Tomgram: Ann Jones, Social Democracy for Dummies
By Ann Jones
Posted on January 28, 2016, Printed on January 29, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176096/ ;
Water drips from a leaky roof. The heat brings on a moldy, rancid odor. A
child volunteer is tasked with killing giant roaches. Welcome to the Detroit
public school system, which, according to a recent New York Times report, is
run down after years of neglect and teetering on the edge of financial
collapse. And yet, last Thursday, this was the closest thing to a good
news story about Michigan on the front page of that newspaper. A companion
piece covered the even more dismal water crisis in the poverty-stricken,
black-majority city of Flint, a penny-pinching state austerity measure
turned public health emergency that has left children there with elevated
levels of lead in their blood, putting them at risk of lifelong adverse
health effects.
How did it come to this? An America dotted with feral cities left to decay
into ruin? Man-made catastrophes spawned by harebrained austerity schemes? A
country of crumbling roads, unsafe bridges, failing schools, a woefully
neglected mental health system whose ample slack has been taken up by a
disastrous criminal justice system? Take your pick when it comes to rotten
institutions and rotting infrastructure, since the list goes on and on.
Presidential candidates are vowing to make America great again or talking
about reigniting its promise, but perhaps a counterfeit, sepia-tinged
trip to the beginning of the road that got us here isnt really the solution
to twenty-first-century Americas problems. TomDispatch regular Ann Jones
has a different idea. In her latest piece, a joint TomDispatch/Nation
article which will appear in print in the new issue of that magazine, Jones
takes a welcome detour to a place where welfare isnt a dirty word, the
social safety net isnt the preferred place for budget cuts, and
axe-wielding children are -- believe it or not -- fostered, not feared:
Scandinavia.
A world citizen who has journeyed across Africa, spent years living in the
Afghan war zone, and was most recently a Fulbright Fellow in Norway, Jones
examines how a couple of Nixon-era decisions led the U.S. down the road to
ruin, while Scandinavian nations charted a different course, embracing
principles of uplift, equality, and humanity. Yes, some American-esque
values seem to be seeping into the Scandinavian scene of late, from the rise
of anti-immigration sentiment in Sweden to a Danish town attempting to stick
it to Muslims by way of pork meatballs in school lunches. But even far-right
parties in these Nordic nations champion a robust welfare state and a
generous social safety net. So let Jones, an intrepid journalist whose
latest book, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars
-- The Untold Story, is already a classic of Iraq and Afghan War reporting,
help explain why Norway, Denmark, and Sweden invariably top global indexes
when it comes to affordable housing, education, health, life expectancy, and
overall citizen satisfaction, while the United States has ended up with
failing cities, crumbling schools, and poisoned water. Nick Turse
American Democracy Down for the Count
Or What Is It the Scandinavians Have That We Dont?
By Ann Jones
[This is a joint TomDispatch/Nation article and appears in print in slightly
shortened form in the new issue of the Nation magazine.]
Some years ago, I faced up to the futility of reporting true things about
Americas disastrous wars and so I left Afghanistan for another remote
mountainous country far away. It was the polar opposite of Afghanistan: a
peaceful, prosperous land where nearly everybody seemed to enjoy a good
life, on the job and in the family.
Its true that they didnt work much, not by American standards anyway. In
the U.S., full-time salaried workers supposedly laboring 40 hours a week
actually average 49, with almost 20% clocking more than 60. These people, on
the other hand, worked only about 37 hours a week, when they werent away on
long paid vacations. At the end of the work day, about four in the afternoon
(perhaps three in the summer), they had time to enjoy a hike in the forest
or a swim with the kids or a beer with friends -- which helps explain why,
unlike so many Americans, they are pleased with their jobs.
Often I was invited to go along. I found it refreshing to hike and ski in a
country with no land mines, and to hang out in cafés unlikely to be bombed.
Gradually, I lost my warzone jitters and settled into the slow, calm,
pleasantly uneventful stream of life there.
