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Sunday, September 24, 2023 3:27:55 AM
Mouths Full of Blood: Trump and His Backers Spread Lies, Violence and Fascism
"The GOP Is Just Obnoxious
"I Saw Hoodie Fetterman With the Devil, and Other Crucible Jokes That Don’t Quite Work" "
Death threats have become rampant as MAGA culture twists norms and makes once-marginal forms of violence mainstream.
By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout
September 23, 2023
Donald Trump leaves after speaking to supporters during a political rally while campaigning for the GOP nomination in the 2024 election on July 29, 2023, in Erie, Pennsylvania. Jeff Swensen / Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump has achieved a unique status in United States history. He is the first president to be indicted for conspiring to overturn a presidential election, defraud the U.S. and obstruct official proceedings by attempting to subvert the peaceful transfer of power.
It’s now a matter of public record that Trump faces four indictments and 91 felony counts for his criminal behavior. As Alan Feuer and Maggie Haberman point out in The New York Times ... https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/08/01/us/trump-indictment-jan-6 , the charges clearly depict how “Trump promoted false claims of fraud, sought to bend the Justice Department toward supporting those claims and oversaw a scheme to create false slates of electors pledged to him in states that were actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.” And Special Counsel Jack Smith has shown that Trump’s lies played a central role in his “unprecedented assault” on the U.S. Capitol and democracy; indeed, he argues, Trump’s criminal actions were “fueled by lies .. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-indicted-grand-jury-jan-6/ .”
[...]
Under such circumstances and within a social order in which violence has become an organizing principle of politics and society, members of the Republican Party and other MAGA followers have become more willing to accept violence in the service of political power, most evident in the events leading to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. They are also willing to normalize mass shootings in the name of gun rights, accept the incorporation of extremist groups into the highest levels of power and normalize the use of violence to obtain political power regardless of the cost. Some members of Congress show their support for gun violence (under the false pretense of defending the Second Amendment) by wearing lapel pins in the shape of AR-15 rifles. This is an act of moral and political degeneracy that embraces the perfect symbol for a political party that is ethically and politically nihilistic and embodies a fascist politics, displaying an unfathomable disrespect to the children and individuals killed by such guns in the United States. As Anisha Kohli reminds us in Time Magazine .. https://time.com/6253690/ar-15-pins-congress/ , the “AR-15-style semi-automatic rifles have been used in most of the high profile mass shootings in recent years, including at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas; Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Conn.; and the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas.”
Trump’s embrace of lies and violence have produced an unrelenting series of shocks to the body politic and its democratic ideals. Violence that was once considered inconceivable and relegated to the margins of society now passes for normal .. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/opinion/anniversary-trump-clinton-election.html . As Trump’s violent rhetoric accelerates, actual acts of violence “have become a steady reality of American life .. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/13/nyregion/right-wing-rhetoric-threats-violence.html .. , affecting school board officials, election workers, flight attendants, librarians and even members of Congress, often with few headlines and little reaction from politicians.” David French notes .. https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/the-third-rail/62f6811cc5c05500224fa5bf/trump-fbi-search-political-violence/ .. that death threats have surged across the U.S. He writes:
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Death threats have surged across the country. As terrorists realize death threats work, they are using them more often — including against Republicans who voted for President Joe Biden’s infrastructure package. Death threats to congresspeople doubled by May of last year, compared to the year before. “These are not one-off incidents,” according to Vox, “Surveys have found that 17 percent of America’s local election officials and nearly 12 percent of its public health workforce have been threatened due to their jobs during the 2020 election cycle and Covid-19 pandemic.” Reuters tracked more than 850 individual threats against local election workers by Trump supporters last year, up from essentially zero in previous elections.
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Right-wing extremists have escalated their use of death threats against those who either oppose or criticize Trump, with a special bile reserved for threatening immigrants and Black people. The targets of the death threats include politicians, health workers, local election workers, journalists, teachers and members of the justice system engaged in holding Trump accountable for his crimes. In a culture that barely tolerates dissent and increasingly confuses the truth with falsehoods, it’s not surprising that Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago who studies political violence, found .. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/13/nyregion/right-wing-rhetoric-threats-violence.html .. that “between 15 million and 20 million American adults believe that violence would be justified to return Mr. Trump to office.”
The plunge into a culture of irrationality fueled by Trump’s lies has upended assumptions regarding the rejection of violence as a governing principle and the necessity of recognizing that a democracy cannot exist without informed citizens. In the MAGA world, ignorance has become the new civic standard, and justice and injustice collapse into each other.
