During the weeks that have passed, we have been able to write another chapter in the story about the growing problems of the Swedish parties in dealing with a new Sweden, a Sweden they themselves were actually involved in creating. This time, the story is not about a couple of individuals, but about an entire district in SSU over which the Social Democracy lost control. In the media, we now read about the harms, about how political "extremism" manages to sneak up once again, how it harmed yet another political victim.
But is this really just about extremism? There is a deeper problem in this story that no one seems to have encountered yet. The phalanx that has taken over in Skåne has expressed condescension about women, gays and other groups. One has mocked non-believers and questioned secularism as the norm. The explanation has become the old custom: all this contradicts the values, and that people with such attitudes do not belong in politics. But this chorus, however reassuring it may be, begins to suffer from problems.
Many of the views expressed in the district are not "extreme". On the contrary, they are very commonplace in large parts of the world, and it has long been accepted that the rest of the world must be allowed to come to us. People think differently, especially in different parts of the world. Sweden is not a country that is in any way representative of other countries, whether culturally or ideologically. Sweden is the exception, not the rule.
This is what makes the conflict in SSU so difficult to deal with simply by talking about "values" and "extremism". In a city like Malmö, people with an overseas background are not a small minority; rather, they are about to form a larger constituency than Swedish-born. What political status should they really have? Sweden today does not have the same "value foundation" that we had for, say, a hundred years ago. In a democracy, all members have the right to decide what is important, the right to decide which principles should apply, which rights to respect and which groups to protect.
The problems in SSU show a growing kind of collision that is not unique to SSU: there are values and political positions that we today imagine that "everyone" should or must share, because otherwise they are not part of politics. At the same time, the group of people who are not part of this "everyone" above is growing, but who still do not feel encouraged to throw their opinions and political values on the wasteland. This tension would not be particularly dangerous if Sweden was a country where the “everyone” group had such a devastating majority that nothing outside it could be assumed to play any role. But this is no longer a Sweden we live in; locally or regionally, it is not difficult to see a situation where the group that agrees with our supposedly shared value assumptions is a minority, and where the group with supposedly extremist views that do not respect the consensus of politics are numerically superior. In fact, it is possible to trace the contours of this particular fear even in the SSU conflict: in one of the articles, a former member states that what has happened is a symptom of the "labor movement's weakness". The old workers disappear, new people come in, and suddenly you have an organization where completely different views and behavior patterns take place.
I can sympathize with this abandonment. But the abandonment, however sympathetic it is, only shows that nobody really thought through what politics actually means. Should new Swedes have the same political rights as the old Swedes, or should they be adapted to a political children's table until they are adults enough to jam into consensus? For the sake of argument, let's say that Annie Lööf's example with a Sweden with 30 million inhabitants was true. If a majority of the population in this new Sweden voted to criminalize homosexuality, and had enough parliamentary support to enforce any constitutional amendments, would this in any way be unlawful or wrong?
To speak of the values of value and to come up with accepted truths about people's equal value or the like must be as progressive and humane as possible. But in practice, it actually means a belief in and encouragement for political apartheid: a view where people's right to be part of the political system is dependent on a sufficient degree of intellectual "maturity" to be able to trust that you do not vote for immoral or harmful things. This approach is not new; rather, it was precisely this kind of argument that was used to explain why poor workers and women should never be allowed to be part of the political system. It was the same kind of view that white residents of Rhodesia (today's Zimbabwe) used to defend minority rule: if we let the majority decide, they will rule the country right down in the ruin.
In Sweden, we have so far solved violations of today's accepted political consensus in two ways. Firstly, we have always emphasized that there is absolutely not even a Swedish political consensus to begin with, because in Sweden you only work with universal values. There are no Swedish values, there is no Swedish culture. There is only pure and cut humanity, where we Swedes - without a shame in the body - happily claim that everything we happen to think on various issues represents the purest, most artificial way of being human. Secondly, we have solved the problem of the increasing prevalence of people breaking the norm by excluding them and viewing them as sad, extremist bugs in an otherwise well-functioning democratic system.
The Swedish political debate today is increasingly similar to an iceberg; Above the surface we are still talking about extremism and fundamental violations as before, as if nothing if nothing has changed over time; beneath the surface lies a huge and growing mass of anxiety and mistrust for the future.
Why this distrust? Well, because both of these methods above are starting to reach the end of the road. The time when they really worked is coming to an end. The old political parties are getting weaker and weaker; their ability to act as gatekeepers on the paths of political consensus is pouring. At the same time, the dreams of the Swede, as the mother of all things, have proved extremely powerless in the ongoing clash with reality. Did all Swedes really get off on a ride with the Swedish metro? Recent reports on the percentage of pupils in the school in, among other places, Gothenburg who live under reverence do not seem to directly provide any greater support for that dream.
In fact, I have to admit that it is extremely difficult to say where all this will end. The fact that so many are so deeply invested in the project to dismiss the existence of all opinions other than those prevalent on diversity courses and in municipal governance documents as a temporary bug in the system is not a good sign. How many people are really prepared to accept these views, the day the dream of being "brought up" away is no longer realistic? One of the most dramatic scenes from Sweden in recent years is to me all the pictures where obviously adult people - men with wife and children in their home countries - are painstakingly transfixed by their Swedish host families. The degree of attachment that could create such a situation - where adult men are treated as fifteen-year-olds, and where adults put all doubts aside and go into the role of tender foster parents - may not have been good for anyone.
These scenes are easy to remember. They are easy to laugh at, because whoever feels that way. But on a larger plane, almost the entire country has fallen in love with the dream of a much larger project of nursing and tenderness, and that love goes back decades. Sweden dreamed of taking care of, of educating, of "civilizing" those who came here, until they were completed as small images of ourselves.
They would enchant us with their food and their exotic dances, and in return, we would have them put aside all their old Malay traditions, gender roles and primitive ideologies. But a democracy cannot work that way; it cannot be based on adults, independent people forever being dressed with a baby bottle and bib. Will everyone still love all those who think differently the day they demand to stop being children?