Four years on, thinking I should settle down, I returned to the United
States. It felt quite a lot like stepping back into that other violent,
impoverished world, where anxiety runs high and people are quarrelsome. I
had, in fact, come back to the flip side of Afghanistan and Iraq: to what
Americas wars have done to America. Where I live now, in the Homeland,
there are not enough shelters for the homeless. Most people are either
overworked or hurting for jobs; housing is overpriced; hospitals, crowded
and understaffed; schools, largely segregated and not so good. Opioid or
heroin overdose is a popular form of death; and men in the street threaten
women wearing hijab. Did the American soldiers I covered in Afghanistan know
they were fighting for this?
Ducking the Subject
One night I tuned in to the Democrats presidential debate to see if they
had any plans to restore the America I used to know. To my amazement, I
heard the name of my peaceful mountain hideaway: Norway. Bernie Sanders was
denouncing Americas crooked version of casino capitalism that floats the
already rich ever higher and flushes the working class. He said that we
ought to look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn
from what they have accomplished for their working people.
He believes, he added, in a society where all people do well. Not just a
handful of billionaires. That certainly sounds like Norway. For ages
theyve worked at producing things for the use of everyone -- not the profit
of a few -- so I was all ears, waiting for Sanders to spell it out for
Americans.
But Hillary Clinton quickly countered, We are not Denmark. Smiling, she
said, I love Denmark, and then delivered a patriotic punch line: We are
the United States of America. Well, theres no denying that. She praised
capitalism and all the small businesses that were started because we have
the opportunity and the freedom in our country for people to do that and to
make a good living for themselves and their families. She didnt seem to
know that Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians do that, too, and with much higher
rates of success.
The truth is that almost a quarter of American startups are not founded on
brilliant new ideas, but on the desperation of men or women who cant get a
decent job. The majority of all American enterprises are solo ventures
having zero payrolls, employing no one but the entrepreneur, and often
quickly wasting away. Sanders said that he was all for small business, too,
but that meant nothing if all of the new income and wealth is going to the
top 1 percent. (As George Carlin said, The reason they call it the
American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.)
In that debate, no more was heard of Denmark, Sweden, or Norway. The
audience was left in the dark. Later, in a speech at Georgetown University,
Sanders tried to clarify his identity as a Democratic socialist. He said
hes not the kind of Socialist (with a capital S) who favors state ownership
of anything like the means of production. The Norwegian government, on the
other hand, owns the means of producing lots of public assets and is the
major stockholder in many a vital private enterprise.
I was dumbfounded. Norway, Denmark, and Sweden practice variations of a
system that works much better than ours, yet even the Democratic
presidential candidates, who say they love or want to learn from those
countries, dont seem to know how they actually work.
Why Were Not Denmark
Proof that they do work is delivered every year in data-rich evaluations by
the U.N. and other international bodies. The Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development's annual report on international well-being, for
example, measures 11 factors, ranging from material conditions like
affordable housing and employment to quality of life matters like education,
health, life expectancy, voter participation, and overall citizen
satisfaction. Year after year, all the Nordic countries cluster at the top,
while the United States lags far behind. In addition, Norway ranked first on
the U.N. Development Programs Human Development Index for 12 of the last 15
years, and it consistently tops international comparisons of such matters as
democracy, civil and political rights, and freedom of expression and the
press.
What is it, though, that makes the Scandinavians so different? Since the
Democrats cant tell you and the Republicans wouldnt want you to know, let
me offer you a quick introduction. What Scandinavians call the Nordic Model
is a smart and simple system that starts with a deep commitment to equality
and democracy. Thats two concepts combined in a single goal because, as far
as they are concerned, you cant have one without the other.
Right there they part company with capitalist America, now the most unequal
of all the developed nations, and consequently a democracy no more.
Political scientists say it has become an oligarchy -- a country run at the
expense of its citizenry by and for the super rich. Perhaps you noticed
that.
In the last century, Scandinavians, aiming for their egalitarian goal,
refused to settle solely for any of the ideologies competing for power --
not capitalism or fascism, not Marxist socialism or communism.