Trump’s embrace of lies and violence have produced an unrelenting
series of shocks to the body politic and its democratic ideals.
In Trump’s worldview, the opposition is not to be debated, it is to be destroyed .. https://www.salon.com/2023/08/10/you-will-get-violence-leading-democracy-expert-says-donald-is-not-running-to-win/ , eliminated. This friend/enemy distinction reinforces the notion that a pledge of loyalty to Trump is comparable to becoming part of a militarized army engaged in war. In this discourse, violence is equated with power, and brutality becomes a measure of loyalty. Reason is now replaced with loyalty, and loyalty becomes the medium to “deploy sadism by bullying and humiliating others .. https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/february/the-big-lie .” How else to explain the increasing use of threats of war coupled with violent language and imagery by Republicans attacking politicians, justice officials and prosecutors who have held Trump accountable for his crimes. According to GOP extremists such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, former political candidate Kari Lake and Trump associate Roger Stone, such actions mean, as former Trump adviser Steve Bannon puts it, that “we’re at war .. https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/february/the-big-lie .”
[...]
Central to the current fascist culture of lying, racism and violence is a cult of demagogues, growing inequalities of wealth and power, a tsunami of class, gender and racial injustices, and philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s war of all against all. All of these forces are choking “the arteries of democracy” as Tony Judt writes in his 2011 book Ill Fares the Land. As the language of democracy is hollowed out by neoliberal fascism, we are witnessing an emerging terror of the unforeseen and the inexorable force of a history ripe with mass anxiety and unimagined catastrophe — produced by a fascist politics governed by lies, myth, and a perpetual fear and crisis machine. If we cannot grasp that such a history is with us once again, the struggle to resist will wither and the seeds of fascism will bury existing democracies with ashes.
Mouths full of blood will usher in a history filled with the smell of genocidal violence, suffering and death. Under such circumstances, it is crucial for the broad left and progressives to release the potential for justice, freedom and equality. That is, it’s crucial to address not only historical remembrance and moral witnessing but also the political and pedagogical necessity to merge memory, civic values, and social responsibility with the power of mass movements and aggressive collective action in the fight against a burgeoning fascism. In the contemporary U.S., we need a new language and politics to fight against the nightmare of fascism. We need a language that rejects an era of foreclosed hope, refuses to address the present as a model for the future, and condemns the rhetoric of fear and violence that contains the present in the nightmarish shadow of a fascist past.
Needless to say, there is more at work in the fight against fascist politics than the need to recast the public conversation about the meaning of democracy; there is also the necessity to reject a politics of normalization in which capitalism and democracy are equated. Fascism and capitalism cannot be separated. Any viable mode of collective resistance must begin by exposing how capitalism is the breeding ground for fascism. Only by developing an anti-capitalist consciousness can the brutalizing forces of neoliberal fascism be made visible and resisted. Only then will it be possible to both redefine the language of power, critical education, direct action and cultural politics to develop the collective forces necessary to think and act differently as part of a wider collective struggle for a socialist democracy.
The legacy of fascism may have shown us what the future and end of humanity would look like. But such a future is not inevitable. As Alain Badiou once noted in his 1998 book Ethics, “the space of the possible is larger than the one assigned,” suggesting that history is open, making the call for building solidarity and social change all the more urgent, and the demand for mass resistance all the more necessary. The times in which we live are too dangerous to be giving up on civic courage, the radical imagination and a vision of a society that is never just enough.
https://truthout.org/articles/mouths-full-of-blood-trump-and-his-backers-spread-lies-violence-and-fascism/
Then there is a more centrist avenue.
Argument An expert's point of view on a current event.
Nordic Countries Aren’t Actually Socialist
Denmark, Norway, and Sweden shouldn’t be held up as socialist utopias.
By Nima Sanandaji, the director of the European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform.
The Boyabreen glacier sits above a stream running past cabins near Fjaerland, Norway, on Aug. 12, 2020. Sean Gallup/Getty Images
October 27, 2021, 12:31 PM
Nordic countries are often used internationally to prove that socialism works. It’s true that social democratic parties are enjoying success in this part of the world. Yet while Nordic countries are seeing a partial comeback for social democratic parties, their policies aren’t in fact socialist, but centrist.
Nordic nations—and especially Sweden—did embrace socialism between around 1970 and 1990. During the past 30 years, however, both conservative and social democratic-led governments have moved toward the center. Today, the Nordic social democrats have adopted stricter immigration policies, tightened eligibility requirements for welfare benefit systems, taken a tougher stance on crime, and carried out business-friendly policies.
