Sweden’s hard right has won, because progressives and liberals screwed up social democracy. Again

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.