A chastisement for those who are eager to write history before it has happened

I follow the goings ons in Sweden with interest. I lived there from 1970-75 before heading off to boarding school and my parents continued there till 1978. I loved the country, people and culture for all their sometimes perplexing (to my mind) quirks. In particular, I admired their capacity for rational argument and a reasonably reality-based approach to idealism. I think my view was somewhat tinged with youthful naïveté but subsequent events seems consistent with that early interpretation.

Sometime in the 1990s Sweden came to some terms with the incapacity to support the well-meaning generosity of the liberal welfare state and went on something of an economic conservative binge. They devalued the Kroner to improve their economic performance, adjusted social spending downwards, reduced the role of government in the economy, controlled wage inflation, and undertook some root and branch reforms in many areas, notably in education. The results have been mixed but broadly much better than the trend lines in the early 1990s.

All this comes to mind based on a couple of news reports. On Saturday, I read a Guardian article about the expected outcomes of the Swedish elections on Sunday. The Guardian is something like a British New York Times. Capable of some spectacular in-depth reporting but also prone to substantial blindness regarding its own prejudices and biases. The Guardian is much more explicitly a child of the Labor movement and generically socialist. The Guardian's article was styled Free-market era in Sweden swept away as feminists and greens plot new path by Richard Orange. I read it because A) I was interested in anything about Sweden. But B) I was interested in that journalistic hubris of reporting on Saturday about results that could not be known before Sunday as if they had already happened.

So how did the feminists and greens do?

Well, according to John Fund, apparently an old stick-in-the-mud traditionalist, reporting after the fact instead of before it, in Swedish Surprise:

On the left, the new Feminist Initiative party stole votes from the left but ended up falling short of the 4 percent required to earn seats in parliament. The Green party actually lost seats.

So one party shrank in size and the other didn't even make the threshold. I guess the pink sunrise of the clerisy was once more clouded over. Perhaps these weren't quite the new paths Richard Orange had them plotting.

As usual with a fragmentary parliamentary system, the results are in but the consequences are not yet known. Various parties of innumerable stripes have to figure out what their priorities are and exactly who they can find sufficiently tolerable or beneficial to form a government. Still, it does represent a chastisement for those who are eager to write history before it has happened.