The Nordic welfare system that people like to point to as a flourishing example of socialism was developed around 1970, when there was a policy shift throughout Nordic societies toward higher taxes and generous public benefits. In the century preceding that turn, Nordic countries had combined small public sectors and free markets to achieve strong economic growth. From around 1870 to 1970, for instance, Sweden’s per capita GDP increased .. https://www.ekonomifakta.se/Fakta/Ekonomi/globala-utvecklingstrender/historisk-bnp-utveckling/ .. around tenfold, the highest growth rate in all of Europe. It was after this period of rapidly growing prosperity that there was a shift to high-tax policies. The public remained skeptical of direct tax raises, and the shift largely occurred through gradual rises in the indirect payroll tax.
It wasn’t an unusual trajectory: Researchers have shown .. https://econpapers.repec.org/paper/cprceprdp/8229.htm .. that countries with higher trust levels tend to have larger and more generous welfare systems. And trust and social responsibility have historically been strong in this region, in part due to the need for collaboration in the unforgiving Nordic climate—stronger, indeed, than in the rest of Europe.
As a result of the shift away from low-tax policies, however, economic growth stagnated. Over the past 50 years, for instance, Swedish GDP per capita has only grown .. https://www.ekonomifakta.se/fakta/ekonomi/tillvaxt/bnp-per-capita/ .. by a factor of 2.1. More importantly, the norms relating to hard work and responsibility have started to erode .. https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWV1.jsp , according to measurements by the World Value Survey, as welfare has increased. For example, in the early 1980s, 19 percent of Swedes agreed that it could be justified to some degree for someone to claim public welfare when they weren’t eligible. This share gradually increased to 40 percent in 2011, and it has since fallen to 36 percent following stricter control of welfare systems and public campaigns warning against overuse.
Today, Nordic nations still have higher taxes and more generous welfare systems than most parts of the world. But since the 1990s, Sweden and other Nordic nations have focused on strengthening those norms of social responsibility again by increasing the control of public welfare systems, reducing generosity in the welfare models, and lowering taxes.
Indeed, many Nordic policies now promote free trade and free enterprise. The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom .. https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking , which measures how capitalist a country is by studying regulation and taxation in different areas of the economy, ranks Denmark and Iceland as the 10th and 11th most capitalist countries in the world. Finland comes in at 17th, Sweden at 21st, and Norway at 28th. By comparison, the United States is ranked 20th. Property rights, business freedom, monetary freedom, and trade freedom are strong in the Nordic nations.
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This move toward the center is playing out in electoral politics, even as social democrats are winning elections again. Nordic social democrats, for instance, are increasingly relying on forming alliances with parties in the middle. Take Finland: In the 2019 election, incumbent Prime Minister Juha Sipila, the leader of the Centre Party, lost to the Social Democratic Party’s Antti Rinne. But Rinne had to form a broad coalition government including the Centre Party, which has, for example, pushed not to raise total taxes.
Sweden, the most populous Nordic nation, has followed a similar trajectory. Social Democrat Stefan Lofven has served as prime minister since 2014. In the Swedish political landscape, though, only a minority of voters support the three main center-left and left-wing parties, so Lofven has relied on support from the right-of-center Centre Party and, previously, the right-of-center Liberals party.
In early 2020, Lofven’s government abolished the varnskatt, a 5 percent tax on the highest incomes, significantly reducing the marginal tax rate. Other recent reforms include the partial privatization of the state employment service and becoming tougher on crime. One of the Social Democratic Party’s main focuses this year, for example, is abolishing the punishment rebate for young criminal offenders, which would lead to longer sentences for those committing multiple offenses. The Social Democrats have also promised tax cuts as part of their platform for the 2022 elections, where the party will likely be represented by Magdalena Andersson, Sweden’s finance minister.
Social democrats in Norway find themselves .. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/14/norway-left-leaning-parties-talks-government-coalition .. in a similar situation to their Swedish counterparts: having to cooperate with a center party that opposes socialist policies in order to secure power. And there are more signs that Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store’s social democratic Labour Party, which just defeated incumbent Conservative Prime Minister Erna Solberg in September’s election, will govern with more centrist policies than some might expect. Store is a millionaire who was previously affiliated with Norway’s Conservative Party. Moreover, he was a state secretary and chief of staff in 2000 and 2001, when the social democratic Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg oversaw widespread privatization policies.
