The refusal by political elites to take cultural concerns seriously continues to provoke citizens. Sweden is one of the Scandinavian models for our own progressives, yet SWEXIT seems to be at hand. Do progressives think they can avoid provoking a similar reaction here, if it can't be avoided even in Scandinavia itself?
The headline writer attempts the usual trick of implying this is just a species of racism by altering a quote in the article for the headline. The headline reads, "I'm not a racist, but...", which might be read to imply that in fact the speaker really is a racist. What the speaker actually said is, "I'm not a racist because...." That's a different thought process. (UPDATE: Actually, it appears there are claims of both kinds in the article; my mistake.)
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I have it on good authority that Norwegians are watching all these developments in Sweden very closely. The Norskis believe the Swedes started going down some very stupid roads years ago, on which they are now trying to turn around and walk back. The Norwegians are concerned because they believe the people of Oslo and a few other cities are of similar bent, and need to be made aware how suicidal this is.
We have recently seen how much the Danes want to make sure that immigrants assimilate.
The Finns just don't accept immigrants very much.
I am a little worried because (as C. S. Lewis pointed out in a debaffler preface to later editions of The Pilgrim's Regress) "[o]pposite evils, far from balancing, only aggravate each other." As I post this, I am praying for a sane outcome to all the debate.
That's a reasonable point. Certainly it's possible for nationalism to go bad; although it's not necessary that it do. We hear so much about the evils of nationalism that it's easy to forget about its goods, for example, a willingness to work together and engage in common projects that would otherwise be impossible. Still, it does sometimes entail evils.
We need to be more clear on what "racism" is. Just about everybody does believe that there are differences between people that are influenced by the race of the person.
The "bad racist" believes that the same law can be applied to people of different races and, despite the same behavior, get different punishment, with the difference accepted because of the race.
An alternate "bad racist" is one who believes that any law which results in more punishment for folks of one race is bad, irrespective of behavior.
My view of bad racist is the first, wanting to judge people differently, based on their different races INSTEAD of based on their different character, as shown by their behavior.
There are multiple senses of the term. There's a sense of "racism" in which you recognize that, at least socially, the concept of race exists and it informs many things in how we interact. In that sense, probably everyone is a racist; and pretending not to be is, as philosopher Charles Mills argues, actually harmful because it avoids allowing us to address the problems.
But there's another sense of "racism" in which you believe that there is something biologically real that 'race' refers to somehow. In that sense, I'm not a racist because I don't think there is such a biological thing. "Race" is an imaginary concept, I think, that was invented in the late Middle Ages or early Renaissance in order to justify the re-introduction of slavery to Europe. Slavery had been abolished in Europe during the High Middle Ages, by the Catholic Church; but after Portugal captured the trade routes to West Africa from the Muslims (who had been slave trading all along), they found themselves with eager customers who had little of value but slaves to trade. So they came up with this story about race, a kind of people who were closer to animals than angels, in order to make it OK to own people again.
In that sense, I'm not a racist; I don't believe race is real, except as a social structure. In that sense it's 'real,' insofar as anything that's only in our heads is real; but very often we end up trapped by the things that are only in our heads. It's a kind of deep mental illness, shared by everyone, that we can't wake up from or find our way out of.
And even then, you can adopt racism in that second sense without also adopting supremacist views, or race-nationalist views, or other hateful views. Or, you can be 'racist' in the sense of adopting those views.
It's another way in which we would do well to sophisticate our national discussion.
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