About 100 years ago, a bunch of Swedish social democrats took a look at the European situation and decided they had a problem.
Working-class revolutions had failed, Bolshevism was a dictatorship, and fascism had captured the patriotic vote. Working-class parties couldn’t capture a majority of the vote on their own, nor could such parties gain an overwhelming majority of the working class. Their answer was a turn away from class alone, and to the nation as a whole, with the idea of the folkhemmet — the nation as “the people’s house”. Per Albin Hansson, a former prime minister, summed it up this way:
The basis of the home is community and togetherness. The good home does not recognise any privileged or neglected members, nor any favourite or stepchildren. In the good home there is equality, consideration, cooperation and helpfulness. Applied to the great people’s and citizens’ home this would mean the breaking down of all the social and economic barriers that now separate citizens into the privileged and the neglected, into the rulers and the dependents, into the rich and the poor, the propertied and the impoverished, the plunderers and the plundered. Swedish society is not yet the people’s home. There is a formal equality, equality of political rights, but from a social perspective, the class society remains, and from an economic perspective the dictatorship of the few prevails.
The formulation allowed the SAP — the Swedish Social Democrats — to gain power, and hold it for just about all of the next 70 years, and about 85 of the last 100, while creating a society that largely abolished poverty without destroying enterprise and initiative. Crucial to the folkhemmet concept was the Social Democrats’ understanding that they had to tackle fascism and its antecedents, which were kinda big in a Nordic monocultural society.
By acknowledging the legitimate desires that national community represented, and the lack of such attachments in class-only politics, the SAP ensured that no one could outflank them.
That century-long victory may have come to an end with Sweden’s elections last weekend, which has produced a knife-edge result between the left and right blocs, each composed of four of five parties. This may be as close as 174 seats each, with a final one up for grabs, of the 349 seats total.
Sweden has had such close elections before, but the difference is that this time the largest party (after the SAP, which took 30%) is the Sweden Democrats (SD), a hard-right outfit with some neo-Nazi origins, which took 20% of the vote, up from 17% in 2018 — and from 3.5% in the 1990s.
This year they passed The Moderate Party (aka the Moderates), a centre-right group, and hitherto the largest party on the right, which gained only 67 seats, to the SD’s 73. The SD is another of the fascist-derived parties that have turned explicit racialist policies into nativist conservatism, arguing for stricter controls on immigration, cultural assimilation, and the recentering of the nuclear biological family.
This leaves the Moderates, the right bloc, and the whole of Swedish politics with a big problem. Hitherto, all parties have excluded the SD from any coalition dealings, though the Moderates have relied on the SD for support. Now the party is too big to ignore. That doesn’t mean it’ll get the nod to try to form government, even if the right has a majority (it works differently in Sweden), but it’s hard to see how it can be excluded from ministries.
Sweden has to confront the ultimate horror in Swedish culture: the admission that it is just like everyone else.
Commentators all over the world have been scratching their heads as to how such a “liberal” society went to the right. But that is addled, a product of assessing politics on a single spectrum.
The left bloc is reasonably consistent: the Greens, the Left and other small parties are to the left of the SAP, the Centre party to the right, but all somewhere along the socialist spectrum. But the right bloc includes doctrinaire free market liberals, the Moderates, and the SD. The latter shares the SAP’s commitment to maintaining a full social welfare system. It is that commitment that has made it possible for it to gain votes from the Social Democrats, breaking its very tight relationship with working-class voters.
This left-right transfer has been happening all over Europe. But the Swedes had managed to keep such processes at bay for decades. How did it all come apart? Sadly, it is mostly the SAP’s own doing — with a big help from the Moderates.
Decades ago, it had used the folkhemmet principle to begin the steady extension of equality to women, to cultural minorities, and to refugees, of which it took significant number. But there had always been a necessary resistance to cosmopolitanism along with it. As that weakened after the 1960s, the SAP’s new generation tried to shift to a more liberal set of policies, while maintaining the comprehensive social welfare system. This led the SAP to back Sweden signing the Maastricht Treaty, and entering the EU just as freedom of movement and neoliberal economics became dominant.
