"Stop Calling Trump a Populist [...] But he’s been in office for a year and a half, time enough to be judged on what he does, not what he says. And his administration has been relentlessly anti-worker on every front. Trump is about as populist as he is godly — that is, not at all."
Does AOC and Bernie Sanders Represent a Norwegian or Venezuelan Future for the US?
Erik Engheim Feb 26
As a Scandinavian married to an American I’ve been looking with great interest at the surge in popularity of candidates advocating a more Scandinavian style approach to economics.
However there are two competing narratives emerging in the US. The American left speaks of turning the US into a sort of prosperous Scandinavian welfare state, with high wages for workers, free health care and education paid for by taxes.
The right prefer instead to speak of how AOC and Bernie Sanders are going to turn the US into a failed state like Venezuela. Who is right?
Let me just start by saying, that the whole Venezuela idea is ridiculous, but there is still a value into going through the details of why this idea is so wrong.
What is Socialism?
The first fundamental problem is agreeing on what socialism is. When the success of Scandinavian countries are pointed to the American right has four typical counter points:
1. Scandinavian countries are not socialist, but rather capitalist.
2. All their wealth was produced back when they were capitalist and they have been going downhill ever since they went socialist.
4.Scandinavia is social democratic, not socialist, which is totally different.
The claim is essentially that Scandinavian countries are not real socialism but Venezuela is. To which I would ask, by what metric?
Instead of arguing over which country “feels” more socialist, let us look at the data.
Public Sector Employment
While we can disagree on the specifics, it should not be controversial to claim that in a socialist society, more people work in the public sector than in the private sector.
And unsurprisingly the capitalist high castle of the US, only has 15.8% in the public sector.
Venezuela has 29% of its worker in the public sector. That is terrible right? Shows how extremely socialist they are! No in fact it doesn’t. Norway is considerably higher at 37.8%. Same goes for another Scandinavian, Denmark at 31.4%.
Perhaps more shocking is that Singapore, which has the image of super capitalism, has 32.0% of its workforce in the public sector. What?!
- Government-linked corporations play a substantial role in Singapore’s domestic economy. As of November 2011, the top six Singapore-listed GLCs accounted for about 17 percent of total capitalization of the Singapore Exchange (SGX). -
The Norwegian government .. https://www.aftenposten.no/okonomi/i/ml4q/Dette-er-statens-forretningsimperium[not in English] .. owns 33% of the Norwegian stock exchange. This includes full or partial ownership of oil companies, hydro-electric power plants, banks, aluminum production, transportation, defense industry, liquor stores etc.
Whether this is more or less than in Venezuela I could actually not obtain information about. The point is that it is quite broad.
Taxes
How about the tax burden. Conservatives like to talk about how socialist countries are high tax.
If we look at the political history of Norway and Venezuela, that is where we see the really big difference. Norway clearly has a more socialist political history. Since 1900s Venezuela has had 6 different occasions .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_Venezuela .. where the military has sized power and suspended democracy. If you go further back in history, there are even more cases.
Norway has history of military rule [[sic] should be a no there i believe], unless you count the German occupation of Norway during WWII.
Without studying Venezuelan history in detail, it becomes quickly apparent just skimming through .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_Venezuela , that it’s political history is nothing like that of say the US or Norway. There is a large number of different political leaders and dramatic and violent changes in government, political exiles, corruption charges, political splits and infighting through the whole post war period.
If one compares with Nordic countries such as Norwegian and Sweden, is that they have far more political stability and peaceful transition of power. Sweden has since the 1930s been almost exclusively run .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Prime_Ministers_of_Sweden .. by social democrats. There are been few changes of prime ministers. Typically Swedish prime minsters have been in power for a long time. The same experience is found in Norway. The social democratic Norwegian Labour party has been in power for most of the period since the 1930s .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heads_of_government_of_Norway .
On the American right it is popular to make the counter argument, that Venezuela the leaders of Venezuela calls themselves socialists and are committed to the abolishment of capitalism. The Nordic countries in contrast they say are social democrats, meaning they strongly support a capitalist economy with just a bunch of welfare services.
As I’ve pointed out through this article that is not the case. In particular in Norway, there is extensive state ownership of the means of production. The leaders of Venezuela calls themselves democratic socialists. Which is actually no different from what has been the case in Nordic countries. That label is seldom used by the Norwegian labour party today. However if you read the party programs .. https://www.arbeiderpartiet.no/om/historien-om-arbeiderpartiet/historiske-partiprogrammer/[not in English] .. since roughly the 30s to the early 1980s, it typically states on the very first line either: “We are democratic socialists” or “we are committed to the principles of democratic socialism.”
