When immigrants from the middle east come to Sweden, one very normal complaint is that over here, "the state" is basically trying to "take their kids", and usurp the parental role.
Usually Swedes just scoff at those remarks but I increasingly think they point to a real thing.
Usually Swedes just scoff at those remarks but I increasingly think they point to a real thing.
In the American conception of the nanny state, you usually see conservatives focus on some of ideological indoctrination part as the point of the state wanting that control. But this misses the much more important area, I think.
Families are *production units*. Always have been. A farmer doesn't exist as a metaphysical being separate from the work of farming, farming and its requirements dominates the way of life. It impacts everything, certainly how to raise kids, when to have them, and why.
The original social democrats saw the family in very "materialistic" terms, not as places for love and life, but as these places for production. And even as they considered those old families inefficient or tyrannical, they at least didn't want to just remove Chesterton's fence.
That's why there's such a culture shock when these MENA immigrants come here. They see - in a way the natives do not - that Swedes genuinely subcontract out parts of the "family as economic unit" out to the state.
One can think whatever one wants of the result. But it's worth mentioning that in Sweden, the very ideological social democrats saw a Chesterton's fence in the family. They specifically wanted to *replace* parts of it, but they thought *removing* it would be crazy and inhuman.
In the US, by contrast, the unholy alliance between "ex"-trotskyists, libertarians and moralists has basically seen the same smashing of the Tom Joad family unit as happened in Sweden, but without a conscious "if we remove something we have to put in another thing" effort.
Europeans - at least Scandinavians - by and large believe that the US is a "conservative" country, and that they are "progressive". Over time I've come to the realization that this might just be the biggest fucking lie ever broadly accepted by human beings.
It's American "conservatives" that are radical, and European "socialists" that are conservative. Tell a feminist socialist over here what's allowed in the US in terms of late term abortions and they'll puke. It's actually crazy.
In a way, the actual goals of the social democrats, the welfare state, the state as an overprotective "nanny", was an attempt to have unlimited economic development WITHOUT just turning the family into a mad max hellscape or a dog eat dog thing.
Even the grandest reform, even the most hubris-riddled social program, was ultimately motivated by very "small" and parochial sentiments: the idea that the Swedish Tom Joad family ought to keep existing even *if* industrialism made that unsustainable or inefficient.
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