Why Sweden?

One of the more curious rhetorical ploys of American right-wing thought is what you might call “the Sweden maneuver.” No, this is not a move in the game of Mornington Crescent. It’s the device of hoiking up a set of (alleged) data on (something) in Sweden, and marshalling it to prove that our “system” is better than their “system. The standard structure is: don’t be misled by the appearance of stability, prosperity and security—this is a frozen swamp where orchids die and toads live long.

It’s not clear to me just how long this has been going on. Certainly to the early days of the Cold War; perhaps all the way to the first publication of Marquis Childs’ seminal Sweden: The Middle Way in 1936 (look here). Childs was “moderate” in the classic sense of the term: temperate, skeptical, curious, hospitable to the unexpected. It’s not a pose that sits well with terrible simplificateurs, and so it seems to have prompted an ever-renewing determination to prove that the Swedes are slatternly, suicidal, promioscuous (and crypto-Nazi to boot).

[An interesting but not particularly simplistic instance of the genre can be found here.]

A remarkable new instance emerges from, unsurprisingly, TCS Daily, the talking-shop of James K. (Dow 36,000) Glassman and his crew. The TCS money shot is this: forget about the rich getting richer. The data shows that the poor in Sweden are just as poor as the United States. That for you, Leif Erikson!

But TCS is not content to let the numbers speak for themselves. No:

If we accept (as I do) that we do, indeed, need to have a social safety net, and that we have a duty to provide for those incapable or unlucky enough to be unable to do so for themselves, we need to set some level at which such help is offered. The standard of living of the poor in a redistributionist paradise like Finland (or Sweden) seems a fair enough number to use and the USA provides exactly that. Good, the problem's solved. We've provided -- both through the structure of the economy and the various forms of taxation and benefits precisely what we should be -- an acceptable baseline income for the poor. No further redistribution is necessary and we can carry on with the current tax rates and policies which seem, as this report shows, to be increasing US incomes faster than those in other countries and boosting productivity faster as well.

The internet still makes my head spin. The TCS piece is dated August 28. The same day, we have one of the authors of the study in question (Max Sawicky), here, responding that “this [analysis] should take an Olympic gold medal for missing the point” (think of Marshall McCluhan, coming to the aid of Woody Allen in Annie Hall). Point being that TCS has simply assumed away the issue of social services, dealt with at length in the original study. Look here to see Matt Yglesias explaining Sawicky, better than Sawicky explains himself.

This is all good fun, but my question persists: why Sweden? What is it about (apparent) security and stability that drives the simplificateurs so wild? As TCS itself inadvertently acknowledges, it isn’t even the “middle way” paradise of democratic socialism that it was in Childs’ day—it has school vouchers and no inheritance tax. Is it that they were too chummy with the Nazis? That they gave us Bergman? Strindberg? Alfred Nobel? Hans Blix?[1] But they can’t even keep control of their own auto industry. Okay, bad example…

Biblio Note: Preparing this note, I ran across this link, which provides a more extensive analysis of Sweden and of meta-Sweden.

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[1] Actually, these days maybe it is Hans Blix. Tis said that one reason the Bush admin wouldn’t go along with the weapons inspectors is that Rove is Norwegian and thought that Rove, a Swede, could not be trusted.