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Our North Shore has been dubbed the Scandinavian Riviera. Given the Finns who settled around the Baptism River, it better may be called the Nordic Riviera. Finns are not Scandinavian, just ask them or check their language, so unlike their neighbors. So, do not call Finns “Scandinavian;” call them Nordic; Icelanders, too.
You wonder why we bother with Scandinavian versus Nordic? Because we all will want to read The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life. The author, Anu Partanan, is a journalist from Finland and now a U.S. citizen. She writes comparing her homeland with her new home. She loves it here, but has suggestions reflecting her Nordic heritage.
How, we wonder, could we have a better life than we have near Highway 61? Because (1) not everyone here shares equitably in that Good Life; and (2) Partanan observes wisely, everyone in the United States lives with a level of anxiety and stress that Nordic peoples largely avoid. Consider these passages from the book:
“Instead I became transfixed by the news stories I read about another kind of American. These were citizens who’d perhaps made one bad decision, or who’d had a bit of bad luck. They’d fallen ill, lost their jobs, gotten divorced, gotten pregnant at the wrong time, or been hit by a hurricane. They found themselves unable to pay their medical bills, or their house was being foreclosed on, or they were working three low paying jobs and still not making ends meet, or sending their children to a horrible school, or leaving their babies with random neighbors because they couldn’t afford day care, or all of the above.” ,,,,
“And in the American wilderness, you’re on your own.” ….
“In America, after children grow into adults and responsibilities, the co-dependent child-parent relationship seemed to flip 180 degrees. I met middle-aged adults overwhelmed by the enormously time-consuming and expensive burden of micromanaging the lives of their elderly parents. They were strung out by the tasks of coordinating medical care and treatment, and handling the logistics, and often the costs, of bills and insurance, on top of trying to juggle their own careers and parent their own kids. In Finland this kind of dependency was unheard of.” ….
“In Europe … it had become a bit of cliché to criticize Americans as superficial and obsessed with money, work and status …. But after seeing for myself how American society forced people into situations that warped some of their most fundamental relationships … between parents and children, between spouses, and between workers and their employers, especially— I could understand where the cliché was coming from. ….
The Nordic nations had found an approach to government that deployed policies in a smarter way to create individual citizens not a culture of dependency, but rather a new culture of self-sufficiency that matched modern life. The result had been to put into daily practice the very ideals that many Americans could only fantasize about in their personal lives: real freedom, real independence, and real opportunity.”
Partanen tells us that Nordic countries ensure that children will have a good start in life, but “… this attitude is not altruistic. … ensuring a child’s fundamental rights to be properly cared for is an investment in the future of the society.” So, what are the policies that support these healthy societies?
In brief, they are–
–universal, free health care, cradle to grave,
–support for parents from pregnancy to age 18,
–government funded parental leaves and sick days,
–government funded, high quality day care for working parents,
–free education through post-high school,
–genuinely recuperative vacations from work (5 weeks is common),
–tax policies that do not push people to marriage and pay for the social programs,
–employers off the hook for the direct costs of these programs, and
–high quality, free care for the aging and aged.
In support of my lean toward Social Democracy, note these facts, well documented in her endnotes:
–Since 2,000, Finland ranks above U.S. in everything, including capitalism
–Finland consistently finishes in the top five in all global rankings on
–the quality of education; the way the economy works; the distribution of wealth; and opportunity.
–From 2000 on, Finland ranked at or near the top in reading, math, science
Partanen does a good job responding the critiques of attempts to transplant these policies to the United States. She notes that Nordic Social Democracy is not Socialism and shows how “Nanny State” critiques are ill-founded.
My biggest hope is that we do not follow Senator Bernie Sanders in referring to his programs as Democratic Socialism. Social Democracy describes the Nordic way of supporting everyone while leaving reasonably regulated capitalism to thrive, unburdened by the costs of the fringe benefits so many need as long as we are organized as we are here.
Note that there were many folks who voted for Barack Obama and then for Donald Trump. I believe those folks believed that they were not being dealt a fair hand by our government and society. Moderates and progressives can unite behind this label as they did in the New Deal and the Great Society.
So, I lean toward calling myself a Social Democrat. If someone has a better label, bring it on. Perhaps others will lean, too, and we will see where it leads.
The main task will be to see how we organize to educate those who are now losing in America–poor and middle-class folk–that Trumpism is fantasm and that Social Democratic policies are good for them and the wealthy, too. Other tasks include (1) analyzing the costs of various policies and how to fund them; 2) figuring out where the votes are and can be; (3) deciding which policies to promote first and where; (4) creating and managing the coalitions of folks, including enlightened business people, needed short and long-term; and (5) doing the hard work of analyzing and creating the transition from where we are to where we need to be.
Likely, most future columns will return to more prosaic Wondering….
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