This is how frustrating it is to try to get Americans on board to try for a better life

I think it's hard to combat a century of red scare and we, as communists of various stripes, have to be able to deal with it. You can't do coalition building or agitprop without this knowledge. If you want to try and bring people in, you have to accept their biases and try and work with them in a lot of ways while educating them in order to either mitigate them entirely or minimise them. We want people who are empowered to do work in their communities and organise in their workplaces and you do that with education and understanding.

It isn't even really exaggeration for some people. As far as I can tell, it's basically monster under the bed but for adults. Like yeah, people will have certain vague talking points at times about how communism was bad, but for the most part, it's an abstraction. As others have written about (https://redsails.org/western-marxism-and-christianity/), even communist sympathizers in the west sometimes have this problem, where in spite of being for it, they are so focused on it in the abstraction as a pure object, they lose sight of supporting it in practice. They see people who are scared of it and they go "I know, I will agree that it's been bad, but it'll be better this time" and all this does is cement for people that it can never work. Or they view violence with a double standard lens (https://redsails.org/the-pitfalls-of-liberalism/).

I think perhaps a useful starting point on it is to ask people to evaluate now and historical communist powers by the same standards they do as their own government. To essentially pretend for a moment that it's a country they live in and then consider where they think they would fall in its systems. The US for example has huge wealth inequality (which feels like a generous way to put it). What makes someone who lives paycheck to paycheck in the US think they'd be worse off in a country run by a communist vanguard party? Even if it were unequal in some ways, what makes them think they'd somehow be in an even more unequal position? It's one thing if someone is rich (and at that point, it's probably going to be difficult to sway them anyway), but if they are relatively money poor, financially insecure, etc., why are they living under fear of an abstract "it could be worse" (monster under the bed) instead of the real "it could be worse" (the existing system discarding them as it tends to do if they don't compete well enough or are simply unlucky).