Geographically stuck between powerful nations waging hot and cold wars for
such doctrines, Scandinavians set out to find a path in between. That path
was contested -- by socialist-inspired workers on the one hand and
capitalist owners and their elite cronies on the other -- but it led in the
end to a mixed economy. Thanks largely to the solidarity and savvy of
organized labor and the political parties it backed, the long struggle
produced a system that makes capitalism more or less cooperative, and then
redistributes equitably the wealth it helps to produce. Struggles like this
took place around the world in the twentieth century, but the Scandinavians
alone managed to combine the best ideas of both camps, while chucking out
the worst.
In 1936, the popular U.S. journalist Marquis Childs first described the
result to Americans in the book Sweden: The Middle Way. Since then, all the
Scandinavian countries and their Nordic neighbors Finland and Iceland have
been improving upon that hybrid system. Today in Norway, negotiations
between the Confederation of Trade Unions and the Confederation of Norwegian
Enterprise determine the wages and working conditions of most capitalist
enterprises, public and private, that create wealth, while high but fair
progressive income taxes fund the states universal welfare system,
benefitting everyone. In addition, those confederations work together to
minimize the disparity between high-wage and lower-wage jobs. As a result,
Norway ranks with Sweden, Denmark, and Finland among the most income-equal
countries in the world, and its standard of living tops the charts.
So heres the big difference: in Norway, capitalism serves the people. The
government, elected by the people, sees to that. All eight of the parties
that won parliamentary seats in the last national election, including the
conservative Høyre party now leading the government, are committed to
maintaining the welfare state. In the U.S., however, neoliberal politics put
the foxes in charge of the henhouse, and capitalists have used the wealth
generated by their enterprises (as well as financial and political
manipulations) to capture the state and pluck the chickens. Theyve done a
masterful job of chewing up organized labor. Today, only 11% of American
workers belong to a union. In Norway, that number is 52%; in Denmark, 67%;
in Sweden, 70%.
In the U.S., oligarchs maximize their wealth and keep it, using the
democratically elected government to shape policies and laws favorable to
the interests of their foxy class. They bamboozle the people by insisting,
as Hillary Clinton did at that debate, that all of us have the freedom to
create a business in the free marketplace, which implies that being hard
up is our own fault.
In the Nordic countries, on the other hand, democratically elected
governments give their populations freedom from the market by using
capitalism as a tool to benefit everyone. That liberates their people from
the tyranny of the mighty profit motive that warps so many American lives,
leaving them freer to follow their own dreams -- to become poets or
philosophers, bartenders or business owners, as they please.
Family Matters
Maybe our politicians dont want to talk about the Nordic Model because it
shows so clearly that capitalism can be put to work for the many, not just
the few.
Consider the Norwegian welfare state. Its universal. In other words, aid to
the sick or the elderly is not charity, grudgingly donated by elites to
those in need. It is the right of every individual citizen. That includes
every woman, whether or not she is somebodys wife, and every child, no
matter its parentage. Treating every person as a citizen affirms the
individuality of each and the equality of all. It frees every person from
being legally possessed by another -- a husband, for example, or a
tyrannical father.
Which brings us to the heart of Scandinavian democracy: the equality of
women and men. In the 1970s, Norwegian feminists marched into politics and
picked up the pace of democratic change. Norway needed a larger labor force,
and women were the answer. Housewives moved into paid work on an equal
footing with men, nearly doubling the tax base. That has, in fact, meant
more to Norwegian prosperity than the coincidental discovery of North
Atlantic oil reserves. The Ministry of Finance recently calculated that
those additional working mothers add to Norways net national wealth a value
equivalent to the countrys total petroleum wealth -- currently held in
the worlds largest sovereign wealth fund, worth more than $873 billion. By
1981, women were sitting in parliament, in the prime ministers chair, and
in her cabinet.
American feminists also marched for such goals in the 1970s, but the Big
Boys, busy with their own White House intrigues, initiated a war on women
that set the country back and still rages today in brutal attacks on womens
basic civil rights, health care, and reproductive freedom. In 1971, thanks
to the hard work of organized feminists, Congress passed the bipartisan
Comprehensive Child Development Bill to establish a multi-billion dollar
national day care system for the children of working parents. In 1972,
President Richard Nixon vetoed it, and that was that. In 1972, Congress also
passed a bill (first proposed in 1923) to amend the Constitution to grant
equal rights of citizenship to women. Ratified by only 35 states, three
short of the required 38, that Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA, was declared
dead in 1982, leaving American women in legal limbo.
