I see it more as a sign of how few mainstream alternatives have been proposed. I've been guilty of generally assuming a communist bent when I see a negatively zealous response to the "free market" ideology. I don't act on the assumption, but from my experience, it tends to be the most common result.
Our political system seems hell-bent on only ever having two solutions to a problem, though.
> Too distracted by social media and our phones perhaps?
I think this is a significant contributing factor. It's becoming increasingly difficult to have any semblance of a meaningful conversation with those around me. I don't really know how to describe it other than an apparent "dumbing down" of the average person. I despise elitists, and I hate to even act in a way that might come off as elitist, but I simply have no other explanation for what I am seeing. People just want to talk about the latest trend on TikTok and have no interest in applying anything close to intellectual thought to what's happening around them.
We seem to be stuck at a local maxima[1]. The current system works great for the 0.001% who have all the money and the power, so it isn't in their interest to change it. But there definitely seems to have been a failure of the imagination amongst the 99.999%. Too distracted by social media and our phones perhaps?
[1] There is a lot to dislike about the current system, but there have been far worse ones (feudalism, communism etc).