Which are derived from common culture and experience. That’s why the homogeneity and size arguments are being pushed so hard.
And FWIW, I think the arguments about Sweden being more diverse now are a sort of red herring. What really counts is how homogeneous they were back in the 40s, 50s and 60s when most of the social welfare legislation was being voted on and implemented. That’s when the big battles were being fought, and while I don’t know for sure, my suspicion is that Sweden was FAR more homogeneous back then than today.
I would bet you a substantial amount of money that people identify as Swedes first before they identify as “Irish Swedes”, or “Black Swedes”
We simply do not have that here. People are selfish and they have been separated for so long (with a big help of our government) that we, as a country, fail to identify first as Americans. Instead we identify as Irish or Black. Why?
It’s gotten us attention or other stuff in the past.
AA and a whole host of other things continue to separate Americans.
Add to this that we have 50 (fairly) independent states, each taxing and raising revenue, passing laws on everything from how you vote to whether you can carry a handgun, and generally looking after its own welfare without too much consideration of what’s going on 3000 miles away. I mean, who in Virginia really gives a flip about Federal funding of high-speed trains in California?
I admire quite a bit about how smaller, more homogeneous, countries can get things done, but I’m not surprised that it doesn’t scale up very well.
I actually agree with this in the US. I think that identity politics from both sides really precludes us from having a true economic left. Instead we have two right-wing parties that just cater to different identity groups. Republicans obviously have no desire at all to talk about inequality and Democrats talk the inequality talk, but generally spend more time worrying about social issues. We don’t really have a Social Democrat party or even a party of FDR anymore. Basically, our politics are consumed by sex, religion and race and real economic policy is being left to lobbyists who have their own agendas.
It is endlessly frustrating to me that we’re watching equality spin out of control, we have a massive and rising debt and the world is literally on fire due to climate change and our big fights are whether a dude can go in the girl’s bathroom? Come on, no wonder we’re screwed.
Today’s NY Times has a story about an Asian woman organizing Caribbean nannies and homeworkers in New York. Diversity and identity are what people retreat to when they don’t see ways to advance their interests and are shut out of the usual political avenues. You can always find diversity and conflict if you want to look for it. You can also overcome it on the basis of common interests, and these are based on power, political and economic, on who has it and who doesn’t. Swedish organizers had all sorts of obstacles that divided Swedes, including language, lack of roads, big differences between urban and rural people, that they set out to overcome, and did, more or less. And there are plenty of examples in the US of this.
Very few government workers are fired. 0.4% of government workers are fired each year, which is less than one third the percentage in the private sector. I doubt government workers are three times as competent as other workers. I had a boss who had worked for the government for almost 40 years tell me that the government would be twice as effective if they fired the right 25% of the workforce. I have worked closely with many government workers and most of them are dedicated and hard working but the percentage of people who are lazy or incompetent is just higher in the government than elsewhere. When my SO first started teaching there was an older teacher who was universally considered the worst teacher in the school. He was lazy, unmotivated, and the kids disliked him. Because of his degree and his seniority he was also the highest paid teacher in the school.
Competence is also relative. Sweden has more competent government than the US does, the US has more competent government than Thailand, and Thailand has more competent government than India, etc.
Because there’s not an “American” ethnic/cultural identity in the same way that your average European country has. We have one that’s starting, but it’s much less developed than say… England, where there’s been an England and an English identity for 1000 years.
And beyond that, we have 50 states which have their own sub-national identity which is in most cases more pertinent than the national one- it’s often more descriptive and accurate to say someone’s a Texan or an Iowan than it is to say “American”. That does describe in very vague terms, a lot of that shared history and culture that the national identities in the rest of the world do.
I mean, what does it mean to be an “American”? It’s a lot more nebulous I think, than what it means to be English, or Mexican, or Samoan, for example. There isn’t really that shared experience or history except in the very broadest terms, and a lot of cultural stuff is still derived from your ancestors’ homeland. People whose ancestors were from Mexico still make tamales at Christmas, people in Fredericksburg, TX still light Easter fires like their ancestors did in Germany, plenty of black cultural traditions derive from African ones, etc… No common thread there.
So it’s fertile ground for identity politics- there’s no one identity to rally around.
Sweden has historically been dominated by the Social Democrats which got over 40% of the vote every year for 60 years from 1932 to 1991. In the last election they got 28.3%, their worst showing since 1908. The Swedish Democrats which was founded in 1988 and is a nationalist party never got more than .5% of the vote until 1998, is now the third largest party in Sweden and received 17.5% of the vote in the last election.
As Sweden has gotten more diverse, its politics has become less consensus oriented and it is moving rightward, toward American politics.