In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunity Reconciliation Act, obliterating six decades of federal social
welfare policy as we know it, ending federal cash payments to the nations
poor, and consigning millions of female heads of household and their
children to poverty, where many still dwell 20 years later. Today, nearly
half a century after Nixon trashed national child care, even privileged
women, torn between their underpaid work and their kids, are overwhelmed.
Things happened very differently in Norway. There, feminists and
sociologists pushed hard against the biggest obstacle still standing in the
path to full democracy: the nuclear family. In the 1950s, the world-famous
American sociologist Talcott Parsons had pronounced that arrangement -- with
hubby at work and the little wife at home -- the ideal setup in which to
socialize children. But in the 1970s, the Norwegian state began to
deconstruct that undemocratic ideal by taking upon itself the traditional
unpaid household duties of women. Caring for the children, the elderly, the
sick, and the disabled became the basic responsibilities of the universal
welfare state, freeing women in the workforce to enjoy both their jobs and
their families. Thats another thing American politicians -- still,
boringly, mostly odiously boastful men -- surely dont want you to think
about: that patriarchy can be demolished and everyone be the better for it.
Paradoxically, setting women free made family life more genuine. Many in
Norway say it has made both men and women more themselves and more alike:
more understanding and happier. It also helped kids slip from the shadow of
helicopter parents. In Norway, mother and father in turn take paid parental
leave from work to see a newborn through its first year or more. At age one,
however, children start attending a neighborhood barnehage (kindergarten)
for schooling spent largely outdoors. By the time kids enter free primary
school at age six, they are remarkably self-sufficient, confident, and
good-natured. They know their way around town, and if caught in a snowstorm
in the forest, how to build a fire and find the makings of a meal. (One
kindergarten teacher explained, We teach them early to use an axe so they
understand its a tool, not a weapon.)
To Americans, the notion of a school taking away your child to make her an
axe wielder is monstrous. In fact, Norwegian kids, who are well acquainted
in early childhood with many different adults and children, know how to get
along with grown ups and look after one another. More to the point, though
its hard to measure, its likely that Scandinavian children spend more
quality time with their work-isnt-everything parents than does a typical
middle-class American child being driven by a stressed-out mother from music
lessons to karate practice. For all these reasons and more, the
international organization Save the Children cites Norway as the best
country on Earth in which to raise kids, while the U.S. finishes far down
the list in 33rd place.
Dont Take My Word For It
This little summary just scratches the surface of Scandinavia, so I urge
curious readers to Google away. But be forewarned. Youll find much
criticism of all the Nordic Model countries. The structural matters Ive
described -- of governance and family -- are not the sort of things visible
to tourists or visiting journalists, so their comments are often obtuse.
Take the American tourist/blogger who complained that he hadnt been shown
the slums of Oslo. (There are none.) Or the British journalist who wrote
that Norwegian petrol is too expensive. (Though not for Norwegians, who are,
in any case, leading the world in switching to electric cars.)
Neoliberal pundits, especially the Brits, are always beating up on the
Scandinavians in books, magazines, newspapers, and blogs, predicting the
imminent demise of their social democracies and bullying them to forsake the
best political economy on the planet. Self-styled experts still in thrall to
Margaret Thatcher tell Norwegians they must liberalize their economy and
privatize everything short of the royal palace. Mostly, the Norwegian
government does the opposite, or nothing at all, and social democracy keeps
on ticking.
Its not perfect, of course. It has always been a carefully considered work
in progress. Governance by consensus takes time and effort. You might think
of it as slow democracy. But its light years ahead of us.
