We have ALWAYS had some degree of socialism.

Depends how loosely you define the term.

If you use a strict definition, e.g. “government ownership of the means of production of a viable free market going concern” developed countries have close to nil. After all, in the US, a business who tried to run Medicare in the free market would quickly fail, because the premiums would be at least 10X of what they actually are. Same for Social Security; any private system that was actuarily viable would return so little that nobody would invest.

I personally can’t think of a single program in the US that meets that criteria.

If I remove the “viable free market going concern” from the definition, then you can argue that SS, Medicare, Medicaid, ACA, Chips, and the VA all kind of fit, although I’d still argue that they are not examples of socialism, but shared services. That’s still not the same as, for example, the government taking over Exxon and saying “OK, we’re going to have a national oil company now”, or taking over United Airlines and making it a US flag carrier (to give two examples of real socialism which *do* exist in some otherwise capitalistic nations.)

Now, when it comes to AOC, I don’t know if she’s a real socialist or not by the true definition; she probably doesn’t know either (yet). She appears to be yet another Sanders-type liberal who has fallen for the myth that we can have a European style package of shared services paid for by nobody but the rich.