Nordic social democratic parties have also had to modify their migration policies as their working-class voters have shifted to more conservative parties that push for migration control. In Denmark’s 2019 general election, when Social Democracy party leader Mette Frederiksen defeated the center-right incumbent to become prime minister, she gained support on a platform that combined traditional social democratic policies with a strict immigration policy.
Nordic nations’ electoral politics mirror broader trends away from socialism over the past few decades. In the 1970s and 1980s in Sweden, for instance, the state monopolized elder care, health care, and education. As schools were taken over by the state, the education model shifted away from adult authority, and pupils began to lead their own learning. Pupil-led education became an important part of Sweden’s socialist policies and remains one of the main holdovers of that period. But since the 1990s, the government has allowed the private sector to have a larger role. Sweden currently has 823 private schools, mainly operated as for-profit companies with public funding. Some, such as the school chain Internationella Engelska Skolan, are offering teacher-led rather than pupil-led education, with considerably better results than the public schools.
Health care is also gradually moving away from public monopolies. As of 2019 .. https://www.ekonomifakta.se/Fakta/Valfarden-i-privat-regi/Vard-och-omsorg-i-privat-regi/vardcentraler-i-privat-regi/ , more than 40 percent of the 1,100 health centers of Sweden are run by private, for-profit actors. While Sweden has universal health care, private sector employees are increasingly covered by private health insurances paid by their employers. In the capital region of Stockholm, 62 percent of elder care home-visit hours are carried out .. https://www.ekonomifakta.se/Fakta/Valfarden-i-privat-regi/Vard-och-omsorg-i-privat-regi/aldreomsorg-i-privat-regi/ .. by private, for-profit companies. The old state-run systems do live on in parts of Sweden, for example in the northern region of Norrbotten, where only 2 percent of elder care home visits are carried out by for-profit companies. But the welfare models are increasingly giving way to more centrist ones, with a role for both the private and public sectors.
Sweden’s pension system has also gradually become more connected to individuals’ work performance. Part of citizens’ pensions is invested in the market, and individuals can choose to invest in pension savings products from numerous private firms. Complementary private saving through employers is also becoming more important in future pension income. Throughout the region, pension reforms have included stricter rules for early retirement, a flexible retirement age, and a closer link between earned wage and accrued pensions.
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Much of the strength of Nordic societies lies in the advanced free market system.
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These are the trends that are contributing to the economic and social success of Nordic countries once again. It’s simply a common misconception that favorable social outcomes, such as long life expectancy and even income distribution, are a direct result of their welfare systems. In truth, these advantages largely evolved well before the rise of large welfare states.
As Swedish economists have shown .. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272707001041 , Sweden had an unusually even income distribution in 1920, and equality continued to grow until 1980. The lion’s share of income equality growth thus occurred during the free market era, predating the rise of the generous welfare state. In another study .. https://ideas.repec.org/p/kud/epruwp/13-01.html , economists showed that income equality in Denmark has increased since the 1920s, with much progress happening before the shift to higher taxes.
Much of the strength of Nordic societies lies in the advanced free market system, which is why it’s essential that they are returning to their centrist roots. As I have previously written .. https://www.newgeography.com/content/007098-nordics-attract-knowledge-capital-despite-high-taxes .. with Klas Tikkanen, chief operating officer of Nordic Capital, Sweden is a leading innovation hub in Europe that’s able to attract foreign capital to growing companies. One reason for this success is its smart tax policy, where funds from a successful investment in one company may be invested in new companies, and taxation only applies when gains are realized. Thus, growth capital can be attracted to a high-tax country.
There are many reasons to admire the Nordic model. Sweden has the highest concentration of “brain business jobs .. https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/02/it-is-western-europes-turn-for-a-brain-drain/ ” among European Union countries. As Bloomberg explained .. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-26/spotify-s-nest-proves-a-fertile-breeding-ground-for-unicorns .. earlier this year, Stockholm has “bred more tech unicorns per capita” than the rest of the world outside of Silicon Valley. Nordic nations are successfully combining entrepreneurship with a shift toward green energies, where governments work with the private sector to push for environmental sustainability.
Ultimately, the comeback of social democratic parties in the Nordic countries can be explained by their focus on centrist solutions to the greatest problems nations face today. It is centrist pragmatists, rather than socialists, who should hold up the Nordics as role models worldwide.
