Things can never be so good that the Mandarin Class can't ruin them

I lived in Sweden as a boy from 1970-78 and have great admiration for the culture and the people. It is a beautiful place. While the political class has done foolish things, as a general rule, it is not perhaps usually as foolish as in many other countries.

But things have changed as reported in Sweden’s Parallel Society by Andy Ngo.

It is sad to see, if this report bears any semblance to reality, what has happened there. Sad, but not too unexpected.

In the time I was there, America was just coming off the civil rights protests and riots of 1968 and was still in the midst of anti-Vietnam war protests. For a pre-teen, it was an odd experience to have Swedish peers, and occasionally adults, want to enter into debates about the moral primitiveness of America. One of the striking things to me, young as I was, was the experiential gap that blinded Swedes to realities beyond their kin.

I eventually learned that one of the most effective rhetorical weapons I had was to turn the tables. While they might accuse America of racism, I could always point out that America was dramatically more diverse than anywhere in Sweden. That while America might not yet have struck the right balance between individual and state and between rights and responsibilities, America was dealing with issues of which Swedes had no knowledge.

If they countered that Sweden was a fair and open place and that there was nothing going on in America which Swedes had not already addressed, my fallback was to cite Sweden's acceptance of Finns, and treatment of Sami, and gypsies. Finnish laborers came over in the post-war era of labor shortages and were, in some ways, treated much like Mexican laborers in the US in the past thirty years of migration. The stereotype was of unskilled laborers lacking education or sophistication.

Sami were not treated as equal at all but almost as wards of the state. And the gypsies? Well, that was a completely unresolved issue to which people elected to turn a blind eye. Swedes had no idea how to accommodate a people who did not want to live as Swedes.

America has always had a rocky process of acculturation and integration, we, almost alone among the major developed nations of the world, actually have a pretty good track record of accepting, incorporating, and even adopting some aspects of new immigrant groups while they at the same time eventually become dyed-in-the-wool Americans.

while the rise of the philosophy of multiculturalism and social justice theory have hampered the acculturation a little bit, we still do a fantastic job compared to virtually everyone else. We are an open society founded on universalist enlightenment principals which cause us to demonstrate an openness, marred as it might be in isolated instances, that is little known elsewhere.

My argument came down to - America has a long track of messy but successful integration of many peoples from many cultures and forging new Americans. Sweden has little experience or track record of doing so.

Once that argument was deployed, the conversation would head in a different direction. It took me a long time to learn to make that argument but it was, in general, reasonably effective.

What was true then, remains as true now. And it is not just about culture. Politics and policy are central to this as well. In Sweden, their political/ideological Mandarin Class are as incompetent as in other countries. The foolishness of the multiculturalism craze took deeper root there than elsewhere. The idea that people are units that can be engineered towards a desired end is still common. And as a consequence, despite all the good will, and general intelligence of Swedes, the Mandarin Class have engineered a mass immigration of peoples who demonstrate little inclination to become Swedes. With results as reported by Ngo.