Ann Jones, a TomDispatch regular, went to Norway in 2011 as a Fulbright
Fellow. She stayed on because it feels good to live in a social democracy
where politics matter, gender doesnt, and peacemaking is the nations
project. She is the author most recently of They Were Soldiers: How the
Wounded Return from Americas Wars the Untold Story, a Dispatch Books
original.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Tomorrows Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright Ann Jones 2016
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176096
Tomgram: Ann Jones, Social Democracy for Dummies
By Ann Jones
Posted on January 28, 2016, Printed on January 29, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176096/ ;
Water drips from a leaky roof. The heat brings on a moldy, rancid odor. A
child volunteer is tasked with killing giant roaches. Welcome to the Detroit
public school system, which, according to a recent New York Times report, is
run down after years of neglect and teetering on the edge of financial
collapse. And yet, last Thursday, this was the closest thing to a good
news story about Michigan on the front page of that newspaper. A companion
piece covered the even more dismal water crisis in the poverty-stricken,
black-majority city of Flint, a penny-pinching state austerity measure
turned public health emergency that has left children there with elevated
levels of lead in their blood, putting them at risk of lifelong adverse
health effects.
How did it come to this? An America dotted with feral cities left to decay
into ruin? Man-made catastrophes spawned by harebrained austerity schemes? A
country of crumbling roads, unsafe bridges, failing schools, a woefully
neglected mental health system whose ample slack has been taken up by a
disastrous criminal justice system? Take your pick when it comes to rotten
institutions and rotting infrastructure, since the list goes on and on.
Presidential candidates are vowing to make America great again or talking
about reigniting its promise, but perhaps a counterfeit, sepia-tinged
trip to the beginning of the road that got us here isnt really the solution
to twenty-first-century Americas problems. TomDispatch regular Ann Jones
has a different idea. In her latest piece, a joint TomDispatch/Nation
article which will appear in print in the new issue of that magazine, Jones
takes a welcome detour to a place where welfare isnt a dirty word, the
social safety net isnt the preferred place for budget cuts, and
axe-wielding children are -- believe it or not -- fostered, not feared:
Scandinavia.
A world citizen who has journeyed across Africa, spent years living in the
Afghan war zone, and was most recently a Fulbright Fellow in Norway, Jones
examines how a couple of Nixon-era decisions led the U.S. down the road to
ruin, while Scandinavian nations charted a different course, embracing
principles of uplift, equality, and humanity. Yes, some American-esque
values seem to be seeping into the Scandinavian scene of late, from the rise
of anti-immigration sentiment in Sweden to a Danish town attempting to stick
it to Muslims by way of pork meatballs in school lunches. But even far-right
parties in these Nordic nations champion a robust welfare state and a
generous social safety net. So let Jones, an intrepid journalist whose
latest book, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars
-- The Untold Story, is already a classic of Iraq and Afghan War reporting,
help explain why Norway, Denmark, and Sweden invariably top global indexes
when it comes to affordable housing, education, health, life expectancy, and
overall citizen satisfaction, while the United States has ended up with
failing cities, crumbling schools, and poisoned water. Nick Turse
American Democracy Down for the Count
Or What Is It the Scandinavians Have That We Dont?
By Ann Jones
[This is a joint TomDispatch/Nation article and appears in print in slightly
shortened form in the new issue of the Nationhttp://www.thenation.com/
magazine.]
Some years ago, I faced up to the futility of reporting true things about
Americas disastrous wars and so I left Afghanistan for another remote
mountainous country far away. It was the polar opposite of Afghanistan: a
peaceful, prosperous land where nearly everybody seemed to enjoy a good
life, on the job and in the family.
Its true that they didnt work much, not by American standards anyway. In
the U.S., full-time salaried workers supposedly laboring 40 hours a week
actually average 49, with almost 20% clocking more than 60. These people, on
the other hand, worked only about 37 hours a week, when they werent away on
long paid vacations. At the end of the work day, about four in the afternoon
(perhaps three in the summer), they had time to enjoy a hike in the forest
or a swim with the kids or a beer with friends -- which helps explain why,
unlike so many Americans, they are pleased with their jobs.
Often I was invited to go along. I found it refreshing to hike and ski in a
country with no land mines, and to hang out in cafés unlikely to be bombed.
Gradually, I lost my warzone jitters and settled into the slow, calm,
pleasantly uneventful stream of life there.
