George Orwell, 1943
In a fascinating essay published in 1937, George Orwell lamented that the British socialist movement shared a problem with Christianity: its adherents made the doctrine unattractive to the general public. On Orwell’s telling, middle-class British socialists glorified the working class while loathing actual working class people. They pontificated on the necessity of smashing the bourgeoisie while clinging, almost desperately, to bourgeois values over and against the uncouth masses they were theoretically trying to liberate. Worse still, British socialism attracted all kinds of cranks (Orwell mentions pacifists, vegetarians, and men with beards) who made socialism an object of derision to mainstream society.
Orwell thought this supremely tragic, since in his view socialism was the only real option to lift millions of British people out of poverty and despair (in 1937 the end of the Great Depression was nowhere in sight). But he emphasizes, I think rightly, that there is no logical connection between the propositions “Socialists are mostly snobs and weirdos” and “Socialism is a failed economic system.” Socialism is the kind of thing that can be valid even if most of its adherents are not particularly appealing people.