I’ve been dealing with a fairly aggressive Cold Warrior boomer from the US lately. When I counter their red baiting with criticisms of American liberalism, the person insists that they’re not actually a lib, but rather a Nordic-style socdem.
Does anyone guide me to any good communist criticisms of the Scandinavian capitalist states?
Pic possibly unrelated.
My conversation piece is that the nordic countries effectively prove the fact that long-term, social democracy is self-defeating.
If you're lucky, (or have access to oil or are otherwise part of a friendly, wealthy trading sphere), you can have decent public services, development, quality of life etc - but only for so many years before even the social democratic parties slide to the right and start dismantling the very things they built. It demonstrates the problem with not going far enough - it is not enough to simply emulate aspects of socialism within a capitalist mode of production - capitalism is like a cancer: if any remnant is left unchecked, it will resurge and reassert itself again and again.
The same is true of countries like the UK of course, but there you have a more reluctant and immediately antagonistic relationship with social democracy in which it is not undertaken willfully but rather resentfully - the alternative in the post-war era being communism.