Four years on, thinking I should settle down, I returned to the United
States. It felt quite a lot like stepping back into that other violent,
impoverished world, where anxiety runs high and people are quarrelsome. I
had, in fact, come back to the flip side of Afghanistan and Iraq: to what
Americas wars have done to America. Where I live now, in the Homeland,
there are not enough shelters for the homeless. Most people are either
overworked or hurting for jobs; housing is overpriced; hospitals, crowded
and understaffed; schools, largely segregated and not so good. Opioid or
heroin overdose is a popular form of death; and men in the street threaten
women wearing hijab. Did the American soldiers I covered in Afghanistan know
they were fighting for this?
Ducking the Subject
One night I tuned in to the Democrats presidential debate to see if they
had any plans to restore the America I used to know. To my amazement, I
heard the name of my peaceful mountain hideaway: Norway. Bernie Sanders was
denouncing Americas crooked version of casino capitalism that floats the
already rich ever higher and flushes the working class. He said that we
ought to look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn
from what they have accomplished for their working people.
He believes, he added, in a society where all people do well. Not just a
handful of billionaires. That certainly sounds like Norway. For ages
theyve worked at producing things for the use of everyone -- not the profit
of a few -- so I was all ears, waiting for Sanders to spell it out for
Americans.
But Hillary Clinton quickly countered, We are not Denmark. Smiling, she
said, I love Denmark, and then delivered a patriotic punch line: We are
the United States of America. Well, theres no denying that. She praised
capitalism and all the small businesses that were started because we have
the opportunity and the freedom in our country for people to do that and to
make a good living for themselves and their families. She didnt seem to
know that Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians do that, too, and with much higher
rates of success.
The truth is that almost a quarter of American startups are not founded on
brilliant new ideas, but on the desperation of men or women who cant get a
decent job. The majority of all American enterprises are solo ventures
having zero payrolls, employing no one but the entrepreneur, and often
quickly wasting away. Sanders said that he was all for small business, too,
but that meant nothing if all of the new income and wealth is going to the
top 1 percent. (As George Carlin said, The reason they call it the
American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463710/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463710/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20In that
debate, no more was heard of Denmark, Sweden, or Norway. The audience was
left in the dark. Later, in a speech at Georgetown University, Sanders tried
to clarify his identity as a Democratic socialist. He said hes not the kind
of Socialist (with a capital S) who favors state ownership of anything like
the means of production. The Norwegian government, on the other hand, owns
the means of producing lots of public assets and is the major stockholder in
many a vital private enterprise.
I was dumbfounded. Norway, Denmark, and Sweden practice variations of a
system that works much better than ours, yet even the Democratic
presidential candidates, who say they love or want to learn from those
countries, dont seem to know how they actually work.
Why Were Not Denmark
Proof that they do work is delivered every year in data-rich evaluations by
the U.N. and other international bodies. The Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development's annual report on international well-being, for
example, measures 11 factors, ranging from material conditions like
affordable housing and employment to quality of life matters like education,
health, life expectancy, voter participation, and overall citizen
satisfaction. Year after year, all the Nordic countries cluster at the top,
while the United States lags far behind. In addition, Norway ranked first on
the U.N. Development Programs Human Development Index for 12 of the last 15
years, and it consistently tops international comparisons of such matters as
democracy, civil and political rights, and freedom of expression and the
press.
What is it, though, that makes the Scandinavians so different? Since the
Democrats cant tell you and the Republicans wouldnt want you to know, let
me offer you a quick introduction. What Scandinavians call the Nordic Model
is a smart and simple system that starts with a deep commitment to equality
and democracy. Thats two concepts combined in a single goal because, as far
as they are concerned, you cant have one without the other.
Right there they part company with capitalist America, now the most unequal
of all the developed nations, and consequently a democracy no more.
Political scientists say it has become an oligarchy -- a country run at the
expense of its citizenry by and for the super rich. Perhaps you noticed
that.
In the last century, Scandinavians, aiming for their egalitarian goal,
refused to settle solely for any of the ideologies competing for power --
not capitalism or fascism, not Marxist socialism or communism.
