Watching French socialist baby mama get progressively (pun intended) more redpilled by every American leftist she meets possesses a subtle and ironic intellectual joy to it.

The Bay Area Left (to use a catch-all) idealizes the social welfare states of Europe, yet possesses views that are completely antithetical to anything resembling the historical Western Left (which still exists in Europe, though in reduced state vs. decades past).

In other words, everyone wants to live in a France or Denmark (or so they think, from that one backpacking trip they made), but yet they'd greet the immigration and schooling policies of those countries (as two examples) with absolute horror.

It's broadly assumed that the US political spectrum is centered to the right of Europe's center.

I'd say that's overly reductionist. Over the past couple of decades, the US has indeed economically moved way to the right, way beyond most of Europe.

But on the social and non-economic front, I think the relative centering of US vs. Europe is a lot less clear. The US has moved way to the left, to the point that even American leftists of a decade ago, assuming they didn't change, would now find themselves right of center.

To invoke the catchy phrasing of Hispanics in New Mexico (whose presence far predates the US expansion west): We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us.

I think lots of US lefties would say that politically now. And ditto European lefties (arguably for many years now).

If you're wondering what aforementioned French socialist says when parsing the SF political mayhem: It's all a show, and the rich (of both political stripes) are throwing crumbs at the poor so they don't rebel. Nobody actually cares about the poor here, only their own pet causes.

It's entirely possible that the American mind is wired in such a way--no real class consciousness, the poor only think themselves 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires', etc.--that Euro-style socialism will never have any real momentum. It'll just be cosplayed by a few dreamers.