Once again, we’re hearing these silly arguments of pointing out superficial differences between two countries, and saying “Connect the dots, sheeple!!!” without one single word about why these superficial differences make any difference.
Are Irish-Americans opposed to child care? Are Jewish-Americans in favor of child care? Are baseball-playing-Americans for or against childcare?
Many private sector employees are fired because capital always has an incentive to do more with fewer workers or with workers who are paid less. Unemployment and overwork for those who remain are mere externalities for the boss. Many people see that as a bug, not a feature. Also, without union protection you can be fired literally on a whim. Again, many see that as a bug, not a feature.
Let me try a different tack here. I assume your issue isn’t with the statement that Sweden is ethnically and culturally homogeneous, which it is even now, and certainly was until fairly recently…I believe the largest ethnic minority were Finns. Not exactly a huge difference there, though I’m sure the Swedes and Finns would both say I’m wrong.
Anyway, I assume your hangup is the relevance of ethnic homogeneity and the correlation between homogeneous populations and similar attitudes in voting as opposed to large heterogeneous populations that are also geologically diverse not voting in the same sort of lock step. And, at a guess, a lot of this resistance is coming from the recent changes in voting in Sweden, as well as you just don’t believe that there is a correlation between shared history, culture, ethnic heritage, outlook, view point and voting for things like social programs.
Without going to the effort to do a bunch of Google searching on opinion polls in Sweden or voting trends over time (which, I admit, I did do but can’t seem to parse it to get away from the recent election stuff, and frankly I don’t care enough about this topic to expend major or even minor effort), I’ll give a few things I think point to a correlation between small, homogeneous nations having more in common due to all that stuff I’ve already said. First up, as is often noted, even the ‘conservative’ parties in Sweden are on board with things like large social programs. This shows, IMHO, that there is a majority common view point of the role of the government in Sweden, of what that government should and shouldn’t do, and this is reflected in the fact that pretty much all their political parties have similar stances. Oh, they differ, no doubt, but they don’t differ from ‘we should have all this’ to ‘we should have none of it’, more like shades of gray…the bar is already there, and they are really debating how much more they should do or how much less. I believe that the reason for their similar attitudes and the fact that even their opposing political parties agree on that bar is because of their shared history and ethnic homogeneity. Does this mean that every homogeneous population is in lock step? No…doesn’t even mean the Swedes are. But they are a hell of a lot closer to lock step than the US is. I think on this same continuum you have Japan as a great example of national identity coupled with shared ethnic background, shared history, shared outlook and view point.
Swedes have similar attitudes towards a host of things, but in their politics I think we see the correlation. Of course, ironically, that’s changing…and, of course, ironically, the other thing that’s changing is that they ARE becoming more ethnically and culturally diverse in the last decade or so, and that a lot of their immigrants don’t have the same shared ethnic background, history, or viewpoint that the rest of their population has built up over centuries if not longer.
I already answered the child-care question above, but to recap, you are asking the wrong question there. No, Irish-Americans or Jewish-Americans aren’t opposed to child care. If you asked them to vote for it locally, I’m sure many groups would be happy to do so. But if you are asking Irish-Americans in Boston what they think about child-care in Oregon they are probably not going to be all that enthused about it because they have only the most tenuous direct connection with people living in Oregon…and vice versa. The two groups don’t have a shared ethnic background, even if both are Irish-Americans…and their shared history is more nebulous and big picture, since it’s about the US as a whole. The connections are more nebulous, and the things that inform their opinion on things are more local and immediate, with less being informed from the top down so to speak. We don’t HAVE a tight nit culture or history going back hundreds or thousands of years. We don’t have a shared ethnic background. At least, not to the extent that a nation like Sweden does…what we have a patchwork melting pot of cultures and a big picture history and our own mythology that does bring us together, but in a much looser way. How could it be different? We are a young country built out of immigrants from all of the old countries and living on a continent sized nation with hundreds of millions of people in it. No other country is like us. Canada has some of those things, as does Australia, but their populations are still relatively small compared to the geographic size. I’d say Russia is probably the closest wrt size, geographic size and racial and ethnic diversity.
Anyway, I think that this is why the opinions of our population, as shown by our political parties, are so different and run to such extremes. That’s my opinion and I’ll leave it there. What’s your’s? Why, exactly do YOU think Sweden knows what they are doing and we don’t, to paraphrase the OP? I haven’t actually seen you answer the OP, and several others haven’t either, more attacking this line of argument.
If you can’t see or don’t care to see that US is better than THEM, no matter who the US and THEM are, then I don’t know that I can help you.
People, all on different scales, are selfish.
Until we all become an US, there will continue to be division and our politics will continue to divide and try and cater to “so and so” group, instead of benefitting us all or even most of us.