Geographically stuck between powerful nations waging hot and cold wars for
such doctrines, Scandinavians set out to find a path in between. That path
was contested -- by socialist-inspired workers on the one hand and
capitalist owners and their elite cronies on the other -- but it led in the
end to a mixed economy. Thanks largely to the solidarity and savvy of
organized labor and the political parties it backed, the long struggle
produced a system that makes capitalism more or less cooperative, and then
redistributes equitably the wealth it helps to produce. Struggles like this
took place around the world in the twentieth century, but the Scandinavians
alone managed to combine the best ideas of both camps, while chucking out
the worst.
In 1936, the popular U.S. journalist Marquis Childs first described the
result to Americans in the book Sweden: The Middle Way. Since then, all the
Scandinavian countries and their Nordic neighbors Finland and Iceland have
been improving upon that hybrid system. Today in Norway, negotiations
between the Confederation of Trade Unions and the Confederation of Norwegian
Enterprise determine the wages and working conditions of most capitalist
enterprises, public and private, that create wealth, while high but fair
progressive income taxes fund the states universal welfare system,
benefitting everyone. In addition, those confederations work together to
minimize the disparity between high-wage and lower-wage jobs. As a result,
Norway ranks with Sweden, Denmark, and Finland among the most income-equal
countries in the world, and its standard of living tops the charts.
So heres the big difference: in Norway, capitalism serves the people. The
government, elected by the people, sees to that. All eight of the parties
that won parliamentary seats in the last national election, including the
conservative Høyre party now leading the government, are committed to
maintaining the welfare state. In the U.S., however, neoliberal politics put
the foxes in charge of the henhouse, and capitalists have used the wealth
generated by their enterprises (as well as financial and political
manipulations) to capture the state and pluck the chickens. Theyve done a
masterful job of chewing up organized labor. Today, only 11% of American
workers belong to a union. In Norway, that number is 52%; in Denmark, 67%;
in Sweden, 70%.
In the U.S., oligarchs maximize their wealth and keep it, using the
democratically elected government to shape policies and laws favorable to
the interests of their foxy class. They bamboozle the people by insisting,
as Hillary Clinton did at that debate, that all of us have the freedom to
create a business in the free marketplace, which implies that being hard
up is our own fault.
In the Nordic countries, on the other hand, democratically elected
governments give their populations freedom from the market by using
capitalism as a tool to benefit everyone. That liberates their people from
the tyranny of the mighty profit motive that warps so many American lives,
leaving them freer to follow their own dreams -- to become poets or
philosophers, bartenders or business owners, as they please.
Family Matters
Maybe our politicians dont want to talk about the Nordic Model because it
shows so clearly that capitalism can be put to work for the many, not just
the few.
Consider the Norwegian welfare state. Its universal. In other words, aid to
the sick or the elderly is not charity, grudgingly donated by elites to
those in need. It is the right of every individual citizen. That includes
every woman, whether or not she is somebodys wife, and every child, no
matter its parentage. Treating every person as a citizen affirms the
individuality of each and the equality of all. It frees every person from
being legally possessed by another -- a husband, for example, or a
tyrannical father.
Which brings us to the heart of Scandinavian democracy: the equality of
women and men. In the 1970s, Norwegian feminists marched into politics and
picked up the pace of democratic change. Norway needed a larger labor force,
and women were the answer. Housewives moved into paid work on an equal
footing with men, nearly doubling the tax base. That has, in fact, meant
more to Norwegian prosperity than the coincidental discovery of North
Atlantic oil reserves. The Ministry of Finance recently calculated that
those additional working mothers add to Norways net national wealth a value
equivalent to the countrys total petroleum wealth -- currently held in
the worlds largest sovereign wealth fund, worth more than $873 billion. By
1981, women were sitting in parliament, in the prime ministers chair, and
in her cabinet.
American feminists also marched for such goals in the 1970s, but the Big
Boys, busy with their own White House intrigues, initiated a war on women
that set the country back and still rages today in brutal attacks on womens
basic civil rights, health care, and reproductive freedom. In 1971, thanks
to the hard work of organized feminists, Congress passed the bipartisan
Comprehensive Child Development Bill to establish a multi-billion dollar
national day care system for the children of working parents. In 1972,
President Richard Nixon vetoed it, and that was that. In 1972, Congress also
passed a bill (first proposed in 1923) to amend the Constitution to grant
equal rights of citizenship to women. Ratified by only 35 states, three
short of the required 38, that Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA, was declared
dead in 1982, leaving American women in legal limbo.
