Wouldn't it make sense that after socialism failed so miserably, people would take notice?

It does, doesn't it? And just as anyone might suspect, they did, that's why no major American politicians advocates for socialism, there are people like Bernie Sanders who call themselves socialists, but they don't know what socialism is, what Bernie actually is, is a social democrat, socialism, as practiced in the past, is state control of the means of production, and yes, that has failed, the state can not replace the entire market, and even if they could, they couldn't do it good enough to compete with a capitalist one. What really grinds my gears is when people try to use the "socialism has been tried" argument against Bernie Sanders, as if what went wrong in the Soviet Union was that they had Free healthcare and education, and if that happens in America then America will just go right in that direction, while these people are completely ignoring that this has been done in the Scandinavian countries and has not led to the problems that where in the soviet union, any intellectually honest and intelligent person would acknowledge that what they have in Scandinavia is not socialism, and than "socialism has been tried" is not a valid argument against having those non-socialist policies in America.