[willvarfar]

I don't get why the Right is so keen to vilify Sweden.

I've lived abroad and travelled and feel I have a fair handle on all the countries I've visited and I'm living abroad now.. In Sweden! Nordic countries are by far the best functioning countries I've ever visited and should serve as positive examples.

[Pxtl]

Because Scandinavia has countries that are aggressively left-wing and really successful at it. These are the places that prove that liberal ideals work. And they've accepted a tremendous number of refugees.

So ideologue right wingers are desperate to see them fail, as proof that Muslims are intrinsically hateful and that Scandinavians are chumps for falling for leftist ideals.

[pavlov]

That seems to be basically it.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Soviet-affiliated communist parties were triumphant in large parts of Europe. In countries like Hungary and Czhechoslovakia, they came to power through elections and rapidly seized absolute government control. Many communists in Western European countries were expecting France, West Germany and others to soon follow suit. After all, the "scientific" theory of Marxism-Leninism explained this would happen, and enough cherry-picked facts were available to support the inevitability of the capitalist governments' collapse.

Today's right-wingers look a lot like those 1948 communists. Plenty of things are going their way, but that is not good enough in itself -- the Bannon-style ideological framework makes fatalist predictions that must be validated, by adapting facts if necessary.

[_delirium]

That's the perception in the U.S., but I don't think I would really describe today's Sweden as "aggressively left-wing". Maybe... staidly center-left, or something along those lines. The Sweden of 2017 is not the Sweden of Olof Palme; it's no longer entirely dominated by the Social Democrats, and the Social Democrats themselves have moved much more to the center. It is fairly socially liberal, though, and still has a reasonable social safety net, so it can look left-wing if your baseline politics are debates over whether abortion should be banned and whether hospitals should be publicly funded.

(And the rest of Scandinavia even less so. I mean Denmark's government is a conservative minority government that depends for its working majority on the support of an anti-immigrant nativist party, so it's hardly some kind of leftists running things there.)

[rayiner]

It's been a long time since U.S. media has really attacked the Scandinavian countries because of their leftism or their welfare state. If anything, the attacks on Sweden implicitly assume the success of their model: the basic narrative is that Sweden has a good thing going but is throwing it away by accepting tons of refugees.

[spiderfarmer]

The politics in Sweden are exactly the opposite of what Trump has in mind. The Right wants to pretend that Sweden is a mess so they can justify their own policies. They know that their electorate swallows whatever they tell them, because, well, they swallowed whatever they said during their campaign. So why change now?

[jahaja]

Malicious propaganda will plant seeds of negative associations no matter how blatantly false and/or out-of-proportion the original statement is. This will probably make it harder to use Sweden and the Scandinavian countries as a good example with regards to basically everything - not just immigration.

An example of this is the immigration related clarification article from the Swedish government that even made it to HN. That shouldn't even be needed for such disproportionate bs. But it just works.

[LyndsySimon]

I don't think Sweden is on the radar screen of most Americans, regardless of political perspective. The only popular reference to it that I can recall is when Trump mad a snide remark about unrest in Sweden, the left-wing press mocking him for doing so, then the right-wing press doing the happy dance when there were some riots there that supported (or could be spun to support) their narrative.

I'm fairly politically engaged, and my largely uninformed opinion of Sweden - and all of Scandinavia, honestly - is that it's a largely homogenous society with a relatively long history of stable governance. There don't seem to be a lot of analogues to American society there, so I haven't cared to learn more about it.

[booleanbetrayal]

Because Trump amplified a poorly executed anti-refugee propaganda piece on Fox News and now they have to double down. You know ... to look credible.

[JustSomeNobody]

Before the election, some of the people I talked to said that if Trump won, they'd exit the country. When asked where they'd go, it was always Canada or Sweden.

Maybe this has something to do with it?

[briffle]

Did any of them actually leave?

[drumdance]

I'm moving to Colombia for part of the year. Maybe full time in the next couple years.

[JustSomeNobody]

Why would that matter?

[Sunset]

No. It was just virtue signaling and a massive display of privilege, to be able to up and move over to another country on a whim.

[jjawssd]

The Right is so keen to vilify Sweden because they care about and want to prevent the disintegration of the nation, whatever that means. If they didn't care, they wouldn't complain.