“To understand the pathologies of America is to first recognize how the Cold War wiped out the entire left half of its political spectrum so that today’s left extreme starts at what most countries would consider right of center, and moves rightward from there.”
http://www.theeuropean-magazine.com/329-rowden-rick/330-american-inequality
eurotale 
The irrelevance of that view is stunning. Using other societies to explain what you find in the US to be detestably different than you want it to be is a vapid in it’s reasoning.
Inequality of income is a bugaboo Europeans going back to the 19th century have used to rally the ignorant, and the envy-laden. It’s raising the standard of living of those with the least, that should be a real concern, and “income equalization” doesn’t do that at all. All proofs that have tried to demonstrate that it does have ignored the real economic forces at work that did.
After all, couldn’t you just “level things out” by making everyone worse off, so long as you make the richest MUCH worst off?
Free markets created the elevation in standards for the broadest number of people which we like to call the “middle class” (as if there was still anything meaningful that you can still call “class”,) despite the idea that labor unionization managed this. It speciously ignores the history of wealth creation from the bottom up observed as far back as Roman society.
In fact, the IDEAS Europeans have conditined into themselves are more telling… than some silly idea that those who DON’T take them up are backward. All the rapidly improving and advancing societies in the world, particularly in Asia, and soon in Africa, have REJECTED those ideas in ORDER TO ELIMINATE POVERTY.
So to think that US society is retrograde for the same reasons is childish. It’s more likely the result of the kind of degradation and insulting assumptions promoted about the US in much of Europe, which I have been able to note over the course of my lifetime having outcome no different than operaant conditioning, neatly expressed in a un-naturally uniform set of opinions on some subjects rather than others.
Posted by ¡No Pasarán! (@nopasa) | November 1, 2012, 4:15 pm