Further reading of the party program will display scathing criticism of capitalism as a system as well as spelling out the long term goal being the abolishment of capitalism and replacing it with a socialist economy.
Now I am not saying this actually happened. But a political movement which has been in power for much longer than Hugo Chavez has explicitly stated that it works towards a socialist economy. Yet despite this goal, and the deliberate reforms enacted to get there, Norway has not ended up as an economic basket case like Venezuela.
Challenge: Name a Metric Where Venezuela is More Socialist Than Norway?
So I have gone through numerous easy to measure metrics which by people tend to judge a country as socialist or socialistic. In not a single one of them did Venezuela “excel”.
And that is my challenge to any reader: Come up with something that is easy to measure, where Venezuela is more socialist than Norway?
I’ve tried to study this and I cannot find it. However I found a lot of other things:
1. An unprofessional government, caring more about loyalists than having competent people in important positions.
2. Lack of transparency.
3. Short term thinking and populism.
None of these traits have anything to do with socialism. In fact the Trump administration seems to suffer from pretty much all of the same traits and they can hardly be called socialists. Like Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump is stacking his administration with yes-men and loyalists, disregarding competency.
Donald Trump also engages in short term populist policies such as debt fueled tax cuts for the rich. These policies may work in the short term. Just like Hugo Chávez’s splurge on social programs with oil money caused rapid reductions in poverty.
Eventually however the negative effects will show up. Hugo Chávez did not put aside any of the money from his windfall profits from high oil prices. Thus it was always just a matter of time before catastrophe would hit his populist regime.
Just as Americans will sooner or later have to repay the debt Donald Trump amass to pay for tax cuts. Will Bernie Sanders be a new Hugo Chavez?
No, because Bernie Sander’s is a not a short term thinking populist. Bernie Sander has far more in common with Nordic social democrats who implemented socialist inspired reforms gradually and always tried to remain financially responsible.
Ironically Donald Trump is far more similar to Hugo Chávez: They are/were both boastful, short term thinking populists.
"Stop Calling Trump a Populist [...] But he’s been in office for a year and a half, time enough to be judged on what he does, not what he says. And his administration has been relentlessly anti-worker on every front. Trump is about as populist as he is godly — that is, not at all."
"Stop Calling Trump a Populist [...] It’s true that Trump still, on occasion, poses as someone who champions the interests of ordinary working Americans against those of the elite. And I guess there’s a sense in which his embrace of white nationalism gives voice to ordinary Americans who share his racism but have felt unable to air their prejudice in public. P - But he’s been in office for a year and a half, time enough to be judged on what he does, not what he says. And his administration has been relentlessly anti-worker on every front. Trump is about as populist as he is godly — that is, not at all. P - Start with tax policy,..."
By Ellen Engelstad
Spurred on by a radical left party, the Norwegian parliament booted the country's most prominent anti-immigrant politician from government.
The last time Norway caught the attention of the international media, it was because Donald Trump remarked that more immigrants should come to the US from countries like Norway and less from “shithole” places. That prompted a string of jokes and jibes about Norway being the whitest country in the world .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQkfDJ2zVNo , a perfect fantasy for a racist president.
How white Norway actually is depends on how you define it, but race, immigration, and “cultural preservation” have indeed stirred things up in this small country. Last month it culminated in the dismissal of Minister of Justice Sylvi Listhaug, who both supporters and detractors have compared to Trump.
But what actually happened? And how big of a blow was it to right-wing populism?
The Norwegian Right
Listhaug belongs to the Progress Party (FrP), a right-wing formation with a history of dog-whistling and blatant racism that has been in government since 2013 with the conservative-right party Høyre.
For a long time the Norwegian establishment refused to collaborate with the FrP, seeing it as too extreme. They changed their mind out of electoral expediency. Needing votes to secure a majority, right-wing parties invited the FrP into the mainstream tent and welcomed their collaboration. Since then, mainstream right parties have assured the public that the Norwegian populist right is not like it is in others parts of Europe — it’s milder and moderate, less historically noxious. While the Sweden Democrats have an outright Nazi past .. https://www.thelocal.se/20161010/just-how-far-right-are-the-sweden-democrats , the FrP’s roots are in an anti-tax liberal party.
