Så normalized racism & right-wing politics despite voters wanting equal welfare: deregulation and healthcare choices created insecurity; surplus labor kept wages down; “winner-takes-all” in parliament; S shot at the market in 2010. The anxiety became the fuel for the right. M attracts voters who like insecurity and SD attracts voters who like security. S is outmaneuvered when they don’t want to go more to the left in welfare and labor law.
It is too easy to shift blame. Destructivity is fostered by people refusing to defend themselves collectively, but instead leaving it to unreliable professional politicians to defend them.
The welfare society was built up by popular movement mobilization. Then we were demobilized with the argument that we could trust the state, and the welfare society was consequently dismantled.
The problem is not the evil of bad people but the passivity of good people, some popular movement leader, I have forgotten who, is alleged to have said. I would not talk about bad and good, we are all a mixture of both, I would rather have talked about privileged and unprivileged. But the essence of the statement still holds true.
Well, that's true. The problem is how easily led many normal people are.
Marx had an explanation for why French peasants could vote for an obvious swindler like Louis Napoléon Bonaparte. They had no way of checking what he stood for because they were not organized, he said.
Then, from the late 1800th century, people organized themselves into permanent organizations with their own internal public sphere. The result was astonishing – the standard increase for ordinary people from about 1880 was enormous.
Until state bureaucracy took over and the effect of the organization waned.
The lesson from this should be the one that Frances Tuuloskorpi always refers to (see e.g. https://francesblogg.com/): talk to us! Don't trust outsiders who have no vested interest in the matter. They may be well-meaning, but they don't put their soul into it, and then nothing will come of it.
Wisely