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From:  The Listening Society, Hanzi Freinacht

 

One Meta-Ideology Has Already Won

So if the Nordic countries, with their growing post-materialist values, offer an interesting case for the world-system as a whole, what political patterns can we see emerging here?

The dominant meta-ideology in the Nordic countries is social-liberalism, with at least a modicum of green, environmentalist hue. We can call it “Green Social Liberalism”. You only have to look at the political “game of thrones” in these countries to see that this is the case. The game of party politics has certain features that are increasingly becoming all but ridiculously evident.

When it fully blooms, liberal democracy (with a parliament, parties, market economy and publicly funded welfare) merges with Green Social Liberalism. This is why Green Social Liberalism is no longer just an alternative among others, but a meta-ideology. Believing in some version of Green Social Liberalism becomes almost as self-evident and mandatory as believing in democracy, multi-party systems and civil liberties. To be a respectable, democratic, liberal citizen is increasingly synonymous with being a green social-liberal. Let’s take a few examples.

There are no represented parties in any of the Nordic countries that want to abolish or, in practice, even seriously challenge the market economy. There are, furthermore, no parties that want to abolish the welfare state— not even the young hardliner libertarians of Denmark, called Liberal Alliance. (Being the most radical of them all, their long-term goal is to lower income taxes to a not so mindboggling 40 percent.) And there are no parties that don’t at least give lip service to ecological sustainability.

All parties in all Nordic countries are in effect green social-liberals. The nationalist party in Sweden, called the Sweden Democrats, founded through a merger of neo-Nazis and a “populist” tax-cut and anti-immigration party, are nominally pro-abortion, pro women’s rights and claim to have a responsible environmental agenda. Their conservative program must be dressed up in social-liberal robes in order to survive at all: they are against immigration, of course, but the way they legitimize such resistance is by claiming that immigration threatens the welfare state and the liberal values of native Swedes, often revolving around women’s rights, and sometimes even gay rights. They also claim to defend small-scale Swedish entrepreneurs and industries by not requiring as high tax rates to fund the often costly immigration, claiming that funds should be used for foreign aid instead of prolonged integration processes of the newly arrived. In other words: This is nationalism and social conservatism under the banner of Green Social Liberalism. The only way you can make a nationalist or conservative argument in Sweden these days is by claiming that you are conserving the national qualities of Green Social Liberalism. In order to gain respectability, the Sweden Democrats have gradually lowered their tolerance for anti-liberalism and racism, leading to the expulsions of more and more members after faux pas in mass- or social media. The party recently broke off with its entire youth corps, after these had elected a too nationalistically inclined young woman as leader. On their pamphlets the Sweden Democrats display their male leader on the back seat of a bike— two female politicians in front, steering the tandem bike. The message is clear: “You can trust us; we play safely within the field of the Green Social Liberal meta-ideology.” And the leader of Christian Democrats joins the fray, marching in the Pride parade.

If you look at the center-left and center-right parties that have hitherto been the largest and dominant ones— indeed, having defined the major divide in politics, like in other countries— they are quite close to one another, both rhetorically and in practice. Sweden had a period of eight years of center-right government from 2006-2014, breaking its long tradition of social democracy. The center-right won, in large part, by promising not to change key features of social democracy, claiming to be the new workers’ party. Indeed, they were influenced by the “third way” New Labour politics of Tony Blair and Anthony Giddens in the UK. When the Danish Social Democrats came to power in 2011, together with a socialist party that once housed many Trotskyists, and a small social-liberal party, they proceeded by more or less copying the Swedish center-right policy implementation. When the Swedish Social Democrats finally took the power back in 2014, by a very thin margin, they promised not to roll back the market-liberal reforms made by the center-right and seem to have copied the slogans of the Danish center-right, defining themselves, rather neutrally, as “the future party”.

I could go on, discussing how the Left (left of center-left) has become social-liberal, how social-liberalism has become an explicit part of the Green parties, how the actual, historical social-liberal parties have all but vanished, as their niche was taken up by all the others, and so forth. Today, some newspapers, public intellectuals and ex-politicians are even calling out for an alliance between the two major parties— the center-left and center-right— in order to leave out the nationalists and the progressive parties deemed too irresponsible. This would, of course, ruin the whole dramaturgy of the current system of party politics, causing a major drop in support both for the center-right and the center-left, as they would both lose their identities without their main adversary. But it is a telling sign that serious commentators are making such suggestions.

All the political parties are delivering the same goods, more or less. A little percentage lower taxes here, a percentage higher immigration there, but it is all within the same over-arching political framework; all parties in all the Nordic countries adhere to the same dominant Green Social Liberalism, even if wet revolutionary dreams and fascism sometimes resurface in individual politicians (who are then instantly hounded off the stage).

And when push comes to shove, all the parties will defend the state bureaucracy and institutions, despite their liberal rhetoric. During the dramatic increase of arrivals of refugees from Syria and other countries in 2015, even Sweden’s coalition between Social Democrats and Greens slammed the door shut the moment that the administrative systems became overburdened. This move was not rhetorically justified in nationalist or state bureaucracy terms but, of course, as a defense of a long-term, sustainable, liberal and social immigration policy.

