The Folkhem apartment—a typical a home environment from the late 1940s recreated inside the Nordic Museum, Stockholm: the kitchen.
Pymouss, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
From time to time, I get questions from readers about the fact that I refer to Sweden as a country that practices socialism. I appreciate those questions: they point to a need for a comprehensive explanation of how Sweden got its welfare state and what kind of benefits it provides.
There are two reasons why this explanation is needed. First and foremost, we as conservatives have the ambition to turn our values into policy practice, and, in my experience, the one policy area where conservatives can benefit from more insights and debate is the welfare state.
The second reason is that there are a lot of misunderstandings about the Swedish welfare state floating around in the public discourse. Some of the questions I get are based on these misunderstandings; correcting those will help us all better understand the true nature of the public policy landscape that we conservatives have to become better at navigating.
Let us not forget that as conservatives, we want a society that is built on cornerstones like individual freedom, limited government, and responsible citizenship—values that Western countries, to varying degrees, are far from protecting. To get there from where we in the Western world are today, we need to make enormous efforts to fundamentally reform our nations.
Errors of the past have turned Europe, and in large part America, into societies that are more or less unrecognizable by conservative standards. Those errors run painfully deep in our societies, so deep that we may think of the path to conservatism as transforming the very concept of citizenship. There is a cynically deliberate reason for this: in their persistent efforts to rebuild the West in the image of their ideology, the socialists of Europe—and to a lesser degree America—have replaced the responsible citizen with his entitled offspring.
Where revolutionary socialists use violent revolution to impose their ideology—communism—on their fellow citizens, democratic socialists work within the parliamentary system. Their tool for reform is known as the welfare state. It is a system of social and economic institutions that serve one overarching purpose: to reduce and eventually eliminate economic differences among its citizens (see my book Democracy or Socialism, Palgrave McMillan 2021).
The common goal of revolutionary and reformist socialism is complete economic egalitarianism. Only when all economic differences have been eliminated have they achieved their ideological end point. Depending on the influence of democratic socialists, Western countries have, to a varying degree, implemented socialist policies; the question of whether a country is socialist is irrelevant. What matters is to what extent the welfare state brings the country any closer to the socialist end goal.
Sweden is one of the countries that, in recent years, has been the focus of the socialism-or-not debate. One of the proponents of Swedish socialist policies is U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders; during the 2016 presidential campaign, he gladly referred to Sweden as a socialist role model for America.
The good senator from Vermont has received support in his assessment of Sweden from U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Since Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez pinned Sweden on the public billboard as a socialist role model, a plethora of pundits have tried to get Sweden off that same billboard. The problem with this debate is that it paints a picture of Sweden that is far from true. The fact of the matter is that Sen. Sanders and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez are correct: Sweden does have a fully built welfare state, it is socialist in nature, and it has been up and running since the late 1950s.
To my amazement, the right-of-center critique of Sanders and ‘AOC’ is much less informed about Sweden than these two democratic socialists are. In 2020, Hannah Cox wrote for the Foundation for Economic Education:
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Sweden sold its state-owned companies, deregulated its financial markets (again), and replaced public monopolies with competition. Top tax rates were cut, welfare programs were reformed. And they went even further.
There is practically no truth in this at all. The Swedish experience with socialism in practice was not some spring break fling. As I will explain, Sweden is one of the world’s longest-lasting, most deliberate, and—sad to say—most successful experiments in democratic socialism.
In 2022, the Heritage Foundation—a reputable American conservative think tank—published an essay by Lee Edwards, a historian of American conservatism, where he, without a whiff of evidence, claims that Sweden had a 20-year period of democratic socialism from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. He also claims that
An aroused populace demanded a reversal of course. The government eliminated many regulations, cut government spending, tightened welfare availability, and shrank the size of government.
I could go as far as to call this historic forgery, especially since Edwards places these events in the 1990s. But I will limit myself to pointing out that, contrary to his narrative, the Swedes voted in 1994 to replace conservative Prime Minister Carl Bildt, who took office in 1991, with democratic socialist Ingvar Carlsson. In 1998 and 2002 they reaffirmed their support for democratic socialism by electing Carlsson’s successor, Göran Persson.
There was no wave of deregulation, and the size of government did not decline. As I explain in my book Industrial Poverty (Gower 2014), the spending cuts were matched by higher taxes, consistent with austerity measures designed to protect the welfare state from fiscal demise. As for taxes, they increased dramatically (Industrial Poverty, p. 31):
There is a common source for all these right-of-center fairy tales about Sweden. That source is Johan Norberg, senior fellow with the Cato Institute. Norberg has spent many years trying to rewrite the history of our native Sweden. For reasons I cannot fathom, he wants to diminish, and even outright lie about, the Swedish experience with socialism.
As a small-scale example, Norberg penned a commentary for Reason Magazine in 2016 where he claimed that Sweden began to steer clear of socialism “in the early 1990s”:
It deregulated, privatized, reduced taxes, and opened the public sector to private providers.
Aside from a limited, government-run and controlled school ‘choice’ system, the Swedish governments of the 1990s did nothing of the sort Norberg suggests. Again, taxes increased substantially in the 1990s.
Also in 2016, Norberg was given ample space by Investors Business Daily (IBD) to market similar fantasies about Sweden. As if to put the crown jewel on Norberg’s inaccuracies, the article refers to him as an “economist; according to his Wikipedia page, Norberg has a master’s degree in intellectual history.
The core of Norberg’s historical revisionism is that Sweden was a capitalist economy before the 1970s and after the mid-1990s. His efforts even opened up a spot for him on premier American libertarian John Stossel’s show.
Norberg went on to spread the same myths about Sweden in an August 2023 article in National Review. In October that same year, on the Faster Please podcast with the American Enterprise Institute’s John Pethokoukis, Norberg astoundingly suggested that “up until the early 1970s” the Swedish economy was dedicated to free markets, friendly to entrepreneurship, and had low taxes.
Just to drive home the inconsistency of his own argument, he proceeds to suggest that Sweden somehow has a smaller government sector than the United States. In reality, a comparison between U.S. and European data shows that the Swedish government sector is about ten percentage points of GDP larger than the American equivalent.
In a pamphlet called The Mirage of Swedish Socialism published by Canadian think tank Fraser Institute, Norberg shows his lack of understanding of national accounts data when he tries to prove that Sweden had a small government up until the 1970s. Measuring government spending as a share of GDP, he leaves out a large portion of government outlays—the very portion that is characteristic of socialist welfare states.
These are, in a nutshell, the main public misunderstandings about the Swedish welfare state. The consequence is that they convey the image that the very large welfare state that Sweden currently has is perfectly palatable to conservatives. That is as far from the truth as we can get: if anything, the democratic socialists in Sweden have been even more successful than they themselves realize. Center-right governments have learned to become good administrators of a government that takes in, redistributes, and spends approximately half the country’s GDP.
In short: Sweden is a dreamland for democratic socialists. If we want to dismantle that dreamland, or if we want to prevent other countries from the same fate, we must understand how the socialists built that welfare state in the first place.
Tomorrow: How Sweden Put Socialism to Work
