Targeting Wall Street 

Mostly, however, Gunnar had been engrossed in the concurring (live) screening of another political event, in the form of the Swedish election: “A great speech!” he said. “It had some of that stuff that’s been missing.”

The speech was that of Magdalena Andersson, the former Swedish finance minister who’d just been elected the new leader of the social democratic party (SAP). The stuff that’s been missing, in Gunnars book, was the once-upon-a-time passion and pathos of labor leaders — attributes that had to some extent died with Palme that frosty night in 1986.

And indeed, hanging up to watch a replay, it was a good speech; 45 minutes of sharp elbows to Wall Street bankers, a call to better integrate migrants, a plan to quell organized crime and — finally — some plain talk about the real damage of economic inequality.

Andersson also took a moment to salute another just-crowned leader sitting in the audience: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. To Andersson, the recent center-left victories in Germany and Norway supported her case that Europe is seeing a turn of political tides.

Never again 

And yet, as Gunnar pointed out less enthusiastically if social democracy in Europe is truly experiencing a revival, Germany was far ahead of Sweden.

Following World War II, as democracy returned to West Germany, the country adopted a set of new laws in 1949 to ensure it would never relive the catastrophe of the Third Reich. Hitler had come to power in a country with a highly liberal constitution, exploiting democratic freedoms to undermine and then dismantle democracy itself.

The new German constitution set up barriers to radical, undemocratic tendencies by granting the Federal Republic powers to ban unconstitutional parties (which it used, first in 1952 to shut down the neo-Nazi Socialist Reich Party and then the German Communist Party four years later.)

The law is separable from morality.

What became known as “defensive democracy” in Germany led to a European renaissance of natural law — the idea that humans have inherent rights and that regulation and morality should be deeply connected. As such, several countries, including Norway, now agreed that the law must rest firmly on inalienable rights — the same conviction that inspired the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

But not in Sweden. In my home country, the social democrats of SAP had in its formative days fully committed to a concept of what’s called “legal positivism” — the idea that what the law is must be separated from what the law ought to be; in other words: The law is separable from morality.

So Nazism, Fascism and other ugly isms hardly surfaced at all in the Swedish legal discourse of the decade that followed the War. In the eyes of my parents' and grandparents' generations, there was no need: The country’s legal system had passed the test of the totalitarian era with flying colors, with wide support for the burgeoning welfare state staving off the threat of extremist ideologies.

From morals to pure mathematics

But fast-forward to today, and Sweden is questioning the very roots of its political system.

As the far-right Sweden Democrats have gone from 1% support to roughly 20% in the last two decades, the SAP (alongside every other mainstream party) have been unable to formulate a credible response to the nationalist and xenophobic stances of a party with roots in Nazi ideology.

And it makes logical sense in our system: if the law is indeed amoral, and democracy is a question of mere formulas, how do we dismiss calls for the deportation of migrants, or the sinister assertion of an “inherited Swedishness,” as inherently undemocratic?

Of course, social democracy has dwindled for the same reasons in Germany as in Sweden and other Western democracies, where voters have seen their lives turned upside down by globalization, automation and recurring financial crashes that are exploited and twisted by xenophobic leaders. But Germany benefits from an arsenal of now 60-year-old constitutional tools to protect itself against extremist forces, while Sweden does not.

Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was a “suspected case” of anti-democratic extremist activity.

Earlier this year, German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Saxony-Anhalt would place the regional branch of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party under surveillance as a “suspected case” of anti-democratic extremist activity.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, the center-right opposition parties have in the last few years gone from refusing to collaborate with the Sweden Democrats to embrace them as a necessary partner on the way to parliamentary power.

To Gunnar, it’s not possible to detach democratic values from natural rights without the detrimental consequences that Sweden (like others in the West) is experiencing today.

It’s worth noting that while Swedish labor leaders like Olof Palme, as well as his predecessors, all subscribed to legal positivism, they carried much of the humanistic message in their characters, which kept the ideology from becoming hollowed out. But today, with the faultlines of legal positivism becoming increasingly clear, we know that these leaders were the exceptions that confirmed the rule: namely that democracy needs more than votes to sustain it.