Nima Sanandaji is the director of the European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform. He has written more than a hundred policy papers on subjects ranging from integration and women’s career progress to the changing geography of successful enterprise and the future of jobs.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/10/27/nordic-countries-not-socialist-denmark-norway-sweden-centrist/
"The GOP Is Just Obnoxious
"I Saw Hoodie Fetterman With the Devil, and Other Crucible Jokes That Don’t Quite Work" "
Death threats have become rampant as MAGA culture twists norms and makes once-marginal forms of violence mainstream.
By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout
September 23, 2023
Donald Trump leaves after speaking to supporters during a political rally while campaigning for the GOP nomination in the 2024 election on July 29, 2023, in Erie, Pennsylvania. Jeff Swensen / Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump has achieved a unique status in United States history. He is the first president to be indicted for conspiring to overturn a presidential election, defraud the U.S. and obstruct official proceedings by attempting to subvert the peaceful transfer of power.
It’s now a matter of public record that Trump faces four indictments and 91 felony counts for his criminal behavior. As Alan Feuer and Maggie Haberman point out in The New York Times ... https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/08/01/us/trump-indictment-jan-6 , the charges clearly depict how “Trump promoted false claims of fraud, sought to bend the Justice Department toward supporting those claims and oversaw a scheme to create false slates of electors pledged to him in states that were actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.” And Special Counsel Jack Smith has shown that Trump’s lies played a central role in his “unprecedented assault” on the U.S. Capitol and democracy; indeed, he argues, Trump’s criminal actions were “fueled by lies .. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-indicted-grand-jury-jan-6/ .”
[...]
Under such circumstances and within a social order in which violence has become an organizing principle of politics and society, members of the Republican Party and other MAGA followers have become more willing to accept violence in the service of political power, most evident in the events leading to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. They are also willing to normalize mass shootings in the name of gun rights, accept the incorporation of extremist groups into the highest levels of power and normalize the use of violence to obtain political power regardless of the cost. Some members of Congress show their support for gun violence (under the false pretense of defending the Second Amendment) by wearing lapel pins in the shape of AR-15 rifles. This is an act of moral and political degeneracy that embraces the perfect symbol for a political party that is ethically and politically nihilistic and embodies a fascist politics, displaying an unfathomable disrespect to the children and individuals killed by such guns in the United States. As Anisha Kohli reminds us in Time Magazine .. https://time.com/6253690/ar-15-pins-congress/ , the “AR-15-style semi-automatic rifles have been used in most of the high profile mass shootings in recent years, including at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas; Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Conn.; and the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas.”
Trump’s embrace of lies and violence have produced an unrelenting series of shocks to the body politic and its democratic ideals. Violence that was once considered inconceivable and relegated to the margins of society now passes for normal .. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/opinion/anniversary-trump-clinton-election.html . As Trump’s violent rhetoric accelerates, actual acts of violence “have become a steady reality of American life .. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/13/nyregion/right-wing-rhetoric-threats-violence.html .. , affecting school board officials, election workers, flight attendants, librarians and even members of Congress, often with few headlines and little reaction from politicians.” David French notes .. https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/the-third-rail/62f6811cc5c05500224fa5bf/trump-fbi-search-political-violence/ .. that death threats have surged across the U.S. He writes:
---
Death threats have surged across the country. As terrorists realize death threats work, they are using them more often — including against Republicans who voted for President Joe Biden’s infrastructure package. Death threats to congresspeople doubled by May of last year, compared to the year before. “These are not one-off incidents,” according to Vox, “Surveys have found that 17 percent of America’s local election officials and nearly 12 percent of its public health workforce have been threatened due to their jobs during the 2020 election cycle and Covid-19 pandemic.” Reuters tracked more than 850 individual threats against local election workers by Trump supporters last year, up from essentially zero in previous elections.
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Right-wing extremists have escalated their use of death threats against those who either oppose or criticize Trump, with a special bile reserved for threatening immigrants and Black people. The targets of the death threats include politicians, health workers, local election workers, journalists, teachers and members of the justice system engaged in holding Trump accountable for his crimes. In a culture that barely tolerates dissent and increasingly confuses the truth with falsehoods, it’s not surprising that Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago who studies political violence, found .. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/13/nyregion/right-wing-rhetoric-threats-violence.html .. that “between 15 million and 20 million American adults believe that violence would be justified to return Mr. Trump to office.”
The plunge into a culture of irrationality fueled by Trump’s lies has upended assumptions regarding the rejection of violence as a governing principle and the necessity of recognizing that a democracy cannot exist without informed citizens. In the MAGA world, ignorance has become the new civic standard, and justice and injustice collapse into each other.
