United States | News & Politics

Cuba, Vietnam, China, USSR, hell even the dprk. Look at life expectancy, literacy, infant and maternal mortality, extreme poverty metrics, worker self management systems, and moving from dictatorship to soviet style proletarian democracy

You are factually correct, but this is rhetorically a poor point to make unless your goal is to have the argument be an endless quagmire of tangents upon tangents (which I don't think it is). Clearly you would generally know better than I, but I can't help but feel that a simpler answer like:

"The liberal revolutions against feudalism broadly had a progressive character, though feudalists and conservatives generally portrayed them as barbarous, traitorous, heretical, etc. Socialist revolutions were likewise broadly progressive, with their rightward opponents portraying them the same way"

Would be a good way to touch on this point generally without just begging them so directly to vomit every red scare myth and reactionary reddit thread they've ever seen at you, or just leave because those things went through their mind and that was enough.