Yet it might be fair to ask if we have not been fooling ourselves that we have the cleanest oil, the nicest fjords, and the sweetest far-right politicians on the continent. It’s been just thirty years since Carl I Hagen, the leader of the FrP at the time, forged a letter from a Muslim living in Norway .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Letter .. and used it to claim that Islam was taking over the country. In the decades since, the FrP’s bread and butter has been pushing anti-immigrant policies and stoking anti-Muslim fear. The two leaders throughout those years, Hagen and Siv Jensen, have been known for their bigoted statements.
And then Sylvi Listhaug came along.
Listhaug became city commissioner (byråd) of welfare and social services in Oslo in 2006, where she pressed for more competition and more private-sector involvement in government. After working for a consulting firm, she then entered the right-wing coalition government in 2013 as minister of agriculture and food. While still largely unknown, she stirred controversy and fear among farmers for her statements in 2010 that Norway’s agricultural policy was a “communist system.”
Gradually she grew into the party’s political star and the country’s most vocal anti-immigrant politician. During the European “migrant crisis” in 2015, she raged against the “tyranny of goodness”: reasonable people who simply wanted stricter immigration policies were being labeled heartless and racist by “tyrants of good,” who used their self-appointed positions as moral commissioners to shut down debate about the consequences of immigration.
Then that December, Listhaug was appointed to a newly created cabinet position: minister of immigration and integration. It was both shocking and expected. Shocking because the conservative right, who claimed to be moderate, chose the most prominent anti-immigrant voice as minister of immigration. And expected because the FrP’s had netted 16 percent of the votes when they joined the coalition. They were strong enough to get what they wanted, and they wanted Listhaug in charge of immigration and a platform to spread the party’s views. Listhaug quickly made the best of it. Shortly after she stepped into the new position, in late December 2015, Listhaug vowed to make Norway’s asylum policies “one of the strictest in Europe.”
Since then Listhaug has been the hero of the Norwegian far right, a provocateur adept at trolling the Left and liberal media. In one stunt that received international attention — and prompted John Oliver to label her “perhaps the most Norwegian-looking human being that has ever lived .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEYGYkE9hys ” — Listhaug tested “how it is to be a migrant” by floating in a wet suit in the Mediterranean. During last year’s election campaign, she claimed that the leader of the Christian Democrats, Knut Arild Hareide, “and other politicians” were licking the backsides of Muslim clergymen.
The Right won the contest, and in the new cabinet she received a new appointment: minister of justice, public security and immigration. On election night, the far-left party Rødt .. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/09/norway-red-party-elections-labor-environment , which won parliamentary representation for the first time, vowed they would kick her out of office.
The Post
On March 9, Listhaug posted a picture of a scary-looking group, presumably in the Middle East, alongside the caption: “Labor thinks the rights of terrorists are more important than national security. Like and share.” The impetus for the post was a proposed law that would allow the ministry of justice to revoke the citizenship of foreign fighters and terrorists without court approval. The bill went down in parliament. Labor, the main opposition party, agreed that known foreign fighters should be stripped of their citizenship, but not before the case was put in front of a judge. The disagreement was thus minor, and that was perhaps the real scandal — that the removal of citizenship was taken so lightly by all major political parties. Would it also, say, apply to Norwegians with double citizenship that went to support the Kurdish liberation struggle in northern Syria .. https://jacobinmag.com/2018/04/syrian-kurds-rojava-trump-united-states-support ?
For Listhaug, though, such questions were of course beside the point — this was another chance to attack and antagonize the Labor Party. Such animosity might seem strange from a left perspective, considering Labor is comprised of rather moderate social democrats that are eager to cross the aisle and seek consensus. In 2015, for instance, the party cut an asylum deal with the conservative government.
In the feverish imagination of the far right, however, Labor supports open borders and are traitors to the nation.
This paranoia reached its most horrific peak in 2011, when right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik bombed a government building and then went on a killing spree at a Labor Party youth camp. Seventy-seven lives were lost.
After the attack the nation came together, and the Labor government spread a message of love, unity, and democracy. It was all very warm and fuzzy — but the aftermath also created a political climate where actually attacking the right wing-extremism that fed Breivik’s actions became taboo. To point out that right-wing hatred was the reason behind the attack was to open oneself up to accusations of “playing the July 22 card” and besmirching opponents as supporters of a crazed lone wolf. Meanwhile, the Progress Party — which counted Breivik as a member for ten years — grew stronger, and extremist websites proliferated, spreading hate against both Labor and immigrants.
