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You’re right up my wheelhouse here and there’s too many issues to pick from in Sweden’s case.
Swedish women don’t want many kids because they say it restricts their freedom. It’s taken for granted that children are born when it’s most convenient for one’s career. In the middle class that usually means between 30-35 (which is old for that kind of thing). But the political elite women’s interest are allied with politically elite men’s interest. Nobody there ever discusses the concept of national “duties,” in this way. You simply won’t see it. In Germany 30% of all women are childless. For those with university degrees it’s 40%. Similar attitudes you find in the west. Not many people remember when Macron in France said, “Show me a well educated woman who has decided to have 7, or 8 or 9 children.”
The only real way the TFR problem has been approached offers two solutions: immigration or the Hungary policy. Back in the 30’s and 40’s Gunnar and Alva Myrdal talked about the birth rate even then because it had sharply fallen off as a result of the Great Depression. That was the foundation of the “Folkhemmet,” where preferential loans, subsidized housing, free healthcare and meals, etc., came into play. When their ideas actually got implemented the birth rate went from 1.8 to 2.7 in 10 years.
In Hungary, they follow similar policies. Hungarian parents who have multiple children to become eligible to receive mortgages with no interest by having at least three. If you have four or more, you’re exempt from paying income tax for life. You can also get a grant of eight thousand euros to buy a car but only if it has more than seven seats. In total it’s resulted in something like a 25% increase in children being born. Still below 2.1, but a reversal of the current trend.
You had members of the Swedish left-wing attacking Orban and calling his policies “offensive” and comparing it to Nazi Germany (predictably). You had Annika Strandhall (who’s the Swedish minister of social security) calling it right out of the 1930’s. But anyone of Orban’s stripe should be happy to accept the criticism. He’s a supporter of democracy as is most of his cohort. He’s not a supporter of ‘liberal’ democracy. Annika apparently doesn’t understand that in Hungary and Poland, their political leaders are appointed in general elections.
If I ever meet my relatives over there I want to ask them why in the hell they seem so desperate to emulate the worst aspects of American society? They’ve currently got a massive case of Shitlib Syndrome that’s only metastasizing.
Let me know how it goes, but I doubt you'll get more than a bewildered look. European libs see themselves as entirely opposed to American culture, even as they make their way to a BLM march in a > 99% white country.
But BLM itself kind of sees itself as going against "that kind of" America. When European libs are opposed to "America" they are against the bald-headed-eagle, flag waving, monster truck and pickup truck riding gun obsessed fat rednecks who eat cheap burgers all the time and shop at walmart in a mobility scooter. BLM in Europe is seen as a revolt against that racist America. There is no contradiction.
There isn't really a good kind of American to European libs, and BLM and all forms of wokeness was originally seen as weird and alien. There was even a common "it's just a couple of crazy kids on college campuses"-esque cope, that wokeness is just an American thing, and will never be relevant in Europe.
If they did believe that there's good Americans as well as bad, than the question would make some sense. They would recognize the parts of culture he's talking about as American, and as being imported, and they could justify it, but I'm pretty sure they ,think it's homegrown by now.
Nope, the criticism was also applied to European cultures, often in ways that make absolutely no sense. For example they apply anti-collonialist critique to Ireland, or try to claim that the descendants of Eastern European peasants, who just barely got out of communism, somehow inherited "white privilege".
Are you from the US? I think Americans often have a distorted view of how Europeans view them, especially if they base this mostly on online stuff like Reddit. The recent animus towards the US is to a large extent about Trump, and there is certainly some longer term undercurrent even during Obama etc that the US is a bit cheap, overly capitalistic, materialistic, everything for sale, everything measured in money, lot of displays of religion, whatnot, but Europeans still follow and consume American cultural products overwhelmingly, often more than domestic ones. European universities are eager to copy the American academic fads (coastal, blue tribe). They might grumble about some aspects, but those are pretty much the same aspects that American blue tribers grumble about.
Yes, but this is the "we're all living in America", fish in water thing. They just see this stuff being the current thing in Hollywood, Oscars, etc. You may underestimate how much Europeans live in an American-defined media environment.
Nope, European through and through.
I agree with this, I think this is the mechanism for what I'm describing, but in my experience Europeans don't tend to admit there are American cultural trends that are worth following. It just happens, precisely because of the "fish in water" thing.
Because of this, I believe that if Tretiak asked "why are you adopting the worst parts of American culture" he'd just be met with bewildered denial that any part of American culture is being adopted.