Trump’s embrace of lies and violence have produced an unrelenting
series of shocks to the body politic and its democratic ideals.
In Trump’s worldview, the opposition is not to be debated, it is to be destroyed .. https://www.salon.com/2023/08/10/you-will-get-violence-leading-democracy-expert-says-donald-is-not-running-to-win/ , eliminated. This friend/enemy distinction reinforces the notion that a pledge of loyalty to Trump is comparable to becoming part of a militarized army engaged in war. In this discourse, violence is equated with power, and brutality becomes a measure of loyalty. Reason is now replaced with loyalty, and loyalty becomes the medium to “deploy sadism by bullying and humiliating others .. https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/february/the-big-lie .” How else to explain the increasing use of threats of war coupled with violent language and imagery by Republicans attacking politicians, justice officials and prosecutors who have held Trump accountable for his crimes. According to GOP extremists such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, former political candidate Kari Lake and Trump associate Roger Stone, such actions mean, as former Trump adviser Steve Bannon puts it, that “we’re at war .. https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/february/the-big-lie .”
[...]
Central to the current fascist culture of lying, racism and violence is a cult of demagogues, growing inequalities of wealth and power, a tsunami of class, gender and racial injustices, and philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s war of all against all. All of these forces are choking “the arteries of democracy” as Tony Judt writes in his 2011 book Ill Fares the Land. As the language of democracy is hollowed out by neoliberal fascism, we are witnessing an emerging terror of the unforeseen and the inexorable force of a history ripe with mass anxiety and unimagined catastrophe — produced by a fascist politics governed by lies, myth, and a perpetual fear and crisis machine. If we cannot grasp that such a history is with us once again, the struggle to resist will wither and the seeds of fascism will bury existing democracies with ashes.
Mouths full of blood will usher in a history filled with the smell of genocidal violence, suffering and death. Under such circumstances, it is crucial for the broad left and progressives to release the potential for justice, freedom and equality. That is, it’s crucial to address not only historical remembrance and moral witnessing but also the political and pedagogical necessity to merge memory, civic values, and social responsibility with the power of mass movements and aggressive collective action in the fight against a burgeoning fascism. In the contemporary U.S., we need a new language and politics to fight against the nightmare of fascism. We need a language that rejects an era of foreclosed hope, refuses to address the present as a model for the future, and condemns the rhetoric of fear and violence that contains the present in the nightmarish shadow of a fascist past.
Needless to say, there is more at work in the fight against fascist politics than the need to recast the public conversation about the meaning of democracy; there is also the necessity to reject a politics of normalization in which capitalism and democracy are equated. Fascism and capitalism cannot be separated. Any viable mode of collective resistance must begin by exposing how capitalism is the breeding ground for fascism. Only by developing an anti-capitalist consciousness can the brutalizing forces of neoliberal fascism be made visible and resisted. Only then will it be possible to both redefine the language of power, critical education, direct action and cultural politics to develop the collective forces necessary to think and act differently as part of a wider collective struggle for a socialist democracy.
The legacy of fascism may have shown us what the future and end of humanity would look like. But such a future is not inevitable. As Alain Badiou once noted in his 1998 book Ethics, “the space of the possible is larger than the one assigned,” suggesting that history is open, making the call for building solidarity and social change all the more urgent, and the demand for mass resistance all the more necessary. The times in which we live are too dangerous to be giving up on civic courage, the radical imagination and a vision of a society that is never just enough.
https://truthout.org/articles/mouths-full-of-blood-trump-and-his-backers-spread-lies-violence-and-fascism/
Then there is a more centrist avenue.
Argument An expert's point of view on a current event.
Nordic Countries Aren’t Actually Socialist
Denmark, Norway, and Sweden shouldn’t be held up as socialist utopias.
By Nima Sanandaji, the director of the European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform.
The Boyabreen glacier sits above a stream running past cabins near Fjaerland, Norway, on Aug. 12, 2020. Sean Gallup/Getty Images
October 27, 2021, 12:31 PM
Nordic countries are often used internationally to prove that socialism works. It’s true that social democratic parties are enjoying success in this part of the world. Yet while Nordic countries are seeing a partial comeback for social democratic parties, their policies aren’t in fact socialist, but centrist.
Nordic nations—and especially Sweden—did embrace socialism between around 1970 and 1990. During the past 30 years, however, both conservative and social democratic-led governments have moved toward the center. Today, the Nordic social democrats have adopted stricter immigration policies, tightened eligibility requirements for welfare benefit systems, taken a tougher stance on crime, and carried out business-friendly policies.
