I think that used to be more true 30 years ago or so, but isn't anymore. As a person from a liberal western country living in the US now, Americans (and specifically certain regions like the Bay Area) now hold all the most extreme positions on the spectrum.

"Extreme" left used to be about worker rights, universal health care, sheltering the poor, or reducing global strife (say the anti-war movements of the 60s/70s).

Bay Area left is now about grievance politics, defunding the police, being anti-tech (represented as being anti-gentrification, or anti-billionaire, but the deeper issue is usually anti-tech, which is seen as what made living in SF/Oakland unaffordable, as opposed to say, obstructionism), etc. It's gotten a lot more extreme in recent years, and I hesitate to even call it "left" because it's more like they've branch off along a new dimension on the axis. You get some of that in Europe too, but it's nowhere near as radicalized.

This is often repeated but, as an American who lived in Europe for some years, it doesn't appear to be true.

There are right wings in Europe that carry very strong albeit slightly different conservative beliefs.

In any society, there will be conservative views and liberal ones. It just seems like there is a difference in how those beliefs are exercised. Extremism in one side just brings extremism to the other side.

We have actual Maoists in the bay area - they're a tiny faction and utterly irrelevant, but they're very good at getting attention and they like to poison the atmosphere for everyone. There are no Maoist governing parties in Europe that I'm aware of, and hardly any Marxists either.

Communist parties in America are nothing but there are communist parties with seats in national legislatures throughout Europe. They’re not specifically Maoist because that doesn’t make any sense for developed countries.

> There are no Maoist governing parties in Europe that I'm aware of

There aren't any Maoist (or any of the other descendants of Leninism) governing parties in the Bay Area, either.