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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.
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.
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.
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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