There are probably some who don't consume it directly, but through local intermediaries who make TikToks in their local language etc. It becomes a discussion topic and the third and fourth degree viewers are not aware of the origin (for BLM it's more concrete, but other woke topics it can seem blurry if it's organic European post-WW2 equality and justice development vs import from America). But even those that are, they just see it as global universal culture, not specifically American.
It's like asking European Taylor Swift fans why they are obsessing over an American celebrity. It's just a bewildering question. It's not like they predecided to obsess over an American. They just consume media, and they liked this celebrity and it's just very organic and obvious and just happens. Like the way in movies aliens always land near LA but certainly somewhere in the US. People are just used to international trendsetting happening in the US. I guess we are in agreement, I'm just elaborating. BLM was just put in front of people at a time when everyone was on their phones during covid. They didn't wake up one day saying "let's follow some American trends, I wonder what trends are going on there and which ones are worth following and which ones aren't". It's just shown to them and they have an emotional reaction to it that this is wrong and has to change and they can feel part of a movement of a morally right cause etc. American or not didn't factor into that chain of reasoning/emotion.
The other thing is that they may even deny there is a trend. It's not a trend. It's just being a decent human being. There is no such thing as woke, etc. etc.
I disagree with this part. It's perfectly normal to bring up a question like that, and it's likely to produce ponderous murmurs about how we should invest more in our own, and not rely on Americans so much. It's not even limited to pop culture, you do this with literally anything, including industry and online platforms.
And this as well. There was nothing organic about the spread of wokeness. Not in America, not in Europe. It relied on the suppression of opposing views on one hand, and it's own imposition through government institutions on the other, as well as entryism into critical private institutions.
I'm just trying to describe what a regular normie who scrolls social media and just gossips about these things and tries to keep up, tries to not be cringe and left behind. They don't feel like they seek out American influences. They just talk about what's in front of them, what's in the media etc. And even if they read the local news portal with local editors in the local language, journalists are social media addicts and look up to the prestigious NYT, NPR etc. across the pond, and want to be cool like them, and they are also lazy and it's easy to write about what's up with the celebrities and the latest culture war controversies etc. Similarly they just listen to Taylor Swift because it's popular on Spotify, it's popular with peers, it's on the radio etc. Not because she is American. It never entered their deliberation.
You can't simply forcefully spread just anything. It has to fit into the framework of what the current generation was taught as children and young adults. Wokeness was laundered / whitewashed as just being a decent human being, and basically just 90s race blindness as the foot in the door, and once you pluck all the DEI/representation fruits from that framing, they introduce well actually it's equity and not equality, and the rest of it. They don't start with struggle sessions and Evergreen State's "get in the canoe" spiels. If you start with extreme stuff, people call bullshit and you can't really suppress dissent that way. But if it starts innocuous, and just like what you were taught as kids about not being racist, giving everyone a fair chance, not relying on snap judgments, looking beyond surface things and judging people on their character etc, then all the initial things are obvious. It's the same way that Scientology doesn't immediately start with Xenu but with practical psychological life coaching advice.
Or for homosexuality/trans it starts as live and let live, adults should be able to have the kind of sex they want without stigma, not overtly discriminating, etc and then it becomes about presenting it as an equal footing, teaching kindergarteners that two dad and two mums are just as normal as one dad and one mum, and that it's brave to change from your "assigned" gender and that gender is a spectrum with Barbie and GI Joe on the ends of it and everyone else a form of inbetween etc.
What I'm trying to say is that it's a distributed system, the useful pawns on the ground who do the first stages are not even necessarily aware of all the subversive critical theory behind all this, and they will deny they are motivated by that at all. But when you go up the chain you do see that they have seminar like this, and all those meetings with "point of personal privilege" cards and whatnot.
The more conscious ones are probably Western European university administrators who copy stuff like diversity seminars, Pride Month, anti-sexual harassment workshops, female preferential hiring and promotion (if illegal, then going as far as they can plausibly deniably, but everyone knowing it informally), renaming buildings and lecture halls with "problematic" namesakes etc. They do look at American prestigious world-class universities and adopt everything, the aesthetics, the web design, the social media strategy, etc. etc., even starting to adopt the junior professor and tenure track structure these days as opposed to the classical European professorship paths. But I don't think they would deny this, American academia is looked up to, it's not part of the "America" that intelligent, cultured Europeans are supposed to look down on. That's the uneducated Trump-voting, gas guzzler driving pollution-unconscious, climate denier racist America.
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