The Nordic welfare system that people like to point to as a flourishing example of socialism was developed around 1970, when there was a policy shift throughout Nordic societies toward higher taxes and generous public benefits. In the century preceding that turn, Nordic countries had combined small public sectors and free markets to achieve strong economic growth. From around 1870 to 1970, for instance, Sweden’s per capita GDP increased .. https://www.ekonomifakta.se/Fakta/Ekonomi/globala-utvecklingstrender/historisk-bnp-utveckling/ .. around tenfold, the highest growth rate in all of Europe. It was after this period of rapidly growing prosperity that there was a shift to high-tax policies. The public remained skeptical of direct tax raises, and the shift largely occurred through gradual rises in the indirect payroll tax.
It wasn’t an unusual trajectory: Researchers have shown .. https://econpapers.repec.org/paper/cprceprdp/8229.htm .. that countries with higher trust levels tend to have larger and more generous welfare systems. And trust and social responsibility have historically been strong in this region, in part due to the need for collaboration in the unforgiving Nordic climate—stronger, indeed, than in the rest of Europe.
As a result of the shift away from low-tax policies, however, economic growth stagnated. Over the past 50 years, for instance, Swedish GDP per capita has only grown .. https://www.ekonomifakta.se/fakta/ekonomi/tillvaxt/bnp-per-capita/ .. by a factor of 2.1. More importantly, the norms relating to hard work and responsibility have started to erode .. https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWV1.jsp , according to measurements by the World Value Survey, as welfare has increased. For example, in the early 1980s, 19 percent of Swedes agreed that it could be justified to some degree for someone to claim public welfare when they weren’t eligible. This share gradually increased to 40 percent in 2011, and it has since fallen to 36 percent following stricter control of welfare systems and public campaigns warning against overuse.
Today, Nordic nations still have higher taxes and more generous welfare systems than most parts of the world. But since the 1990s, Sweden and other Nordic nations have focused on strengthening those norms of social responsibility again by increasing the control of public welfare systems, reducing generosity in the welfare models, and lowering taxes.
Indeed, many Nordic policies now promote free trade and free enterprise. The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom .. https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking , which measures how capitalist a country is by studying regulation and taxation in different areas of the economy, ranks Denmark and Iceland as the 10th and 11th most capitalist countries in the world. Finland comes in at 17th, Sweden at 21st, and Norway at 28th. By comparison, the United States is ranked 20th. Property rights, business freedom, monetary freedom, and trade freedom are strong in the Nordic nations.
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This move toward the center is playing out in electoral politics, even as social democrats are winning elections again. Nordic social democrats, for instance, are increasingly relying on forming alliances with parties in the middle. Take Finland: In the 2019 election, incumbent Prime Minister Juha Sipila, the leader of the Centre Party, lost to the Social Democratic Party’s Antti Rinne. But Rinne had to form a broad coalition government including the Centre Party, which has, for example, pushed not to raise total taxes.
Sweden, the most populous Nordic nation, has followed a similar trajectory. Social Democrat Stefan Lofven has served as prime minister since 2014. In the Swedish political landscape, though, only a minority of voters support the three main center-left and left-wing parties, so Lofven has relied on support from the right-of-center Centre Party and, previously, the right-of-center Liberals party.
In early 2020, Lofven’s government abolished the varnskatt, a 5 percent tax on the highest incomes, significantly reducing the marginal tax rate. Other recent reforms include the partial privatization of the state employment service and becoming tougher on crime. One of the Social Democratic Party’s main focuses this year, for example, is abolishing the punishment rebate for young criminal offenders, which would lead to longer sentences for those committing multiple offenses. The Social Democrats have also promised tax cuts as part of their platform for the 2022 elections, where the party will likely be represented by Magdalena Andersson, Sweden’s finance minister.
Social democrats in Norway find themselves .. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/14/norway-left-leaning-parties-talks-government-coalition .. in a similar situation to their Swedish counterparts: having to cooperate with a center party that opposes socialist policies in order to secure power. And there are more signs that Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store’s social democratic Labour Party, which just defeated incumbent Conservative Prime Minister Erna Solberg in September’s election, will govern with more centrist policies than some might expect. Store is a millionaire who was previously affiliated with Norway’s Conservative Party. Moreover, he was a state secretary and chief of staff in 2000 and 2001, when the social democratic Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg oversaw widespread privatization policies.
