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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44935 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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There is no side that doesn't want to restrict immigration, there is no side that wants to dismantle the nuclear reactors, there is no side that doesn't want to join NATO, there is no side that doesn't want to strengthen the police. Etc.

All of this would seem like evidence of a general shift to a right-wing/conservative direction, no?

Depends on what one means by those labels.

Both blocs have shrunk to fuel SD's growth, but is SD right or left wing? They are anti-immigration for sure and plenty of their representatives are xenophobic but their economic and social security policy mostly aligns with the social democrats.

The biggest loser in Sweden the last 8 years is liberalism, which is kind of dead after it won fairly big back in 06 and ushered in massive changes in Sweden.

It seems the right bloc won the narrowest of victories, although we won't know for certain until Wednesday because it's so even. Perhaps a similar change will occur now. The social democrats seems to have been on board with rolling back many changes but couldn't do so due to their electoral coalition but I suspect they might quietly keep a lot of the changes the right bring about now if they win in 4 years.

It seems the winds of mild reaction has finally reaction has finally reached Sweden and it's a bit hard to tell where we'll be in 4 years. Or perhaps the left will pull out a truly astonishing comeback with the late postal votes and Swedes voting from abroad. We will see.

I've seen some Finnish politics nerds post their results from Aftonbladet's political compass thingy, and their presentation for party results from the compass seems to show SD on the right side of the of economic line.

I had not done that compass since I don't read the evening press but the results there seem a bit different from the other compasses I've tried and looking into it very briefly it seems like their methodology is different.

While the other compass makers have had the parties do the compasses themselves, Aftonbladet seems to source their answers from interviews etc. (Some of them pretty old) They also don't have any questions about social security which is peculiar.

I maintain that the primary identification of SD is populist. They promise both large increases in welfare and public sector and lower taxes. They want to finance this with cuts to immigration and foreign aid.

I don't think anyone really knows where exactly they stand, except that they are strongly against immigration. If the result stands we'll see where they are willing to compromise though.

Economic leftists oppose excessive immigration. It moves the supply and demand curve of labor in favor of employers, and is also shown to reduce the workforce's propensity to unionize or otherwise collectively bargain.

Everyone opposes "excessive" immigration, they just have different ideas of what numbers (if any) constitute "excessive" in a given time and place.

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