The result destroyed the notion of refuge as a gift, replaced that form of exchange with the exercise of right, and saw large numbers of migrants move into Denmark and Scania, the southernmost part of Sweden. The problems arising — poverty, urban compression, crime, perceptions of free-riding welfare use — were no worse than in other places, but they hit hitherto fairly staid Sweden like a bomb.
Then in 2006 the Moderates won power for the first time since the 1990s — only the second time the right had gained sustained power in many decades. Their eight years in power was a mild neoliberalisation compared with elsewhere — parental leave threatened to fall below 400 days’ leave at 75% of salary, the horror — but there was enough of a shift to sharpen inequality, just as there was an influx of job-ready migrants, above the previously well-controlled numbers of refugees.
By the time the SAP was back in power in 2014, it had problems Sweden had avoided for decades. For progressives there wasn’t any easy way to acknowledge it, but migrant neighbourhoods had formed, especially around Malmo, the capital of the southern region of Scania, gun and knife crime was up, and so was sexual violence, harassment and assault as the disenfranchised young males of very patriarchal cultures landed in the country which was perhaps the most advanced in both the sexual and second wave feminist revolution.
This was all unprecedented for Swedes, but at the same time the SAP had been transformed by the postmodern liberal journey. Its commitment to sexual equality had always been so great that at times it amounted to anti-family policies: for decades it had provided unlimited free childcare, while denying parental leave on the grounds that the latter would simply reinforce traditional sexual roles. Now its social progressivism took it into the territory of gender rights, at which it inevitably became a world leader on self-definition rights in schools and workplaces, and got well out in front of mainstream attitudes, even here.
At the same time, under the rule of multicultural tolerance of difference, excessive deference was being shown to reactionary values in some Muslim migrant communities, in which values could be transmitted that just didn’t work in mainstream Swedish society.
Since both the SAP and the Moderates had thus undermined the “people’s house” concept, all the SD had to do was make itself the right-wing version of what social democracy had previously offered, and bang, legitimacy had transferred.
Flows of votes came from both the Moderates and the SAP, as the SD curated its politics to fit in with the mix of progressivism and conservatism of the mainstream. Any sort of racial notions have long been junked, though the party is still crawling with racists and crypto-Nazis, despite a series of membership purges over the past two decades. It is pro same-sex marriage, does not object to limited gender affirmation measures, but wants policy recentered on the sexually equal nuclear family (Sweden has a huge single motherhood rate). Indeed, it has performed the move the maverick Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn (a gay Leninist-Foucaultian) performed, arguing that excessive Muslim immigration combined with value-neutral multicultural policies will eventual threaten hard-won sex, gender and sexuality equality.
Sweden could have avoided some of this. How much is another question. It should have stayed out of the EU, maintained its migration policy as refugee-dominated and offered as the moral gift of refuge in someone’s home, not the right to cross a dissolved border.
How much neoliberalism it could have skipped is another question. The place had no commercial broadcasting for decades, no non-government schools, and a collective culture — drink at the union club, holiday at the union camp, etc — that was becoming cloying. Sweden was everything the early utopian socialists had dreamed might be possible; turns out that the deepest human desire is the opportunity to watch Friends.
But it could have avoided the empowering of fascists if — and stop me if you’ve heard me saying this — progressives had been able to come to a deeper understanding that their own social values, on community, migration, gender, may have seemed universal and obviously right but only appear so, because progressives’ particular culture is that of universality. Their defining belief is the possession of truths, instantiated in rights, applicable everywhere. And everywhere, from Sweden to Italy to Britain, conservatives, right populists and actual post-fascists are being elected on the strength of it.
