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Notes -
How Peaceful Sweden Became Europe’s Gun-Murder Capital
This link is probably paywalled for most, so some of the salient points:
It might also be helpful to look at this article in conjunction with this Free Press article on violence in Sweden: Two Bombings in One Night? That’s Normal Now in Sweden.
At least on its face, this situation has a clear cause (migration from non-Western countries) and a simple solution (stop accepting migrants and remove many of the migrants that are already in Sweden), but to even state these facts gets you labeled a "right-wing populist" (nice of WSJ to omit the customary "far right populist").
I do see where the Left is coming from here. Most migrants aren't committing violence, and it does seem cruel to kick out people who have been living somewhere for years or even decades. But I also think a given community has the right to maintain the integrity of its society and culture. That's also why I'm more okay with something closer to open borders in the USA: Our culture is already so hollowed out that migrants moving here are probably adding, not subtracting, from whatever "culture" there is in the US.
Sweden had and still has that right.
They chose to let in migrants. They chose to have a non-ethnic conception of citizenship.
Everything happening is Europe's choice. None of these Ancient Roman comparisons really map. One of the wealthiest, highest human capital regions in the world is not being presented with a fait accompli by Somalians or a technical problem it can't figure out.
This is just what they chose.
There was never a referendum on multiculturalism in Sweden just like there wasn't in America for the 1965 immigration act. This "people chose this themselves" is a tired and unconvincing argument.
Honestly, when was America's last actual referendum? Usually, on federal issues, passing a law and never repealing it is as close as you get no?
This argument seems to do too much. It easily just collapses into a criticism of liberal democracies and how such polities choose anything. Which...I'm not inherently against but if you want to say that "America/Sweden/Whoever" didn't decide on this it can be applied to everything.
America especially was designed to have anti-populist mechanics. That's the foundational bargain of the country. It's a bit late to argue choices aren't legitimate cause they weren't done by plebiscite.
Getting a referendum is also a sign of commitment. The Brexit referendum happened cause Brexiteers were a loud and annoying enough constituency. If the Swedish people don't have the will to push such a thing on their government...that's on them no?
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At least it can be said that the people didn't oppose with sufficient zeal to bother meting out any electoral consequences. 'The people chose it' is maybe a slight exaggeration but 'the people chose not to stop it' is basically right. And fwiw Hart-Celler polled pretty well.
The people who opposed it were often prevented from competing on fair terms electorally. In many cases, their party leaders were just jailed. This is a recent example. So no, I find the "let's blame the voters" unconvincing and frankly a sign of a mind unable to look critically at the system as it is.
Did this happen in Sweden? Your example is from very recently, Golden Dawn hardly did that well in 2019, a whopping 3% of the vote. Greek solution got another few percent, so still under 7% for the far righters. Can that poor of a performance really be blamed on your imagined unfair electoral terms; what was the unfairness in 2019?
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The exact phrase was "Sweden chose this"
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Who voted for mass immigration?
Take the UK - since the 1990s both major parties consistently said they'd be tough and restrictive on immigration. They then proceeded to increase it while in power. https://twitter.com/t848m0/status/1560662923101347840
The governments of Europe and the European Union make the choices, not the people. Consider how much intense opposition there was to Brexit, something that really could be considered the people's choice! It eventually happened, after a great deal of fooling around and delaying tactics. Or the many times states have rejected EU integration in referendums, only to be made to vote again or their decisions were ignored. Capital punishment was abolished decades before it became unpopular.
What is the point of democracy if the major parties consistently lie about their plans and implement their agenda regardless of what the voters want? Or if they form a 'cordon sanitaire' to prevent political representation of undesirables? Or if they manipulate the media by omission, lies, slant and emphasis to enforce ideological orthodoxy? Middle East Wars are the primary example. Russiagate is a secondary example, now that the Durham report has been released.
In the UK we can't electorally reduce immigration, it is an issue decided by the people who work in the home office and legal system. If you want to reduce immigration then you have to change the opinions of those classes of people and wait a generation or two for the attitudes to get embedded in the bureocracy. Voting will never result in less immigration except for a short term fluctuation - 300 000 last year and 299 999 this year, see voting did make it drop! next year its 1000 000, etc.
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These are flaws in the implementation of democracy, not indicators that we should abandon democracy altogether. There's a huge difference between European or American governance systems and those of a real dictatorship like Russia.
Immigration issues typically have a huge amount of fraudulent "compromise" because corporations like cheap labor, so they bribe (through political "donations" and other kickbacks) politicians to "compromise" on the issue, effectively relegating countries to open borders in some cases. Support to Israel is also held up above and beyond popular approval due to AIPAC corrupting the US political system.
