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Because they are uninformed. And Democratic socialism is closer to communism than social democracy.
Democratic Socialism is closer to socialism than communism. It literally means using democracy to transform the economic system to be socialist.
I'd consider myself a democratic socialist myself, as I believe that workers should own the businesses they work for instead of consolidating the power to a small amount of executives and shareholders who only care about making more profit than they did the previous quarter. I also believe this would limit the possibility of corruption by preventing extreme wealth from existing in the first place.
I do not consider myself a communist because I don't believe that centralized control is a good idea in most cases. An exception to that for me would be a single payer healthcare system, where the government guarantees healthcare to all of its citizens and visitors free at the point of service.
Here I reckon you’ve made an important point. Socialism is economics, not governance. Well, in a democracy anyway. Perhaps that should be indented. I think it’s one of the biggest barriers to being comfortable with the word itself.
Workers can own businesses today, so there's nothing stopping that from happening. There are lots of worker owned collectives out there. The major difference between Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism is that Democratic Socialism wants to nationalise many categories of business, ie. to have the government run them.
This tends to not go well where it's been tried because once business and government meld it becomes an unstoppable force that eats everything and has no accountability to anyone or oversight by anyone, and rapidly becomes inefficient and ineffective. I much prefer the Scandinavian way of mass deployment of labor unions, so that labor is a powerful force in it's own right rather than one that's ruled by a powerful merged political/business elite.
The difference between it being an option and it being mandated is that when the level of greed we see today is allowed to exist, then it will exist, and power will slowly and inevitably be taken away from the worker class.
There are also multiple types of socialism, and socialism doesn't necessarilly mean government ownership specifically. Check out Professor Richard Wolff's excellent lectures on the topic.
That's why I wish there was better understanding of social democracy.
I understand social democracy very well and I don't think it's a good system because the capitalist class ultimately stays in charge, which will inevitably lead to corruption and the slow reverting of social services. I used to be a social democrat myself around when Bernie started to run for president the first time, so I understand why the premise is popular.
My idea of socialism includes:
And that's just what I came up with and is by no means comprehensive.
Who is uninformed, Americans or Europeans?
Americans. And I can say that as someone who's lived half his life on each continent. But Europeans probably don't know what Democratic Socialism is either.