A Warning to Swedes from a Former Social Democracy

The United States was once one of the world’s social democracies, although the term itself has never been used much there. “Progressive,” “liberal,” and lately thanks to Bernie Sanders, “democratic socialism,” have been words that in at least some of the periods of their usage have described social democrat politics. Social democracy is the political version of having your cake and eating it. More specifically, of demonstrating that it is possible for a government to promote economic wellbeing and social security on the one hand, and to guarantee civil and political liberties on the other.

The form of communism that emerged in places like the Soviet Union, and traditional liberalism as it flourished in places ranging from nineteenth-century Britain to the twenty-first century U.S. claimed that there was an incompatibility between these goals. Social democracy suggests otherwise.

Today, social democracy is most associated with western Europe, although variants have existed and continue to exist in places ranging from Latin America to East Asia, from southern Africa to the Pacific. Perhaps particularly in western Europe, publics today are likely to see the U.S. as home to a crude and cruel form of capitalism that pushes its citizens into astonishing precarity in the name of a curious form of freedom.

But social democracy in the U.S. was vibrant if imperfect between the 1930s and 1970s. It was most obviously encapsulated in the widely proclaimed legislative programs of successive Democratic presidents—the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the Great Society. And it transformed—sometimes fleetingly, sometimes in lasting ways—everyday life in areas of health, economic security, education, employment, organized labor, energy, agriculture and, significantly, people’s conception of what a government could be asked to do in their name.

If many people around the world today have forgotten that the U.S. was a home to social democracy, no one could have ignored the fact in its heyday. American social democratic thinkers and practitioners in government collaborated with revolutionaries in Mexico, sought to understand the strength but also the limitations of Soviet experimentation, and dispatched both advisors and onlookers to emerging social democracies in western Europe. During the Cold War, the U.S. government sought to export social democracy, partly out of conviction that it was delivering unprecedented gains at home that should also be enjoyed abroad, and partly, connected to this, from the belief that the export of social democracy was a key component of the conflict against communism, depriving the Soviet Union of its charge that capitalism was deaf to the economic and social tribulations of the people in the states where it reigned. The U.S. sought to write social democratic principles into some—but not all—of the international institutions it sought to create after the Second World War and into the principles behind the aid it exported.

Like other ideologies, social democracy was and is everywhere inflected with national characteristics. In the U.S. two of these illustrated its limitations. Particularly during the early years of the U.S. social democratic era, its design and more often its implementation was disfigured by southern segregationists. And the tensions between federal and state governments always meant that social democracy in the U.S. was less well entrenched than in more centralized systems of government.

Today, those characteristics (dog whistle politics from the right and state-federal issues, along with ideological opposition) remain a barrier to President Joe Biden’s attempts—though you would never catch him using the words—to reconfigure a social democratic framework for the U.S. in a way none of his predecessors for decades have dared to do, or even believed was desirable.

This is a somewhat roundabout way to come to Sweden’s election, taking place in just a couple of days, where two versions of the political right—one ethno-nationalist, and the other more classically liberal—appear prepared to make common cause in a way they have not previously proven able to do. Such a coalition, should it govern what is often regarded as one of the world’s most comprehensively social democratic nations, would chip away at two principles of social democracy: the principle of universality, and the notion of directed public policy, substituting a vulnerable piecemeal approach, and sub-contracting policy to the fantasy of the market, the idea that millions of aggregate combined transactions and interactions can somehow make efficient and purposeful policy. This would be a troubled coalition to be sure—a less raucous and less lopsided version of the conflicting wings of the U.S. Republican Party—but it could re-shape Sweden dramatically. And it is here that the U.S. example is instructive.

The social democratic version of the United States did not vanish overnight. And Americans—contrary to some of the condescending narratives that one hears when some Europeans discuss U.S. politics and history—did not vote at one fell swoop for the dismantling of their social democracy. There was no moment when a politician in the U.S. stood up and said, “Let’s flush this system that has brought comparative economic and social wellbeing to so many down the toilet!”, to public acclaim.