The Fall of Listhaug
Listhaug’s Facebook post on March 9 shook the political landscape. Published on the opening day of the first movie about the 2011 attacks .. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/feb/20/utoya-july-22-review-norway-mass-killing-gut-wrenching-ordeal-berlin-film , the post triggered criticism from all mainstream parties, including Listhaug’s coalition partners. On Monday, March 12 the leader of the Christian Democrats insisted that Listhaug had only one option: delete the post and apologize. “Delete and apologize” is not Listhaug’s modus operandi, though, and she refused to remove the offending post for another couple days. When she finally relented, she cited copyright issues as the reason for her about-face. The same day, Rødt proposed a motion of no-confidence.
Listhaug appeared before parliament the following day, where she was met with furious opposition. Four times she was forced to apologize. After the session the Labor Party decided, rather surprisingly, to support the vote of no-confidence, and the Greens, the Socialist Left, and the Center Party followed suit. Now all that was needed was the Christian Democrats and the motion would have majority. By Norwegian parliamentary tradition, such a move would trigger the resignation of the entire government, unless Listhaug withdrew or was sacked by the prime minister. Intent on maintaining a majority, Prime Minister Erna Solberg said she would do no such thing. She was ready to stick with the FrP and bring the entire government down if the parliament voted no-confidence.
On Monday, March 19, the Christian Democrats’ national committee decided in an emergency session that it did not have confidence in Listhaug and asked the prime minister to “take measures to resolve the situation.” The next day Listhaug announced she was stepping down as minister and returning to her post as a regular member of parliament. In a press conference, she claimed that she was the victim of a witch hunt and that she was stepping down to save the country from a Labor government — which, in her estimation, would be a “catastrophe for Norway.”
The Majority Is With Us
How should we interpret all of this?
First, it should be seen as a victory for the Left .. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/09/norway-elections-socialist-left-snorre-valen . Norway’s most prominent far-right politician was booted from government and consigned to work as just one of 169 parliamentarians. Without the ministerial post — and an important one at that — Listhaug should receive less media attention and will certainly wield less power. Second, a firm line has been drawn against right-wing scaremongering, which is designed to divide the country into supposedly loyal denizens and purportedly traitorous supporters of terrorists and immigrants. Finally, and most importantly, this is a victory for the majority of the country that doesn’t believe the right-wing narrative that the nation and its values are under attack from immigrants.
In 2015, Listhaug claimed it was impossible to question whether welcoming refugees was good policy, that the political climate made it impossible to “speak the truth” about immigration. Turns out it’s the other way around: as the Right has grown stronger .. https://jacobinmag.com/2018/04/fidesz-viktor-orban-hungarian-elections .. across .. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/03/italian-election-far-right-m5s-lega .. Europe, they have increasingly dominated national debates, labeling anyone who disagrees with them as naive and out of touch, scaring them into silence. Immigrants have been told to shut up and be grateful, or better yet, leave, while native Norwegians who support a more humane immigration policy have been told to shut up because they are do-gooders with no basis in reality.
Recent weeks have demonstrated that narrative might be changing. A young woman, Camilla Ahamath, started a fundraiser for Doctors Without Borders in the name of Rødt leader Bjørnar Moxnes to salute his motion of no-confidence. In just three days the campaign drew more than 17 million kroners (around $2.2 million) from about 80,000 people. It is a confirmation of what we should have known all along: The far-right supporters of Listhaug are vocal, especially online, but they are relatively few. The majority of Norwegians are fed up with toxic speech and fearmongering. In a poll conducted just after the infamous Facebook post, and before her resignation, a clear majority of the population said they had a bad impression of the far-right politician, and only 22 percent said they had a good one. When Listhaug stepped down, 84 percent of respondents said they thought it was a good decision. And last year a poll found that more than 70 percent of young people rank “fighting racism and xenophobia” as the most important political issue, while “limiting immigration” ranks last.
This does not mean that all is well and won. The Progress Party has increased both its membership and its support in the polls after this episode, and it’s fair to say that Norway is both more divided and not necessarily more left-leaning. The so-called moderate right has shown itself quite willing to protect the far right in order to stay in power. Prime Minister Erna Solberg thanked Listhaug for her service, said she was welcome back in the government at a later date, and tried to downplay Listhaug’s responsibility by claiming that extreme rhetoric abounds “on all sides.”
Still, the lesson the Norwegian left should take from Listhaug’s ouster is that we gain strength by standing up to the far right, not backpedaling or apologizing for our values. The majority is with us — regardless of how much the Right insists otherwise.
About the Author
Ellen Engelstad is the editor of the online journal Manifest Tidsskrift.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
AI
