Why aren’t we Sweden?

Guns, butter, and meatballs: the “inexplicable” inadequacy of America’s social safety net.

Making an equitable world is as easy as riding a bike, only the bike’s on fire, and the road’s on fire, and you’re on fire, because you’re in Hell. The world is not inherently fair and it’s an uphill battle to try to make it so. Justice exists, but only because we create and nurture it, and then only to the extent that we do and keep on doing so. It’s as if it came with a “Some Assembly Required” sticker that grossly underestimates how much work is needed.

In a world where anything can happen to anyone at any time, it makes sense for us to stick together, to shield each other from the worst of adversities through a form of mutual insurance at the national level: the social safety net. There are fundamental needs—food, housing, medical care—that we can provide for ourselves only so long as we are fortunate enough to be economically successful.

Even then, when disaster strikes, our ability to self-insure can prove insufficient, especially when we’re living hand to mouth even in the best of times. Few people have the cash on hand to pay for advanced medical treatments such as surgical intervention or chemotherapy. In America, medical debt accounts for two thirds of bankruptcies, while 1 in 9 struggle with food insecurity, and over half a million are homeless on any given night.

America prides itself on its exceptionalism, on being the best in the world, yet when it comes to helping its own when they’re in need, it falls short. So why is our welfare state so inadequate as compared to what countries like Sweden have? Why are the people unable or unwilling to sustain the political will to make America more just? Why are we fine with funding the greatest military force on the planet, but balk at paying for welfare programs? Why guns, but not butter?

This is the question that sociologist Roderick Graham touches on in an interview on Anglerphish. I’ll just wait here while you listen to it for the next hour or so.

Graham answers in terms of the myth of meritocracy, which claims that success naturally comes to those who have the aptitude and put in the effort. What makes it mythical is that, rather than meritocracy being seen as something for us to aspire to—a fair system that rewards, and thereby motivates, our best—it is claimed that we have already achieved it.

This version of meritocracy insists that, while a class structure exists, you have effectively-unlimited upward mobility. Moreover, it claims that this mobility is not impaired by systemic discrimination, thus justifying a color blind approach. How convenient!

That we live in a meritocracy now is nonsense on stilts. It’s not just false, it’s absurd, and malicious in that it pretends that those who succeed are always deserving while blaming the victims of societal inequity for their own failure. So why is it so popular? Why is it ubiquitous and endemic in our politics?

Simply put, because it feels good. This doctrine of non-aspirational meritocracy feeds into the just-world hypothesis, a cognitive bias towards seeing justice where none exists. In this fairy-tale world, success comes to the worthy, and this is reassuring because everyone believes that they fundamentally are.

So long as you’re a good person—and who isn’t?—you’ll be safe. When someone stumbles, it’s their own fault, so don’t worry about being next. Nobody is a victim of the system. Nobody is poor, we’re all just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

The problem for just-worlders is explaining away that embarrassment. It’s not a new problem: organized religion has long struggled with the need to justify why, in a world created by an all-powerful, all-good entity, bad things happen to good people. This has even spawned a branch of apologetics called theodicy, whose purpose is to make excuses for the problem of evil.

The central tactic is to explain it away with free will, implying that those who are sick or poor or unhappy chose to be that way. This is victim-blaming, parallel to the rugged individualism ideal in American politics. A complementary solution to the problem of evil is to personify it in a malicious entity that counters the good that would otherwise happen. However, this approach requires someone to demonize.

In American secular theodicy, the fall guy is obvious: we have long blamed the victims of colonialism for their own misery, whether it’s the Native Americans whose lands we stole or the Africans we kidnapped and used as slaves. In the modern version, these historically-oppressed groups (aka “minorities”) are why honest (white) folk are suffering.

The only reason you’re not already a millionaire, they say, is that your money is being taken away by the evils of taxation and used to help the undeserving. The curiously anodyne term for this vicious doctrine is “economic conservatism“.

White Americans have historically been more than willing to go against their own economic interests so long as they believe that they are hurting Black people more. They would benefit from these social programs themselves, but that would entail allowing the disadvantaged and “unworthy” to benefit more, closing the already-shrinking gap between white trash and BIPOC.

Another way to look at this is that the self-interested wealthy can reliably use the existence of Black people to keep poorer white people from demanding economic equality. Even when we made progress, such as through FDR’s New Deal, which created the welfare state, this was only made possible at the expense of racist policies which threw Black people under the bus.

In Sweden, who plays the role of this outgroup that gets blamed? For a long time, nobody, which is why Sweden was able to install a social safety net worthy of the name, while America could not. But this is changing. Sweden was effectively a monoculture, but as immigration by visibly-foreign refugees has provided a convenient target, right-wing populist nationalism has been on the rise. The paradox is that white supremacy opposes multiculturalism but requires the threat of it in order to justify its own existence.

The defining conceit of populism is that there exists such a thing as The People, a monolithic, homogeneous group whose interests it represents. Multiculturalism denies this, which is why it is an inevitable target. This is perhaps more visible on the populist right, with its blatant bigotry, but the populist left is also fond of denigrating equal rights as “identity politics“.

So why aren’t we Sweden? Fundamentally, because our roots in colonialism ensure that we always have minorities to blame for our problems. What can we do about it? That question does not allow a simple answer, but the solution starts with understanding the problem and frankly addressing it.

Ultimately, any successful policy that helps the disadvantaged and the oppressed has to be seen as also helping white people, else it will never be implemented. We have to undermine the narrative of the blessed monoculture, anticipate the willingness of white people to sabotage the good of all, and counter that framing at the policy level. And this entails opposing populism in all its forms.