The loss among Swedes of a sense of home, of living in a place where you have to be taken in even when you don’t deserve it, haunts Swedish politics today—and, more broadly, all European politics. It is one of the great drivers of xenophobia because it stresses questions that never arose in the old days: Who deserves a place in the family and why? At root, the mourning for folkhemmet recognizes the loss of any sense of mutual obligation. It’s not easy to imagine the policies or the politicians who could restore such a sense today. In the meantime, many Swedes are choosing to heed their own lost leftist ideals by voting for the far-right at the ballot box. Unlike most of the Swedish establishment, the populists at least acknowledge that those ideals have been breached.
The "old days" the
article refers to are a brief post-war period of consensus. Otherwise, I'm not sure you can say very many human civilizations have ever enjoyed the luxury of the question never arising: what do people have to do to "deserve" what they take from the fruits of others' labor?
Their morale, their togetherness, is stronger than most other nations (true of other Scandinavians). It is more like extended family in some ways - or was. It is the positive side of what can descend into fascism: "If we all stick together we can accomplish great things."
ReplyDeleteOne complicating factor in the narrative is that 25% of their population moved to North America between about 1857-1927, including a large percentage of the poor. Many took that as sort of a national shame, and bonded even more tightly.
That's not an uncommon story. More Irish left Ireland than stayed there during the famines of the 1840s. And the Scottish clearances resulted in massive population transfers overseas. What's unusual in Sweden may be the lesson they learned from it.
ReplyDeleteOne complicating factor in the narrative is that 25% of their population moved to North America between about 1857-1927, including a large percentage of the poor.
ReplyDeleteWhich reminds me of the earnest liberal informing Milton Friedman that poverty rates in Scandinavia are lower than in the US. Friedman replied that poverty rates for Scandinavian-Americans were lower than the overall poverty rate in the US.
@ Gringo. Crime rates too. Just a little higher than what they are in Scandinavia, actually.
ReplyDeleteXYZ-American violent crime tends to mirror original-XYZ violent crime.
It's fascinating that it should be a source of shame when the poorer part of a population takes a courageous risk and goes to settle in a new area where there's a ton of opportunity--unless, that is, the shame arises out of having played it safe while watching other people do something heroic for their descendants. But I suspect the shame was explained as a belief that the poor should have been made more comfortable with the results of whatever they'd been trying up to that point.
ReplyDeleteIt's not that odd really. Have a friend of Scottish descent (ancestors left in the 18th century) who returned with his father to where the ancestor came from and the attitude seemed to be "He was a loser, and he left. If he had been any good, he'd have stayed and made it here."
ReplyDeleteMy Scottish ancestors left after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. They were Duncans, and their clan and the Stewarts were always close -- neighbors, in fact. So in that sense I suppose they were, literally, losers who left; but they were there to help win the next round in 1776.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't call the ones who leave for the frontier losers, but if I did, it looks like any shame would be on them, not the ones left behind. The Swedish attitude AVI was referring to was the idea that it reflected poorly on the old country that they made the outbound pioneers feel too unwelcome.
ReplyDeleteNorway ran out of land that could be farmed. With a rising population, the option was migrate or starve. So a lot of Norwegians moved to the US. Norway-residing Norwegians don't seem to share the Swedes' concerns about emigration during the late 1800s-early 1900s, at least not that I've read.
ReplyDeleteLittleRed1
I guess it could be something like the shame California should--but evidently does not--feel about squelching home-grown opportunity to such an extent that it faces a massive exodus to freer states. But that's not the kind of shame AVI seemed to be referring to.
ReplyDeleteEric Blair:
ReplyDeleteIt's not that odd really. Have a friend of Scottish descent (ancestors left in the 18th century) who returned with his father to where the ancestor came from and the attitude seemed to be "He was a loser, and he left. If he had been any good, he'd have stayed and made it here."
At the same time, some who have gone back to ancestral Ireland have been told, "The cream left." In Ireland circa 1850, I would suspect that nearly everyone was poor, so those leaving weren't all that worse off than those who stayed. Which meant that those with more drive and initiative got up and went. I suspect that about Greece. The only people of Greek ancestry I have known in the US were either professionals or small businessmen- as opposed to Greek as the wreck of Europe.
Being an American in Slovakia, many many competent Slovaks wonder why I and my wife haven't left for America. Like so many competent Slovaks think they would do, if they could.
ReplyDeleteSlovak shame is on Slovakia for not providing better opportunities -- and more recently on Slovak corruption.
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The article makes a great point about small ponds and fish size:
" When there are many small ponds, each will have its own large fish; when there is one huge lake, far fewer fish will count as truly large."
Better to have more banks, and more bank presidents, rather than bank branch managers. For society from a status perspective. Economic productivity is, according to market evolution, with fewer bank presidents and more lower-than-top-but-higher-than-average status branch managers.
It would be better to reduce the convergence and concentration of power and status -- but elites like it that way.