Sweden’s Social Democrats Find Bernie Sanders Too Far Left

Sweden’s Social Democrats Find Bernie Sanders Too Far Left

The Social Democrats are the ruling party in Sweden, but they see right through the so-called “democratic socialists” here in America.

Looking at you, Sen. Bernie Sanders.

From The Week:

Johan Hassel, the international secretary for Sweden’s ruling Social Democrats, visited Iowa before the caucuses, and he wasn’t impressed with America’s standard bearer for democratic socialism, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). “We were at a Sanders event, and it was like being at a Left Party meeting,” he told Sweden’s Svenska Dagbladet newspaper, according to one translation. “It was a mixture of very young people and old Marxists, who think they were right all along. There were no ordinary people there, simply.”

Hassel was most “impressed” with Pete Buttigieg, though he also liked Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Eric Kleefeld, assiduous student of foreign politics, provides some context on Sweden’s Social Democrats:

The Swedish Social Democrats have governed that country almost non-stop for the past 100 years. They’ve only had very rare turns out of office, and quickly got back in.

Simply put, they are the “Nordic Model” we hear about — which also makes them their own “establishment”!

— Eric Kleefeld (@EricKleefeld) February 18, 2020

Some more context: The “Left Party” he talks about in there is the old Communist Party back home in Sweden. (They changed their name around 1990 or so — wonder why.)

The Left/Communists have worked with the Social Democrats in minority parliaments, but never included in cabinet.

— Eric Kleefeld (@EricKleefeld) February 18, 2020

Sanders praises the “Nordic model,” but it turns out that his idea of “democratic socialism” differs from Sweden. This has caused the Swedes numerous headaches:

Well, democratic socialism is different than Sweden’s social democracy — the “Nordic model” Sanders touts — “and, unfortunately, Sanders has contributed to this confusion,” writes MIT political economist Daron Acemoglu. Democratic socialism seeks to fix the iniquities of the market economy by handing control of the means of production to a company’s workers or “an administrative structure operated by the state,” he explains. “European social democracy is a system for regulating the market economy, not for supplanting it.”

Lars Løkke Rasmussen, then the prime minister of Denmark, made a similar point in a speech at Harvard in 2015, when Sanders was gaining national attention. “I know that some people in the U.S. associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism,” he said. “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy,” albeit with “an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security to its citizens.”

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