The arguments were subtler than that. They were about tradeoffs. They were about efficiencies. They were about market reforms. They were about liberalization. They were about more choice. All of which, carefully articulated, can sound like thoroughly good things. And they did not end social democracy in the U.S., even with its somewhat shallow roots and limits imposed by the federal-state divide, in one electoral cycle. I suggest that if you had asked U.S. voters in the late-1960s or even the early -1980s if they wanted to live in today’s social and economic system in the U.S.—and then described the results of the changes that have made the U.S. so unequal since then—they would not have accepted those changes. It would have seemed entirely irrational.

But because the changes occurred slowly, in piecemeal fashion, much as social democracy is often built to begin with, it was difficult for people to understand how the big picture was changing, or who or what was responsible for it changing. I suspect that something like this is at work in Sweden today—and that it has been for some time. Electoral gridlock, and the rise of ethnic nationalist parties hitherto excluded from governance, means that the Social Democratic-led governments of the last eight years have governed as minority governments, sometimes subjected to agreements that read like the playbook of the very conservatives who dismantled social democracy in the U.S.

Since the 1990s, when many thinkers in the U.S. and elsewhere proclaimed the triumph of free market liberalism and capitalism as having permanently conquered political alternatives, social democratic parties have almost universally faced crises of confidence (and sometimes comparative loss of political power) from which most continue to struggle to extricate themselves.

These factors have muddied the waters, as people place significant blame on the center left for a period during which it reigned but did not rule, or presided but did not govern, or at least reigned and governed in a highly limited manner.  And, as is typical with parties under pressure, the Social Democrats offer a sometimes-muddled message, trying to articulate core principles while appeasing what they believe voters for the right wish to hear, to occasionally incomprehensible effect.

I had quite a few conversations about politics at a playground with other parents for a two-week period—mostly people in their late-20s or 30s, living comfortable lives in affluent but expensive Stockholm, in a reasonably diverse neighbourhood, many of them enjoying the final days of their half of extraordinarily generous parental leave. Swedish political discourse seems much more careful and technocratic than is the case in the U.S., making it easy to disguise quite dramatic proposals in distinctly bland language. And I was interested in the distinction that people made between social democracy and the parties in which it is housed, and the welfare state. And yes, it is argued that key elements of the welfare state have become rooted in a political consensus that includes those from beyond the parties on the left of the political spectrum. But the rhetoric of consensus and civility masks very deep differences.

This seemed to point to a complacency when people discussed their thinking, how they would vote, and what they wanted to see happen as a result of that vote, that the key components of the welfare state aren’t tethered to any ideology, or that Swedish parties of the right are not ideological. It pointed to people’s belief that the welfare state—built on social democratic principles whether they wanted to acknowledge it or not—is an inevitable feature of Swedish life, and that the most anyone’s political labors could amount to is a kind of tinkering around the edges, improving its efficiency or affordability. But a welfare state without social democracy won’t survive long as a national project.

Much attention in the media is focused on the ethnic nationalist Swedish Democrats, who appear to be in second place in polls following a two-decade whine that wouldn’t be out of place in the nastiest corners of U.S. far-right politics. But it is in the Liberal, Moderate, and Christian Democratic Parties that I most recognize the policies and language that dismantled security and a path toward the good life in the U.S. A bit of de-regulation here, a bit of choice there, a dab of privatization here, and an ounce of means testing there might not a revolution make. But taken together, and pushed over a period of decades, even after limited, intermittent electoral victories, they point toward the further erosion of Sweden’s social democracy. Not, perhaps, for everyone, or even anyone, voting in Sweden’s election on Sunday, just as the older generations in particular who voted in successive elections for the erosion of social democracy in the U.S. most often without fully appreciating what was being unraveled, experienced comparatively few of the consequences. But certainly for future generations.

It is with a kind of morbid fascination that Swedes recount or ask about the cruelties, precarities, injustices, inequalities, bureaucracies, battles, absurdities, and inefficiencies that they hear about shaping the lives of many Americans. But Americans did not vote for those things as a package deal. They voted, episodically and with mixed convictions and only partial attention, for polite sounding reforms that are very much on the menu from which Swedes will choose on Sunday.