I went to Sweden by accident 15 years ago, saw that social democracy was very different, decided to stay a while. I came to understand that decades of actual social democracy, with all its residual, unchanged inequalities of elite power and its more complex sociocultural problems (the best postwar Swedish novel, about the transformation of Swedish psychology, is called The Autistics) had created a society that was qualitatively different in how people were treated and thought of each other, of the fierce commitment towards an equality of opportunity in education and work, of a real equality (or reduced inequality) between the sexes — as opposed to the weaponisation of victimhood — and a refusal to accept that anything was too difficult to tackle.
This was the outer edge of the prize, the society of genuinely universal human flourishing. That it has all been screwed up and handed over to the hard right by a combination of doctrinaire neoliberalism and hubristic progressivism fills me with sadness and anger.
We’ll know full results tomorrow, which will only be certified weeks later. But even if the right loses by a seat or two, the Sweden Democrats won. Italy votes for fascists all the time — it’s like deciding occasionally you’ll have a cassata, a little treat. This loss is different. This is epochal, a broken possibility, the end of an era, a place we don’t live in nay more.
“But it could have avoided the empowering of fascists if — and stop me if you’ve heard me saying this — progressives had been able to come to a deeper understanding that their own social values, on community, migration, gender, may have seemed universal and obviously right but only appear so, because progressives’ particular culture is that of universality.”
This really needs to be said ad nauseum until it’s understood and internalised!
I sometimes wonder if progressivism would do better if universalism should only be treated as an ought, rather than treating is as an is. Any sympathetic understanding of the human condition (what a progressive morality ought to aspire to) needs to take into account that we are a tribal species with strong parochial urges. Universalism often comes across as aspirational at best, and often comes across as both condescending and deeply out of touch.
An interesting perspective, Guy. I think all cultures have a maximum rate of social change they can accommodate stably. While nativist thought acts needlessly allergic, there’s no time when free immigration proponents have ever engaged this question constructively. There’s also a false equivalence between multiculturalism and universal human rights — which latter are a product of both culture and economy, and therefore have never been supported universally.
Universal human rights is a tricky question, as the Swedes are apparently finding. I can’t see any argument against ideas in the UN declaration , but many don’t accept them.
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Woopwoop said: I can’t see any argument against ideas in the UN declaration
They’re more than ideas, W^2; they’re designed as policy. Which means they can be critiqued on provenance, framing, principles, implementation and enforcement.
I can’t think of anyone serious who wouldn’t criticise them on at least one of these criteria. In my response to lexusaussie above I criticised them on the first three, and it’s even easier to criticise them on the last two.
There is no such thing as “Universal Human Rights” however that doesn’t stop the Golden Billion from pushing Western values as “Universal”.
Lexusaussie offered: There is no such thing as “Universal Human Rights”
The UN presumably intended them to apply universally, rather than suggest that they saw universal consensus.
And: that doesn’t stop the Golden Billion from pushing Western values as “Universal”.
The problem is, they originated with Deist thought (virtually no major thinker is a Deist anymore), which itself was a naturalistic abstraction of Protestantism, which of course is based on Christian metaphysics, none of which accurately predict the way anthropology, sociology or economics work anyway. And it was partially constructed in reaction to the particular way that the RC church had conspired with European monarchies — none of which was repeated outside the purview of the RC church.
So we need a species-wide compact on what decency and ethics ought to mean, but the colonial Atlantic fait accompli that is the Declaration of Human Rights isn’t it.
We also need to realise that a lot of modern morality isn’t ‘evolved’ but constructed economically. Starving primates routinely commit infanticide: well-fed primates don’t have to.
Also, there’s no society in which dominant groups welcome newcomers who’ll challenge their dominance. I don’t just mean no modern society: I mean no primate society at all.
So political ideologies of any stripe don’t count for much when they’re rationalisations about behavioural misconceptions. Guy rightly points out that we need to do better and that the cost of failing to see how is that viable societal improvements become untenable for sociological reasons and not simply economic misfortunes.
While the neoliberal right’s hostility to social boundaries is relatively easily explicable, the neoliberal left’s hostility will have to be understood as the same hubristic ignorance as the French Revolutionaries’.
