The Nordic Model — what the hell is it?

There’s a shitload of anti nordic-model articles out there, by all the usual rightwing mags. Whatever the nordic-model is, it scares rightwingers.
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Jacobin on Scandanavia:https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/national-review-williamson-bernie-sanders-sweden/

What Makes Scandinavia Different?

By Andreas Møller Mulvad and Rune Møller Stahl

What accounts for the Nordic countries’ strong welfare states? Hint: it’s not white homogeneity.

There’s a reason the Scandinavian welfare states are still the envy of many across the world. Even decades into a neoliberal project to reform them, Scandinavia sports relatively high income equality, large, tax-financed welfare programs, powerful unions, and relatively low unemployment rates.

Neoliberal textbooks tell us that the only way to societal prosperity is through low tax rates, deregulated business, and cut-throat competitive labor markets. Yet despite failing to meet the metrics of the Anglo-American variety of capitalism, Scandinavian countries stubbornly continue to prosper, and regularly come out on top of the global indexes of happiness and quality of life.

It is no surprise, therefore, to find neoliberals and conservatives devoting considerable intellectual energy to delegitimizing the “Nordic Model” of public welfare.

Earlier this year, the Institute of Economic Affairs, a British neoliberal think tank, devoted an entire book to Scandinavian “unexceptionalism.” The aim was to explain away the success story of the Nordic welfare states, arguing in classical Hayekian fashion that the success of the Nordic countries predates the era of public welfare, and that anything exceptional and successful about it has vanished since then.

Meanwhile in the US, where the Bernie Sanders campaign has thrown ideas of Nordic social democracy into the political mainstream, National Review’s Kevin Williamson has adopted the opposite strategy. In a couple of recent pieces he acknowledges the continuing exceptionalism of the Nordic experience and admits that the Nordic countries have indeed been relatively successful until very recently.

But in a strange plot twist Williamson also racializes the Nordic experience, tying the success of social-democratic policies to the alleged whiteness and homogeneity of the Nordic countries, thus undermining its credibility as a source of inspiration for American progressives committed to antiracism.
The “Nordic Consensus”

In a National Review piece published in early July, Williamson calls Sanders a “national socialist” and denounces his use of “Us and Them” rhetoric as un-Scandinavian.

Williamson construes Sanders’s willingness to highlight conflicts of interest in popular power as being supposedly the “polar opposite” of how politics is done in Scandinavia — where politics is “consensus-driven” — and that where this “conformity” constitutes a “stabilizing and moderating force in politics, allowing for the emergence of a subtle and sophisticated and remarkably broad social agreement that contains political disputes.”

Scandinavian politics is much less partisan and more coalition-prone than in the US, with proportional representation effectively denying any one party an absolute parliamentary majority. But we should not mistake a contingent twentieth-century historical conjuncture of relative political civility for a supra-historical essence of Nordic political culture.

Today the universal welfare state and regulated, egalitarian labor markets, are so popular among voters that even liberal or conservative politicians wanting to dismantle them have to run as defenders of public welfare if they wish to avoid electoral suicide. But this situation did not emerge from the mists of history. It is the product of decades of struggles from organized labor and other popular movements throughout the twentieth century.

The social-democratic welfare state has faced strong historical challenges — both from the Left, by strong communist and new left movements, and from the Right, by organized business, such as the powerful Swedish employer organization SAF, and by Tea Party-like anti-taxation movements, which appeared in the 1970s in Norway and Denmark.

Simply put, the “Nordic Consensus” has never been as comprehensive as Williamson would have us believe…..see link…