Nordic social democratic parties have also had to modify their migration policies as their working-class voters have shifted to more conservative parties that push for migration control. In Denmark’s 2019 general election, when Social Democracy party leader Mette Frederiksen defeated the center-right incumbent to become prime minister, she gained support on a platform that combined traditional social democratic policies with a strict immigration policy.
Nordic nations’ electoral politics mirror broader trends away from socialism over the past few decades. In the 1970s and 1980s in Sweden, for instance, the state monopolized elder care, health care, and education. As schools were taken over by the state, the education model shifted away from adult authority, and pupils began to lead their own learning. Pupil-led education became an important part of Sweden’s socialist policies and remains one of the main holdovers of that period. But since the 1990s, the government has allowed the private sector to have a larger role. Sweden currently has 823 private schools, mainly operated as for-profit companies with public funding. Some, such as the school chain Internationella Engelska Skolan, are offering teacher-led rather than pupil-led education, with considerably better results than the public schools.
Health care is also gradually moving away from public monopolies. As of 2019 .. https://www.ekonomifakta.se/Fakta/Valfarden-i-privat-regi/Vard-och-omsorg-i-privat-regi/vardcentraler-i-privat-regi/ , more than 40 percent of the 1,100 health centers of Sweden are run by private, for-profit actors. While Sweden has universal health care, private sector employees are increasingly covered by private health insurances paid by their employers. In the capital region of Stockholm, 62 percent of elder care home-visit hours are carried out .. https://www.ekonomifakta.se/Fakta/Valfarden-i-privat-regi/Vard-och-omsorg-i-privat-regi/aldreomsorg-i-privat-regi/ .. by private, for-profit companies. The old state-run systems do live on in parts of Sweden, for example in the northern region of Norrbotten, where only 2 percent of elder care home visits are carried out by for-profit companies. But the welfare models are increasingly giving way to more centrist ones, with a role for both the private and public sectors.
Sweden’s pension system has also gradually become more connected to individuals’ work performance. Part of citizens’ pensions is invested in the market, and individuals can choose to invest in pension savings products from numerous private firms. Complementary private saving through employers is also becoming more important in future pension income. Throughout the region, pension reforms have included stricter rules for early retirement, a flexible retirement age, and a closer link between earned wage and accrued pensions.
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Much of the strength of Nordic societies lies in the advanced free market system.
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These are the trends that are contributing to the economic and social success of Nordic countries once again. It’s simply a common misconception that favorable social outcomes, such as long life expectancy and even income distribution, are a direct result of their welfare systems. In truth, these advantages largely evolved well before the rise of large welfare states.
As Swedish economists have shown .. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272707001041 , Sweden had an unusually even income distribution in 1920, and equality continued to grow until 1980. The lion’s share of income equality growth thus occurred during the free market era, predating the rise of the generous welfare state. In another study .. https://ideas.repec.org/p/kud/epruwp/13-01.html , economists showed that income equality in Denmark has increased since the 1920s, with much progress happening before the shift to higher taxes.
Much of the strength of Nordic societies lies in the advanced free market system, which is why it’s essential that they are returning to their centrist roots. As I have previously written .. https://www.newgeography.com/content/007098-nordics-attract-knowledge-capital-despite-high-taxes .. with Klas Tikkanen, chief operating officer of Nordic Capital, Sweden is a leading innovation hub in Europe that’s able to attract foreign capital to growing companies. One reason for this success is its smart tax policy, where funds from a successful investment in one company may be invested in new companies, and taxation only applies when gains are realized. Thus, growth capital can be attracted to a high-tax country.
There are many reasons to admire the Nordic model. Sweden has the highest concentration of “brain business jobs .. https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/02/it-is-western-europes-turn-for-a-brain-drain/ ” among European Union countries. As Bloomberg explained .. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-26/spotify-s-nest-proves-a-fertile-breeding-ground-for-unicorns .. earlier this year, Stockholm has “bred more tech unicorns per capita” than the rest of the world outside of Silicon Valley. Nordic nations are successfully combining entrepreneurship with a shift toward green energies, where governments work with the private sector to push for environmental sustainability.
Ultimately, the comeback of social democratic parties in the Nordic countries can be explained by their focus on centrist solutions to the greatest problems nations face today. It is centrist pragmatists, rather than socialists, who should hold up the Nordics as role models worldwide.
Nima Sanandaji is the director of the European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform. He has written more than a hundred policy papers on subjects ranging from integration and women’s career progress to the changing geography of successful enterprise and the future of jobs.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/10/27/nordic-countries-not-socialist-denmark-norway-sweden-centrist/
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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