism and conservatism are all to an extent responses to trends in 17th century Britain. Socialism, conservatism and later fascism are all, in part, differing reactions to liberalism. The point is, things have been around for a long time by now and each tradition has lots of stuff in it. The messiness is essential and not accidental complexity.

There's also the fact that misunderstandings about what socialism is run rampart in politics. It's not when the government does things like the GOP says.

Y'all are a generally pretty smart and good group and I was wondering if you had Good Reading Resources for People Who Don't Know Things. I'd prefer reading resources that don't add emotional content and also try to provide details in a holistic manner.

I recommend giving a read to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on socialism. It fits your criteria, the encyclopedia is a peer reviewed resource and the article has, like, 100 works in its bibliography. It's also not a 19th century text like the ones socialists online often recommend. Stay away from YouTube for the moment being.

If you don't have experience reading philosophical texts, I recommend to:

1. reading slowly, very slowly. Briefly pause after each sentence, thinking about whether you've understood it. After each paragraph, try to summarize it, think how it's serving the text as a whole (its purpose) and anything that comes into your mind. This with section as well and finally the whole text.
2. return to earlier parts, if needed, liberally. It's not a novel. Later parts inform your understanding of earlier parts.
3. Taking notes is a pretty good practice, and also taking notes of the notes as a summary at the end of each section and trying to construct the essence of the argument.
4. The article might genuinely take 4-5 hours to read with my method, but that's ok.

I mean it's an encyclopedia article, so it's somewhat less bad to read casually, but imho this is step where people fuck up so why not do it right from the beginning?

My own personal take is that Sanders is as a private person a socialist, but he isn't running on a socialist platform for POTUS. He won't bring forth socialism (or make the world much closer to it), but if I were an American, I'd get involved in his campaign, but I see the movement as more important than any figureheads, including Sanders.

This was long because I'm procrastinating, but hopefully it's helpful.