That also feels like a kind of "no true Scotsman" clause, an "ah well, but those aren't _American_ progressive Utopias".
The San Francisco electorate, by and large, would likely call themselves "very progressive", probably more so than any other major city in the country. Almost all of the significant power brokers, all the way up to the governor's office, in San Francisco politics would call themselves "very progressive". In that sense, San Francisco's government represents the one of the purest embodiments of what is a real political bloc or viewpoint or movement, one that calls itself "progressive", and what it might hope to achieve. Friedersdorf wants to call this politics "progressive" too; you object, and say this "American progressiveness", and the utopia created in its image to the best of its abilities, has little to do with "real progressives" and what their utopia might be like. But either way, I think what I'm trying to get at is - regardless of what you want to call it, it's real.
And I think there's something to be said for, "Conor Friedersdorf is an American, writing in an American magazine, about American politics" that makes it reasonable to highlight that distinction, or default to an American understanding of the term. I'm not trying to say that "Nordic progressiveness" isn't better than "American progressiveness", or that it isn't good or workable, but I'm hesitant to say that it's "truer" than "American progressiveness" - that's the fallacy.
(and, for what it's worth: highlighting a real distinction is certainly a rhetorical feint, and maybe a case of moving the goalposts, but it's not the same as No True Scotsman, where the distinction is, as Wikipedia puts it, "rhetoric [that] takes the form of emotionally charged but nonsubstantive purity platitudes")
But to be clear, I do like this reply a lot. And also to be clear, I'm Canadian, and in most respects like the way Canada is more progressive (in any sense, really) than the US, and think both of us would be better off if we were more like the Nordic countries. So I think it's valuable to ask, then: why is it that, Sweden, say, is more successful at producing good "real" "progressive utopias" than San Francisco?
In other words, while I think it's important to recognize the significance of self-identification, doing so while ignoring incredibly evident hypocrisy is a kind of solipsism.
I have considered moving to the USA (which is a viable option for me, for reasons that I wont go into here), and the question "but, which state?" always stops me. I start with the revealing question "what's the guns-to-healthcare ratio there?"
In the words of US/Canadian author William Gibson:
"People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary"
The only thing about it that's progressive is its social culture, in some ways, such as how it's a very LGBT-friendly city. That's all that comes to mind.
Or, one of
a) They're not really, deep down, as progressive as they claim to be.
b) it's not possible, _within the USA as it currently operates_.
c) Related to b, power to "create a progressive city" doesn't actually lie with the "supermajority" of voters, but with a few powerful people who are fine with things the way they are.
I suspect, with no evidence, a bit of all of these.