In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunity Reconciliation Act, obliterating six decades of federal social
welfare policy as we know it, ending federal cash payments to the nations
poor, and consigning millions of female heads of household and their
children to poverty, where many still dwell 20 years later. Today, nearly
half a century after Nixon trashed national child care, even privileged
women, torn between their underpaid work and their kids, are overwhelmed.
Things happened very differently in Norway. There, feminists and
sociologists pushed hard against the biggest obstacle still standing in the
path to full democracy: the nuclear family. In the 1950s, the world-famous
American sociologist Talcott Parsons had pronounced that arrangement -- with
hubby at work and the little wife at home -- the ideal setup in which to
socialize children. But in the 1970s, the Norwegian state began to
deconstruct that undemocratic ideal by taking upon itself the traditional
unpaid household duties of women. Caring for the children, the elderly, the
sick, and the disabled became the basic responsibilities of the universal
welfare state, freeing women in the workforce to enjoy both their jobs and
their families. Thats another thing American politicians -- still,
boringly, mostly odiously boastful men -- surely dont want you to think
about: that patriarchy can be demolished and everyone be the better for it.
Paradoxically, setting women free made family life more genuine. Many in
Norway say it has made both men and women more themselves and more alike:
more understanding and happier. It also helped kids slip from the shadow of
helicopter parents. In Norway, mother and father in turn take paid parental
leave from work to see a newborn through its first year or more. At age one,
however, children start attending a neighborhood barnehage (kindergarten)
for schooling spent largely outdoors. By the time kids enter free primary
school at age six, they are remarkably self-sufficient, confident, and
good-natured. They know their way around town, and if caught in a snowstorm
in the forest, how to build a fire and find the makings of a meal. (One
kindergarten teacher explained, We teach them early to use an axe so they
understand its a tool, not a weapon.)
To Americans, the notion of a school taking away your child to make her an
axe wielder is monstrous. In fact, Norwegian kids, who are well acquainted
in early childhood with many different adults and children, know how to get
along with grown ups and look after one another. More to the point, though
its hard to measure, its likely that Scandinavian children spend more
quality time with their work-isnt-everything parents than does a typical
middle-class American child being driven by a stressed-out mother from music
lessons to karate practice. For all these reasons and more, the
international organization Save the Children cites Norway as the best
country on Earth in which to raise kids, while the U.S. finishes far down
the list in 33rd place.
Dont Take My Word For It
This little summary just scratches the surface of Scandinavia, so I urge
curious readers to Google away. But be forewarned. Youll find much
criticism of all the Nordic Model countries. The structural matters Ive
described -- of governance and family -- are not the sort of things visible
to tourists or visiting journalists, so their comments are often obtuse.
Take the American tourist/blogger who complained that he hadnt been shown
the slums of Oslo. (There are none.) Or the British journalist who wrote
that Norwegian petrol is too expensive. (Though not for Norwegians, who are,
in any case, leading the world in switching to electric cars.)
Neoliberal pundits, especially the Brits, are always beating up on the
Scandinavians in books, magazines, newspapers, and blogs, predicting the
imminent demise of their social democracies and bullying them to forsake the
best political economy on the planet. Self-styled experts still in thrall to
Margaret Thatcher tell Norwegians they must liberalize their economy and
privatize everything short of the royal palace. Mostly, the Norwegian
government does the opposite, or nothing at all, and social democracy keeps
on ticking.
Its not perfect, of course. It has always been a carefully considered work
in progress. Governance by consensus takes time and effort. You might think
of it as slow democracy. But its light years ahead of us.
Ann Jones, a TomDispatch regular, went to Norway in 2011 as a Fulbright
Fellow. She stayed on because it feels good to live in a social democracy
where politics matter, gender doesnt, and peacemaking is the nations
project. She is the author most recently of They Were Soldiers: How the
Wounded Return from Americas Wars the Untold Story, a Dispatch Books
original.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Tomorrows Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
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Single-Superpower World.
Copyright Ann Jones 2016
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176096
