For a century, Sweden was ‘the people’s home’: patriotic socialism, without fascism. Now the usual suspects have handed it to a party with neo-Nazi roots.
About 100 years ago, a bunch of Swedish social democrats took a look at the European situation and decided they had a problem.
Working-class revolutions had failed, Bolshevism was a dictatorship, and fascism had captured the patriotic vote. Working-class parties couldn’t capture a majority of the vote on their own, nor could such parties gain an overwhelming majority of the working class. Their answer was a turn away from class alone, and to the nation as a whole, with the idea of the folkhemmet — the nation as “the people’s house”. Per Albin Hansson, a former prime minister, summed it up this way:
The basis of the home is community and togetherness. The good home does not recognise any privileged or neglected members, nor any favourite or stepchildren. In the good home there is equality, consideration, cooperation and helpfulness. Applied to the great people’s and citizens’ home this would mean the breaking down of all the social and economic barriers that now separate citizens into the privileged and the neglected, into the rulers and the dependents, into the rich and the poor, the propertied and the impoverished, the plunderers and the plundered. Swedish society is not yet the people’s home. There is a formal equality, equality of political rights, but from a social perspective, the class society remains, and from an economic perspective the dictatorship of the few prevails.
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