There Is No “Center” of Politics

In popular parlance this phenomenon (of one winning meta-ideology) goes by different names: that all the parties have “gathered around the center”, that the “political scale has been compressed” and the like. The Left, both academic and populist, is thrilled to be shocked by how “ultraliberal” society has become, and its adherents somehow always manage to mention Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as a kind of transcendental prime mover, explaining how the world took a wrong turn based on corporate lies and blinding neoliberal ideology. The Right, and by that I mean the socially conservative elements of society, is equally thrilled to be appalled by what appears to be an endless onslaught of political correctness, relativism, multiculturalism, and the excessive softness of the nanny welfare state. As I mentioned, the neo-fascists like to call it the victory of “cultural Marxism”. What we are hearing are scattered remnants of the voices of the alternatives to Green Social Liberalism that existed under industrial modernity.

Hanzi (1117)

…We are approaching a new landscape. I am not talking about what Zygmunt Bauman calls “postmodernity”[ 17] or “liquid modernity”[ 18] or what Anthony Giddens calls “late modernity”[ 19]. What I mean is that we have passed into a postindustrial and digitalized age where new political rules apply— and where metamodern politics becomes increasingly viable. There is no “center” in any strict, analytical sense. What we have is one victorious meta-ideology, one recipe for society that has beaten its competitors when it comes to functionality and rhetorical edge. It is this meta-ideology that is disguised as a “center”, as being the sensible, moderate form of politics.

The “middle” is a position that under other circumstances would have appeared as extreme. Indeed, Sweden is an extremely modern, liberal country, stabilizing approximately around this equilibrium:

• An uncompromising acceptance of the market economy.
• An equally uncompromising acceptance of the welfare state.
• A gradual adaptation to the pressures of economic globalization, with a focus on economic growth, liberal markets and international competitiveness.
• An approximate 50-50% mixture of public bureaucracy and private enterprise, usually with a slight tilt towards private (Sweden, for instance, collected 50.4% of GDP in taxes at its peak in 1999, which had gone down to 43.0% by 2015).
• An uncompromising acceptance of basic liberal values.
• A rhetorical minimum of ecological awareness.

Anybody who strays from this path commits political heresy. All values, from radical feminism and veganism to anti-surveillance and anti-immigration nationalism, are justified with at least some reference to this same meta-ideology. This meta-ideology is dominant simply because it is superior to its alternatives under the current economic, technological, socio-psychological and historical circumstances. That doesn’t give Green Social Liberalism any transcendental value or divine justification. It just happens to have a competitive edge under the current circumstances.

Readers will no doubt note that one can see similar tendencies in many Western countries. The point here is that these tendencies are more pronounced and have progressed farther in the Nordic countries, which is why we are studying them specifically— they may, to some extent, portend the political development in a more international, even global, context. In the Nordic countries of today there is no real public discourse about where society is headed, no real tug-of-war pulling in different directions. There are just superficially different varieties of Green Social Liberalism.

If we zoom in a little on what may be causing this ideological (but not economic or cultural) stand-still, the list looks something like this: The industrial society we knew has been suspended in favor of a postindustrial, digitalized service economy. Thereby the parties no longer represent real economic classes (peasants, workers and bourgeoisie) that people feel they belong to in their everyday lives. Individual people have increasingly complex identities, interests and ideologies (mixing, for instance, feminism with Christianity and online privacy concerns or whatnot), making them harder to represent in coherent political parties.

Politics deals with more and more complex financial, legal, social, political, technological and ecological realities— thereby landing more power in the hands of non-elected bureaucrats and experts and making public discourse more difficult and filled with distorting simplifications. The increasingly mixed class and social interests make it difficult to form monolithic structures to organize and represent voter interests. For the individual person, this also makes it harder to “join” any one movement without contradicting some of one’s own central values. If a country goes farther left it loses in the face of international competition for capital; if it goes farther towards liberalization, it suffers social paralysis and protests; if it retracts civil liberties (gay marriage, etc.) it loses valuable economic agents; if one ignores the environment or the plight of foreigners one loses the rhetorical battles for moral high-ground.

The party system we know, with a Left and a Right, is a product of the classes of an industrial society, where a majority of everyday activity was based around partaking in the production and distribution of industrial goods. The same can be said about the electoral system itself; it is constructed to house class-based parties. In the postindustrial, digitalized and globalized economy, where the most revenue is cycled through rather abstract services, we no longer have the same class division; we no longer have the same social strata that the parties were designed to represent. Social mobility is relatively high in the Nordic countries, which also means that within one family, you can have one unemployed blue-collar person, one with depression and on sick-leave, one with a fancy international job with high salary— and a school teacher.

The divisions become much more multilayered and complex.

Later in this book, when we study how moral values and worldviews develop, you will understand more clearly which new divisions are emerging as the most significant ones. In the parts of the world where this postindustrial economy has manifested most clearly, postindustrial politics follows like a shadow: liberal values together with a balance struck between free enterprise and social welfare— and sustainability. In the Nordic countries, the clout and seriousness of every political movement is measured by its dedication to the dominant meta-ideology of Green Social Liberalism. The question is no longer which society we want— one vision has won by walk-over, and it allows no alternatives— but rather, who will be most proficient at getting us there. Who is the best janitor? What should we make of this? Is all ideological struggle over? Are we, in effect, replacing one janitor-of-a-prime-minister with another? Let’s take stock of some implications. First of all, don’t be fooled by the fireworks, the displays of rhetorical and practical disputes of the politicians, who have every interest in maintaining the image of deep divisions and conflicts, an interest shared by the media who work hard to create drama concerning relatively small differences.

Freinacht, Hanzi. The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One (Metamodern Guides 1) (Kindle Locations 1146-1157). Metamoderna ApS. Kindle Edition.