I feel like I keep repeating myself: if someone were to ask why we have the agricultural policy we do, and someone responded with something about the urban/rural divide in the US, I’d take no issue with that answer. It’s pretty easily shown how urban and rural voters favor different things with respect to subsidies, food stamps, etc.
But putting ethnicity as a top reason why the US doesn’t have a different social welfare system makes literally no sense. And literally everyone I ask about this keeps stating the obvious: that the U.S. is more ethnically diverse than Sweden. I keep saying, so the fuck what? What does diversity have to do with social programs? If we had fewer (blank)-Americans, we would have universal health care? That doesn’t sound right at all. It sounds like total nonsense. I see nothing that ties a people’s view on, say, individualism or the proper role of government to their color, religion, genes, or whatever.
If you want to argue that maybe our experience with the labor movement is different than Sweden’s, and that impacts our social welfare system – I’d understand that. What I fail to see what that has to do with diversity.
I disagree. Americans are more likely to hold general principled views about social issues that transcend geography. For example, few Americans would say that they support universal health care for their state, but not for people living 500 miles away. Few Americans would say that they favor easy access to birth control for people a few states over, but not for themselves. This part I quoted is patently silly.
See post number 9. I also think posts 43 and 39 are on the mark.
Are you trying to say that both the U.S. and Sweden are generally equally racist, but since Swedes are predominantly white, they are more willing to adopt policies that benefit the 90% of white Swedes; whereas in the United States, the racial divide makes it harder to enact policies that benefit the 75% of white Americans?
You are asking what do policies matter when they only benefit someone else? And to that I feel like, have answered.
What helps the rural farmers, when I live in a metropolis?
What helps the urban dense folks, when I live in the country?
What helps the people of California when I live in Kentucky?
What helps the poor, when I am rich?
What helps the impregnated, when I don’t want kids?
For these reasons and MANY more, is the WHY that a small homogenous society can do the things that a diverse, large one cannot.
Basically what benefits a smaller society is a great benefit to THAT society. Not so much to the society across the country.
Bolding mine. Sadly, this is definitely the answer to the OP’s question. Looked at in the extreme there are nomads and co-operators. We have shifted way too much into nomad territory. Sometimes I dream of a day where we put all the nomads into 1 or 2 states and build a wall around them.
It’s less an “I’ve got mine” and more like “I’ve worked my ass off to get where I am, they can too”
But you have the government which is as divisive as they come. Politics has become about how we can divide the country instead of how we can gather enough support to push policies to make us a greater country and benefit society as a whole.
Dividing folks is how politicians become powerful.
Jesus, what do I have to do to start forcing words into people’s eyeballs?
I have very specifically commented that I strongly object to the idea – I specifically cited the posts on the previous page – that ETHNIC IDENTITY is a major factor in our social policies.
Then you go off and ask a bunch of rhetorical questions that have nothing to do with ethnic identity. :smack:
What favors black folks when I am white?
What favors mexicans , when I am black?
Who has more out of wedlock children, THEY do.
Who has more single parent homes, THEY do.
It doesn’t have to come down to ‘racism’, it simply comes down to US vs THEM.
Selfishness.
In the USA we are less an US and more a collection of THEM’s.
It’s not ethnic identity that’s the driver by itself. It’s more that ethnic and cultural identity inculcates people with certain shared values and outlooks. Stuff like the fussy, meticulous German, or the libidinous Italian, or arrogant Frenchman, to use a few stereotypes as an example.
So the more homogenous a country is, something’s either a VERY hard sell, or it’s relatively easy. Here in the US, nearly everything is a tough sell because you’re not selling it to a group of people with similar views, values and culture, you’re selling it to fifty states’ populations, and however many cultural subdivisions under that. It’s part of why the Federal system works so well for us, and part of the reason that the Federal level struggles to get meaningful stuff done, except in the case of SCOTUS legislation or the rare occasions when one party dominates, or there’s some clear reason to work toward a common goal (wars, cold wars, etc…)
For some relatively small number of people, I’m sure it’s a racist thing, but for others, it’s more of an identification of the fact that the government has limited resources and that every decision to do one thing means that another doesn’t get done, or doesn’t get done as well or completely as someone would like. When they don’t have that shared cultural bond and values, everyone makes that choice in their own way - I may value things like education, while someone else may value public safety. And a third person may value helping the homeless. These things are going to depend a lot on their personal cultural baggage- my views will likely be in line with a lot of people like me, and may (or may not) be different than those of a Mexican-american friend of mine on some issues. His will probably line up more with his Mexican-American people than with mine on issues like immigration, for example.
That’s the root of what I think we’re trying to say- when a nation and a country coincide, you get situations where everyone is closer to thinking along the same lines than when you have the crazy quilt that you have in the US.