I have no idea what that article was trying to communicate, or why TB posted it. Probably the usual bleat about how "liberals can't even keep their terminology straight". Of course, words and their meaning change over time. "Liberal" doesn't mean today what it meant 200 years ago, either, as conservatives love to point out.

As any student of language can tell you, dictionaries don't determine usage, they document it, so it is inevitable they are always a bit behind the times. Modern day conservatives in the USA (but not in Europe) call the European economies "socialist", although they clearly contain many, if not predominantly, capitalistic institutions and overall organization. Conservatives also equate socialist economics and lack of political and freedom and democracy. This is, of course, simply not true, no matter how much they may insist it is: a country's economic organization has little to do with its civil freedoms.

In this case, "socialism" is just being used as a slur. To an American conservative, anything they don't like is socialism, and anyone who fails to reflexively attack socialism is therefore, a Communist, which is identical to socialism. This is how they conveniently dismiss and discredit even the slightest deviation from what they really want, which is to operate free of any taxation, criticism, supervision, regulation, or law. THAT is what Maher's panel was talking about, and what the article was trying so hard to find some hidden sinister meaning in.

As it turns out, socialism is not a place, its a direction, on the economic spectrum. Even Cuba and Vietnam allow some capitalism in their markets, just as the USA does have some socialist elements in its economy. And of course, even "capitalism", a perfectly legitimate and value-free English word, is often avoided by conservatives who prefer pansy euphemisms like "free enterprise".

Today, when oligopolies like Russia and China are nominally capitalist, and most civilized and democracies have sufficient "socialism" in their economies to drive most American conservatives apoplectic, it really makes no sense to use the term "socialism" as a noun. It is still perfectly useful to use it as an adjective
(as in "Israel is more socialist than most of her Arab neighbors".)