You're right, that was a bad analogy, but I can't think of a good one. My intent was simply to highlight that true democratic socialists are actually socialist, while the real life alternatives we have genuinely are not.
From Britannica (every Marxist I've ever had as a prof was an orthodox one and would have bristled at calling a revisionist a Marxist):
After Engels’s death in 1895, Marx’s followers split into two main camps: “revisionist” Marxists, who favoured a gradual and peaceful transition to socialism, and revolutionary Marxists, among them the leaders of the communist
Russian Revolution of 1917. The foremost revisionist was
Eduard Bernstein, a leader of the
Social Democratic Party of Germany, who fled his homeland in 1881 to avoid arrest and imprisonment under the antisocialist laws of Chancellor
Otto von Bismarck. Bernstein spent most of his exile in Britain, where he befriended Engels and later served as executor of his will. Bernstein’s experiences there (including his association with the gradualist
Fabian Society) led him to conclude that a peaceful parliamentary transition to socialism was possible in that country—a conclusion he defended and extended beyond Britain in his
Evolutionary Socialism (1899).
Bernstein revised Marxian theory in four interrelated respects. First, he added an
ethical dimension that had been largely lacking in Marx’s thought; specifically, he held, following the German philosopher
Immanuel Kant, that human beings should be treated as ends in themselves and never as means or instruments, whether by capitalists (who used workers as human machines) or by communists (who were prepared to use them as cannon fodder in the future revolution). Second, he argued that the emergence of
trade unions and working-class political parties in late 19th-century Europe presented opportunities that required revisions in Marx’s theory and therefore in Marxian political practice. Third, Bernstein noted that rising
wages and better working conditions meant that—contrary to Marx’s prediction of the immiseration of the proletariat—the lives of workers in advanced capitalist countries were actually improving. This trend he traced not to the kindness of capitalists but to the growing power of unions and working-class political parties. Fourth, however, he also warned of the danger of a revolutionary
dictatorship of the proletariat, which was likely to become a dictatorship of “club orators and writers.” On the basis of these four revisions, then, Bernstein advocated gradual, piecemeal, and peaceful reform—“evolutionary” socialism—rather than violent proletarian
revolution.
Orthodox Marxists branded Bernstein a bourgeois and a counterrevolutionary traitor to the cause. Chief among his communist critics was Lenin, who had devoted his life to the revolutionary transformation of Russia.