Throughout Europe, Social Democrats have long since shifted from the kind of stalwart ideology that Sanders pushes toward what many referred to as the Third Way. Photograph by Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty

Bernie Sanders has been campaigning in New York, where he grew up, but in a real sense his gaze remains focussed on Northern Europe. In his effort to make American society fairer, he has looked, throughout his run for the Presidency, at countries whose welfare states were built by Europe’s Social Democratic parties. But there’s an underlying oddity: while Sanders’s calls for a redistribution of wealth and for state intervention—in health care, education, the financial system—echo what the Social Democrats of Europe were up to in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, his views often clash with the policies of those parties today. “What Sanders is saying has not been said in Europe for decades,” Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist at the University of Georgia, whose specialty is European political movements, said.

In the Netherlands, for example, where I lived for seven years, and where the existing system was largely shaped by Social Democrats of old, a steely pragmatism now rules. Since 2012, the Social Democrats have been part of the governing coalition, under the conservative Freedom and Democracy Party; because the Social Democrats are in government, “they are heavily influenced by the role they play on the European stage,” according to Chris Kijne, a prominent Dutch journalist. That means taking stands that might have been anathema to their predecessors. “They’re involved in the austerity plan and budget control,” Kijne said. “Leaders of the Party also engineered bank bailouts.” As far back as 1995, Wim Kok, then the leader of the Dutch Social Democrats, described “the shaking off of ideological feathers” as “a liberating experience.”

Throughout Europe, Social Democrats have long since shifted from the kind of stalwart ideology that Sanders now pushes toward what Germans called the Neue Mitte (New Center) and those in other countries referred to as the Third Way. Some on the left look at the shift as a straight-up sellout to capitalism. Others describe it as a realization, driven home by electoral defeats, that things like free tuition and free health care have costs that eventually need to be paid. What most struck me about living in the Netherlands as its welfare-state model evolved was its sophisticated mixing of public and private. While Americans tend to think of European systems as involving vast government-run social-service programs, health care in the Netherlands has been, since 2006, mostly in the hands of private insurance companies. But the government has a prominent role: it is responsible for covering long-term conditions, and has oversight of both insurers and individuals. As Kijne notes, “the system has been privatized with the tacit approval of the Social Democrats.”

The pragmatic approach of the Dutch Social Democrats was brought home to me a few years ago, in a conversation with Carolien Gehrels, a member of the Party who was a deputy mayor of Amsterdam at the time. She had just returned to the Netherlands from a tour of American cities, and she expressed amazement at how weak city government was in the U.S. Her main point was not that government ought to run all or most aspects of municipal life but that it had to be strong enough to be an effective mediator between nongovernmental entities, such as developers and large landowners. Stripped of much of their power, she felt, American cities were being eaten alive by corporations.

The prevailing pragmatism of Europe’s Social Democrats brings many of them into alignment with, of all people, Sanders’s opponent, Hillary Clinton—and makes Sanders seem, to some on the Continent, like a throwback. One Dutch politician told me that Sanders reminds him of Michael Foot, the head of the British Labour Party in the early eighties, a socialist at heart who struggled against Margaret Thatcher, and who wanted to bring back government control of industry and enhance the power of labor unions. Karin Pettersson, the political editor-in-chief of the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, told me that Social Democrats there are split between Sanders and Clinton. The U.S. Presidential race, she said, “has become a proxy for the internal debate between ideological purity and pragmatism.”

Almost across the board, Europe’s Social Democratic parties have lost ground in recent years. Some say that this is precisely because they abandoned their core commitment to the kind of egalitarian society that Sanders envisions. But it’s also true that the parties were formed in a different era, when issues like immigration and free trade were not so pressing and divisive. Whereas Sanders opposes the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership being negotiated between the U.S. and the European Union, saying that it’s bad for American workers, European Social Democrats have defended it on the ground that their countries need to be competitive. And while Sanders has vowed that, as President, he would sign an executive order to grant illegal immigrants in the U.S. a path to citizenship, Europe’s Social Democratic parties are fractured by the immigration issue. The Dutch party has been steadily losing voters to Geert Wilders, the country’s Trump-like, anti-Muslim populist politician (who even has his own funny hairdo).

Sanders sometimes refers specifically to Europe’s Social Democratic parties, but just as often he calls himself a “democratic socialist,” which is something else entirely. As an old lefty, he surely knows the difference. The manipulation of leftist terminology allows him to pick and choose elements that suit a given moment on the campaign trail. Socialism is an ideology of dramatic change; young people respond to the rhetoric of “revolution,” and aren’t scared away by “socialism” in itself (though they aren’t nearly as excited about the idea of redistribution of wealth). Yet Sanders has no intention of trying to engineer a state takeover of the means of production. What he seems to want is a return to the era of his own youth, when his ideas were shaped by Europe’s Social Democrats in their heyday, politicians who dreamed of a society that was both egalitarian and capitalistic, and who erected vast social-welfare states. In Europe itself, those days are gone, while rampant inequality in the heartland of capitalism has fuelled Sanders’s run. Says Cas Mudde: “I think it’s ironic that the last real Social Democrat would be in the United States.”