[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.