Coincidentally last night I read this review of a book about the evolutionary origins of the human capacity for society, in both cooperative and violent actions that are unknown in other primates:
“Modern humans descended not from cold-blooded individualists nor from indiscriminate cooperators. Rather, we are descendants of those who distinguished between us and them, between ingroups and outgroups.”
(https://thecritic.co.uk/The-Distinctiveness-of-Human-Aggression/)
So the neoliberal left, looking back at the 20th century, decided the way to a more peaceful future was not more of the judicious expansion of Us achieved in, for example, the Australian colonies and pre-Great War federation, post-Great War Sweden and post-WW2 Europe and Japan.
Rather that future can only come from demolishing the bounds of Us (economically, politically, intellectually) and demonizing everyone from a majority demographic attached to an Us, or who understands that fences make good neighbours. (What a lucky coincidence for the neoliberal right that the left shared their hostility to inherited boundaries and conservatives.)
The result in Sweden does seem catastrophic. I’m grateful for your analysis, which is the best I’ve read so far. Would the same argument apply to the failure of the referendum on the Chilean constitution?
Yes, that’s exactly the case
The Swedish experience provides a classic case study of what is almost certain to happen when an advanced western country takes in large numbers of immigrants who are simply not acquainted with, let alone sympathetic to, or understanding of, western values and customs.
The Swedes were well known for their kindness and generosity. Unfortunately, along with that kindness and generosity went a good deal of naivete. And now they are paying a huge price for the monumental mistakes they have made. Someone should have reminded them of the old saying that:
“The pathway to hell is paved with the best of intentions.”
before it was too late.
I hope that we are paying attention to what is happening there (although somehow I very much doubt that we will learn anything from their experience – thanks to the politically correct commissars who direct the agenda in this country.
Finally, I would highly recommend those who wish to acquaint themselves with the situation in Europe in general, to read Douglas Murray’s excellent book “The Strange Death of Europe Immigration, Identity, Islam”. Before I read this book a few years ago I knew that the situation in Europe was bad but it was not until I had finished the book that I realized just how bad it was.
Finally, another saying we would do well to remember,
“Oil and water do not mix”.
Douglas Murray’s book belongs up there with Jean Raspail’s ‘Camp of the Saints’, published by deceased white nationalist John Tanton’s Social Contract Press (& reviewed favourably by an Oz ‘academic’….), which has inspired Camus’ ‘great replacement’ and bannon et al.; Guardian had a prescient article years ago ‘Far right or far wrong’ summarising similar.
Drew, Camp of the Saints’ by Jean Raspail, is a fictional novel. I say again Drew, fiction.
In stark contrast Drew, Douglas Murray’s book is a meticulously researched book based on much solid evidence. He includes myriad references. A few years ago I read an article by a Guardian reporter who tried to dismiss his book. The attempted refutation was so poor at to be contemptible. Murray’s factual account of what was and is going on in Europe does not fit the loony left’s narrative, so the best that they can do is to try to dismiss it with baseless criticism. The left, in their typical way, throw a few pejoratives about, and then they expect everybody to ‘fall into line’, nodding approvingly like little automatons. Unfortunately, they don’t get that response from me, Drew. I like to think for myself and look at empirical evidence (and that means much more than just reading Douglas Murray’s book.)
Murray received the same treatment from the Graun – quelle bloody surprise!- for his views, as a gay bloke, on the gender imbroglio.
Both are promoted by and within the same circles for parallel themes i.e. shared by the nativist libertarian right masquerading as conservative.
Well Drew, I do not support, or have any affiliation with the ‘nativist libertarian right’. If something seems genuine to me, then I support it regardless of whether it is from the ‘right’ or ‘left’.
No youve got this completely wrong. As i say in the article, high refugee intake worked for decades. A monocultural people took in people from all over the world. What wrecked it was the changed method. Yr esentialist, biologistic take is exactly what im rejecting….
