Some comments from Sweden here.
I’m not very knowledgeable about politics, nor have I been around in other European countries or the US in order to see the differences. So what follows is just some vague impressions from an ordinary young citizen.
I think I strayed a lot from the central question in what I wrote below, too.
[QUOTE=Alien]
If you ask this question to the growing 5%-20% European far-right you’ll get a resounding YES! They have nothing but disdain for politicians, the media, the EU or “people not like us”. We have a couple of them here on SDMB.
[/QUOTE]
That seems to be my impression as well. The growing anti-immigration parties are playing the populist card, but I think that’s based on a quite wide-spread already existing feeling of “contempt for politicians” among the general population – politicians are seen as generally corrupt and sometimes elitist especially by many less well-to-do people. But this kind of contempt of politics doesn’t have anything to do with another kind of suspicion towards politics which I imagine to be more common in the US – i.e. the kind of libertarian attitude that politicians and politics should mess as little as possible with the individual’s life. (Although the center/right wing parties have of course sometimes tried to connect the phenomenons in that way)
But I rather think the contempt of politicians that exists in Sweden today is perhaps partly rooted in a traditional class-conflict-based way of thinking, only now seeing politicians --even those of the left/social-democratic parties-- as part of a new elite/upper class. As I’ve heard, a large part of the voter base of the growing anti-immigration party Sverigedemokraterna (whose political outlook is quite right-wing/conservative on both moral and economical issues) are actually former traditional Social Democratic voters who feel the Social Democratic politicians have betrayed them, having a world view far distanced from their own supposed reality today, consisting of widespread unemployment and growing criminality, moral decay and general conflict/unsafety supposedly much due to the costs and effects of large scale immigration.
And it is often the case that op-pieces in the “serious”, non-tabloid, media, rather than simply joining this general “contempt-of-politicians”, express worries about tendencies of un-nuanced contempt for politicians and politics as a whole, feeling that this may be a threat to the vitality of democracy in the long run. This is connected to the fact that Sweden has historically had a quite large percentage of the population who were members and somewhat active in political parties and organizations, as well as a high voting rate. But these numbers have sunk a lot, especially for party membership, and while the voting rate in general elections (~80%) is still high, at least when compared to, for example, the US, I believe in many other ways the Swedish citizenry could be said to be rather inactive in politics (Among the citizens in the USA who do vote, there are a comparatively high number who are very active and interested in politics).
But that doesn’t mean that the press is behaving in any way uncritically towards politicians, at least not to a higher degree than in the USA – we have these small and big corruption scandals going on all the time, some sillier than other, of course, and often with a political motive behind the blowing-up/diminishing of their proportions, as everywhere in the world. “Moral” as opposed to “political” scandals are a lot more common than ten or twenty years ago, but perhaps with a different slant than in the US – the most common are where politicians misuse their political position for economical gain (like using a board member position in a charity foundation to give their children an appartment in sought-after inner-city regions) or ignore controversial laws which they made themselves (like using a black-market babysitter instead of paying Sweden’s high labour taxes, or the Minister of Culture systematically not paying the mandatory public television license for 20 years) – then it doesn’t matter if it’s about a really small sum of money. Sexual scandals are possible, but then they often contain financial aspects as well and it should be possible to give the whole thing a “feministic” rather than purely “moral” bent – like politicians visiting strip clubs, paying with representation money. The Monica Lewinsky scandal wouldn’t really work in that way here – even if we far from expect of politicians to have extra-marital lovers (they say about the French that it’s almost an institution there…).
Yes, and that’s a difference between Sweden and for example France. In Sweden politicians traditionally haven’t always been very well-educated, and it has rather been required of politicians that they demonstrate themselves to be ordinary people who have worked and lived as ordinary folks, rather than being “political broilers” or upper-class snobs.
Also, as I understand it, in France it would be expected of politicians to openly show if they’re educated and have an interest and understanding of, say, literature, or, for example, opera, and try to hide it if that were not the case. Whereas it’s almost the opposite here in Sweden.