Democracy in principle is fine (referendums for example, which should be cheaper and more regular in the digital age). There's a role for the state of course. But democracy in practice is, as you say, grossly flawed.
I don't know if you've seen the famous 'We're Losing OUR DEMOCRACY' video. What is the point of Our Democracy anyway? What does it get us? Are we not spied upon intensely, as in China? Are we not dragged into costly wars by the government like Russia?
Is it a qualitative matter? Is Our Democracy keeping us a bit less corrupt than Russia? How do we even measure corruption, should we include lobbying and 'investments in underpriveliged communities'? Was Russia less corrupt during its brief experiment with Democracy? Are the wars we'd get dragged into less bloody than they'd otherwise be? In China, you can vote for your Party member. Here, we get to vote for different Parties, which mostly have the same policies.
If you want a more rigorous answer to this question, I recommend this book.
For a shorter answer, being democratic makes us massively less corrupt than Russia, even though, yes, corruption is still an issue in the US (and everywhere) but comparing the US to Russia is just worlds apart.
We're also far richer and have much better public services like education and healthcare. It's possible for some rich countries to be authoritarian, but it's the exception rather than the rule. Though there is some debate on which way the causality goes here, although I would personally say it's more a case of democracy --> stability --> rich.
Is that actually true? On an absolute scale the amount of corruption contained within the MIC and federal procurements systems alone would demolish Russian levels of corruption and if you include preferential legislation enacted to keep the big banks happy I think you could make a plausible case that they're actually more corrupt on a relative basis as well.
I don’t think that’s actually true. We spend a lot on overhead and standards but not so much on things “falling off the truck.”
But what do I know; I just work here.
The US spends more than ten times as much money on their military than Russia does, and everything I have heard about the US military procurement effort and pork-barrelling suggests to me that Russia would have to spend more than 100% of their entire budget on corruption in order to match up to US figures.
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Corruption definitely happens in the US armed forces, but comparing what goes on to the Russians is at a whole different level.
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Post hoc ergo propter hoc?
A better comparison would be democratic Russia vs. non-democratic Russia. Do you think Yeltsin's regime was less corrupt than Putin's (or Gorbachev's)?
And of course it's easy to find countries that mostly aren't democratic and are also less corrupt than the US. Liechtenstein in Europe is an example. So is Singapore really or Hong Kong when it was still under the control of the English.
Democratic Russia was indeed very corrupt, but the attempt at democracy only lasted for ~10 years. Democracy isn't a magic panacea that fixes everything instantly; rather, it's a way to change institutional incentives to slowly guide countries to better outcomes. The book I listed above goes into this more. It would have taken decades to root out the centuries of corruption that had been caked into East Slavic society through the Tsars and Bolsheviks. Even before the war Ukraine was still very corrupt, but its democratic path gave it a far better chance than Russia to actually fix its problems, which we're seeing now. Most other Warsaw Pact states like Poland saw massive reductions in corruption after they switched to democracy.
Assertion without evidence (I don't have time to read an entire book, sorry).
Russia was only getting more corrupt under its democracy and it's hardly the only example. Egypt had a brief fling with democracy that set it back decades. And all democracy seems to have done in South America is make it easier for the cartels to buy national governments.
As for Poland and the like, you seem to be forgetting that they were highly civilized functional countries in their fairly recent (generally non-democratic) past. A better explanation seems to be that those countries were doing well due to a myriad of reasons (good genes, cultural capital, etc...) until they got hit by the communism stick. After communism was gone, they reverted to their mean.
The comments on Ukraine are pure speculation. It's democracy certainly didn't seem to be helping given the multiple color revolutions and the constant conflict between it's two halves. Of course these would have been problems anyway but what's your evidence that Democracy made any of this better?
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Unfalsifiable, else Brexit would have falsified it. You can’t expect the state to act on every whim of the populace. The promise of democracy is that the little guy gets some power, a backstop, not unlimited, on-call power.
Take away all his power, and he just might find himself in a Putin's invasion situation, where it’s not just a few dollars and soldiers on the line, but his life.
Say you're in a restaurant and you specifically order steak but get served tomato soup. Once, twice, three times... They say that steak is on the menu, yet keep giving you soup. Isn't this egregious? You're still paying for the meal. And it's not like they ran out of steak! You're not ordering something outlandish like unicorn fillet or dragon sausage, steak is well within the capacity of the restaurant.
If people were asking for low taxes and high spending, then sure, that's unreasonable. But it's not hard at all to reduce immigration. It's trivially easy, unless you have an enormously large border like Russia or perhaps the US. The UK has absolutely no excuse, it's an island. Don't grant so many visas, don't let people come in, expel those who do. The Royal Navy has plans to combat China in the Pacific, they should be able to secure the English Channel from unarmed boats.