Sorry Guy, I have to disagree with you – totally. My impartial examination of the evidence tells a much different and far more disturbing story. In keeping with my professional training, not to mention, my natural instincts, I let reality guide my response to these issues, not some unreal and wishful view of how I would like things to be.
Remember the old saying Guy:
“The world is as it is, not as we would like it to be.”
Guy, we got our fingers burnt when we took in large numbers of Catholics over a100 years ago. These people wanted to impose their Catholic agenda onto the rest of us through organizations such as the Catholic Social Studies Movement (later the National Civic Council, which I regarded as the Industrial Wing of the Church); and the Democratic Labor Party (the political wing of the Catholic Church). Guy, in all honesty, do you really believe that ‘you know who’, (I don’t want to activate the Crikey delay algorithm by specifically mentioning this religion) will not do the same once they reach a ‘critical mass’?
Sweden is certainly not the only country that has these issues. In fact, it would be hard to find one that hasn’t had problems as a result of taking in these immigrants. Look at the problems the English and French have had. Douglas Murray gives ample evidence of the consequences for Europe as a whole of poor decision-making in regard to immigration.
Finally Guy, I am not too clear on what an “essentialist, biologistic take” is even though I have looked up both of these words. And that prompts me to comment (and I do not mean this in a nasty or sarcastic way), but your writing style is often very difficult to understand, sometimes to the point of being almost impenetrable.
I have a very different take on the Catholics in Australia.
It strikes me that the accusations being leveled at Muslims in Australia now are exactly the same as what used to be said about Catholics as late as the 1960s (I’m old enough to remember the chasm that separated Catholic and Protestant Australia, as least as great as that with Muslims now).
They were brainwashed in an alien religion
Their loyalty to the religion was greater than their loyalty to the nation or society.
They ran a parallel society
They had a record of violence (Finians etc)
Their school system brainwashed them into this parallel society.
They treated women like sh!t
They bred like rabbits, as part of a strategy of outnumbering the rest of us.
The situation now is unrecognisable, with the power of the Church and its number of adherents radically reduced. Catholics are much more part of the mainstream.
I’m not being a Polyanna, but IMHO we have been here before and came through it.
OMG! Catholics as the enemy? With an alien culture displacing good old protestant values? Are you an orange man by any chance?
Nick, let me reassure you, I am not, never have been, or ever will be “an orange man”. If I have ever had to paint myself in any color, it has always been red. I have always regarded myself as a democratic socialist, although these days I find the views of some who claim to be ‘democratic socialists’ to be completely alien to my own. Furthermore, Nick, I am an avowed atheist and have been for virtually all my life. As far as I am concerned Nick, ALL religion is ‘the enemy’ of common sense and progress.
It’s nothing to do with a ‘biologistic’ view – it is cultural as RR points out with those delightful Tykes.
(See also the pleadings to Fraser by the Maronite community – incidentally the first non-Euros allowed into Australia en masse in the early 60s – not to allow in the ‘other’ community come here when yet another civil war erupted in Lebanon as they would not adapt – not could not.)
Multi-culturalism was a typical euphemism (for multi-racial) from the usual suspects in the early 70s because it was abvious the latter would not fly.
Biology is not destiny – the kultur of the dominant demographic is.
Mutti et al seemed to have believed that millions of M/E (90% young/military age male) in a year or two could be absorbed as easily as were the 17M Ossies into the Vaterland in the 90s, still a sore spot there.
Hi Guy. Could we get more articles diving into this topic a little deeper please? As usual, I’m struggling to get my head around it but find it really interesting
Not so much the “changed method” but the rapidity & numbers involved since the turn of the century.
Sweden currently has quarter of its population either born abroad or descended from immigrant which cohort has a 20% unemployment rate.
This is not a recipe for social cohesion as demonstrated elsewhere in Schengenland – see also Brexit.
Although never part of that borderless experiment, the UK currently has 5M (7.5% of its population) permanent residents from EU countries which were, not all “Polish plumbers”.