The funny thing about that is, that even for Europeans the term sounds negative, at least for Germans. We do not think that we live inside socialism. For us socialism is what Eastern Germany had and it is a bad idea (TM), too. We would use terms like social democratic or social market economy. Maybe it is different in other European countries, though.
In Western Europe socialism doesn't seem to uniformly create a negative reaction. After all Francois Hollande, President of the French Republic is a member of the Socialist Party.
If you go further east in Europe though both Brutalism and Socialism are scorned.
Perhaps when young Americans talk about socialism they don't really mean socialism in the Marxist sense, but rather a mixed economy somewhere in between the USA and France?
I'm referring to the US associations; I think that's the cultural zeitgeist that the New York Times is more familiar with :-P
Sort of the backlash to the right wing calling both European Social Democrats and American moves to expand the welfare state "socialist" as a term of abuse.
I honestly don't think Bernie would have had a chance at getting the kind of traction he got if the US right hadn't basically massively overplayed its hand by trying to tell a generation that grew up after the end of the cold war that Obama was a socialist.
It led to a very strong, very noticeable shift in perception where a much wider group of Americans in discussions would start asking questions about socialism instead of shooting down any mention of it with insults.
Socialist party on France is not really socialist nor communist: it is a capitalist party with "social-democrat" focus, i.e. quality public schools, quality and universal medical coverage for citizens, etc. In fact, even the conservative-liberal French party is in favor of universal medical coverage. That is pretty much the same in other European countries, like e.g. Spain (close to France), where I live.
In "western Europe" the negative word for "socialist" is "communist", as most western-European "socialism" became social-democracy (i.e. "capitalist liberal-progressist" without Marxist commitment at all) after WWII.
In Germany Honecker invented the term "real existierender Sozialismus" [0] (actually existing socialism) and except in some extremist circles definitely has a negative meaning today. In my head it is stored next to sentences like "Niemand hat die Absicht eine Mauer zu errichten." ("Nobody has the intention of building a wall").
