We really should stop calling it communism.

The welfare state as it exists today is more akin to the Nazi system.

[en.wikipedia.org]

Although the Nazis were on principle against welfare they instigated a welfare program with racial qualifications. It was by design a political tool not unlike what we are seeing with talk of reparations for blacks in the US or student loan forgiveness as just two recent examples. The history of the modern welfare state is complex. It certainly has some roots in socialism and Marxist theory but most Western countries remain "capitalistic". That capitalism again however has taken more of the form that existed in Nazi Germany. What distinguishes it from the Nazi version is that the emerging system today is becoming a form of corporatism. Or an incestuous relationship between government and corporations. It works through both the legislative and executive branches while the Nazis essentially did not have a legislative branch. Nazism in this regard is more akin to the system that emerged out of communism in China.

I think it is important to remember that the end state in Marxism is a form of anarchy. You could argue that AntiFa and other manifestations in modern society reflect that ideology along with ideas such as defunding the police. I would say George Soros is more a Marxist than most other players today because he seems to want to skip the socialist phase and move straight into anarchy. Most of the other players however seem intent on moving towards an authoritarian model. You could think of capitalism as an anarchy system as well which pushes people such as Ayn Rand ironically closer to communism than liberals and conservatives. The problem with libertarianism is that you need a government to keep it going. The natural tendency of any system to concentrate power and money means you need a government to break up monopolies and prevent corporatism.

Words have meaning but they are never a substitute for the thing itself. Rome had a welfare state but it wasn't communist, Marxist, capitalist, libertarian or corporatists. Those words had not been invented.

What history teaches us is that some form of state social welfare seems to always be necessary for social stability. Private systems have always proven to be inadequate. Even if the motivations in the West were political welfare has all but eliminated absolute poverty. A good deal of credit for that of course has to go to the industrial revolution. What role liberal democracy played is hard to quantify but the spread of liberal democracy does seem to correlate with social development. The one glaring exception would be China which managed to extract considerable social development with capitalism minus liberalism. There are other historical examples but that is complex.

The point I'm trying to make is that idealism of any variety will run into the brick wall of reality.

Progressivism hit that wall a few decades ago when social engineering, of which welfare is just one example, started to show cracks because of unintended consequences and program failures. A lot of that has to do with ideals becoming more important than pragmatism. Early on progressivism had some impressive successes such as rural electrification, the Tennessee Valley Authority being a prime example. Make work projects such as the WPA had similar successes. Japan's intervention in it's economy was very successful until it wasn't. You can have too much of a good thing. It's always about balance but ideologies are by definition extreme.

The key to the success of liberal democracies is that government and capitalist anarchy and the tendency to monopoly were kept in balance by responsible pragmatic representative governments.