Well the whole point of Brexit was to reduce immigration... which still has not happened. If you ask Brexit voters what they wanted, they would say they want reduced immigration.
Eyes national debt charts nervously...
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It took multiple constitutional crises (including a proguation of parliament, which many regard as undemocratic), a general election in 2017 where parties promising won over 85% of the vote, the biggest defeat of those parties ever in the 2019 European election when they reached deadlock over Brexit (and 30.5% of the vote for the Brexit party, a completely unprecedented rise for a new party in UK political history), and Labour losing their MP in Bolsover.
It also involved setting up internal trade barriers in the UK, against the wishes of most people in Northern Ireland.
True, but it is typical that if the state seeks a mandate from the populace in a referendum for X, it doesn't choose to do X even if the referendum goes against X. Can you imagine what would have happened if the Remain side had narrowly won the referendum, but the Conservatives implemented Brexit anyway, saying that membership of the EU was unworkable? Or even had a second referendum a few years later, saying that the Remainers had misunderstood the issues?
Still, even if you argue that Brexit was a transient and uninformed whim, it's still not comparable to the public's desire for less immigration, which is a very persistent preference in the UK, and many other EU countries. The problem is that, at least on this issue, democracy has been ineffective as a means of incentivising politicians to act in accordance with that preference. I think that this is a general flaw with democracy: people generally vote for candidates, who come as package deals, and who can afford to change parts of that package after the deal in order to appeal to special interest groups who are better organised than most voters.
You might argue, with Churchill, that "Democracy is awful, but it is the worst system of government, save for all the others," but that's a prima facie argument for less government, not more democracy.
They voted for a barrier. So there was going to be a barrier somewhere, either between the irelands or the islands. Democracy doesn’t have the power to alter reality to make people’s wishes come true.
You keep talking as if Brexit hadn’t happened.
Yes, my point was that implementing what people wanted was costly, partly because democracy is limited in what it can do.
No, the point is that the hurdles for Brexit were high, partly because a considerable majority of the political establishment was against it. Again, this is an instance of one of the limitations of democracy: a referendum result can be incompatible with the wishes of those with the power to implement it.
Do you agree that Brexit not happening after the referundum would have been evidence in favour of ‘elites make all the decisions’? Then Brexit happening is evidence against.
People don’t update generally, fine. But you’re using anti-evidence as evidence.
Sure, but the thesis you're defending here is that those with the power to implement it get their way regardless of the will of the people or referendums.
I didn't say that elites make all the decisions. I simply expanded the facts about Brexit, which are relevant to assessing the strength of elite opinion in developed democracies.
My own view is that democracy provides weak incentives for politicians to enforce majority preferences, except insofar as these preferences correspond to the balance of political profits from special interest groups. Of course, the circumstances vary, e.g. there are arguments that special interest groups are more influential in proportional representation systems, while widely-encompassing special interest groups are arguably less harmful. Mancur Olson's The Rise and Decline of Nations is a good introduction to this topic, even if Olson was pushing too hard for the One True Theory of Society.
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Isn't it funny how democracy results in erecting barriers they don't want, and abolishing barriers they do want?
In practice, it kind of didn't.
The problem though is 'the people' seemed to want no barrier at all, which was incompatible with the Brexit which they also apparently wanted. If they ask for no border in the Irish sea, and no border on the Irish border, but also a border somewhere, you can't blame the politicians for failing to deliver on the impossible wishes of the 'people'.
How so?
What's impossible about letting in the Irish, but not other EU members?
A lot of policies end up copy-pasted from the EU anyway, I think that's what happened with the Even More Annoying Cookie Banner Directive. Another curious thing is how all of Europe, including the UK, is now simultaneously passing gender self-ID. To be fair I think the problem is bigger than the EU but also let's not pretend the UK is independent now and it's elites are listening to the people.
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You mean, aside from the barrier around Britain the elites didn't want?
As is often the case, the EU was just a scapegoat for pro-immigration forces which operate both inside and outside the EU. They have met the enemy, and it is them.
Which barrier is that?
Right, and now the scapegoat is the voting public, even though they voted against it
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They chose to help those poor, poor migrants. I don't think they chose to have murder and rape and mayhem. I mean, the latter is the consequence of the former, but I don't think they realized it when making the choice.
They were told (by bad people of course), and either they didn't believe or didn't care. When it happened, they denied, covered up, and still choose to help those poor, poor migrants. As I said, nobody ever updates.
It is so ironic you say this given you had multiple people giving you examples of them updating. It sure sounds like you yourself didn't update.
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