After Woke

There is life after Woke. But what kind of life? Having been Woker than most Sweden gives some hints of what to expect.

Swedish flag, Wikimedia Commons 

In the early 2000s, the United States of America was invading Iraq. By that time, Sweden was in a totally different mode: It was already going Woke.

It wasn't literally called Woke - by that time, the Woke concept didn't even exist in its current meaning. Instead, we called the phenomenon political correctness, or more often, PC. But it definitely were the general principles behind Woke that began to rule Swedish society by then. Swedish Woke peaked in the early 2010s and has been in decline since 2015. 

Currently, I think we are getting a glimpse of what is coming after. A glimpse that could be of use to those of you who live in societies that are still in full Woke mode.

A Swedish flavor of Woke

In principle, Woke in Sweden was the same as Woke in America. It was about the evil, successful majority causing innocent minorities to be unsuccessful and miserable and what to do about that. However, since both the time frame and the demography differs between Woke in Sweden and in America, some important details differ. 

In the Anglosphere, the transgender issue is an enormously important part of Woke. Not so in Sweden. By the time transgender became an important issue, around 2015, Swedish Woke was already in decline. Early on, the LGBTQ issue took over some subcultural spheres in Sweden. But that was it. By and large, Swedish society as a whole never took the transgender question very seriously. 

Swedish Woke also was not as much about race as American Woke. Simply because Sweden is, and especially was, not as racially segregated as America. Sweden has many third world immigrants. But racially, most of them are, more than anything else, white: Arabs and Afghans are not another race compared to Europeans. So complaining about "whiteness" doesn't work in Sweden.

Another difference between Sweden and America was that in Sweden, the population category described as worthy of compassion and charity was created in real time, by Woke itself. In the early 2000s, when Woke rapidly became fashionable in Sweden, there was not much of a racially and culturally segregated lower class like there has been in America for two hundred years. Instead, such a class was being created, day by day, through refugee immigration from Third World countries. Swedish Woke was predominantly a question of defending the value of Third World immigrants and of supporting the ongoing creation of an ethnically distinct underclass. What black people are for American Woke, Third World immigrants of all races were for Swedish Woke. 

Where it began

In the late 00s, pro-immigration became the most important political question in Sweden. Not because the idea was new. Immigration of people from different cultures had been an ideal of the Swedish elite since the 1960s.

The difference was that in the 00s, the idea for the first time met significant opposition. Before that, the multi-cultural ideal had been more of an idea than reality. Before 1990, the immigrants were mostly socialists from Chile, anti-Islamists from Iran, some Palestinians and, most of all, labor immigrants from Italy and Yugoslavia. Not being racist to them was pretty easy. Both for the elite that invited them and for the people who had to co-reside with them. Anti-immigration opinions were a fringe phenomenon: Young people who really, really wanted to provoke and seek out fights gathered in groups of neo-Nazis and skinheads. Otherwise, few people opposed the immigration policy. 

During the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s, Sweden lost its ability to decide its level of hospitality itself. That was also the beginning of anti-immigrant politics in Sweden. An ephemeral anti-immigration party won seats in the parliament. But the opposition against the influx of Yugoslavs was mostly rather short-lived. After all, the Yugoslavs were white, secular Europeans whose compatriots had been immigrating to Sweden for 30 years already.   

Reality knocking

The successful integration of the Yugoslav refugees and the even more successful overcoming of anti-immigration sentiment emboldened the Swedish elites. From the second half of the 1990s immigration to Sweden increased inexorably, driven by liberal immigration policies and simplified international travel. Swedish politicians were not worried. On the contrary, they were convinced not only that welcoming refugees was the right thing to do but also that welcoming refugees was a great way of signaling your goodness to the world. 

I grew up in a town of about 8000 people. That town became one of the early experiment grounds for the ever-expanding refugee project. In the early 2000s, a refugee reception center housing about 150 people opened up in an empty apartment complex. 

Since I considered myself open-minded, I did my best to make contact with the new arrivals. Early on, I came to speak with a man from West Africa who described himself as a street-smart person who knew how to get by. Going to Sweden was one way, he explained.

"Are you not a refugee?" I asked for clarification. 

"Would I be a refugee?", he exclaimed, ridiculing my question. It was obvious that he preferred to present himself like a savvy world citizen, not like some kind of victim I should feel sorry for.

Many of his colleagues from the refugee center radiated the same kind of confidence. A number of migrant men obviously liked the sexual moral of their place of origin better than that of Sweden. When I biked through town to my summer job, it happened more than once that groups of 5-10 young men shouted and made obscene gestures toward me. Probably they thought I wore too little clothes.

I never felt certain that the refugee center housed zero genuine refugees who most of all just wanted to integrate in a wonderful country like Sweden. How could I know that? Probably there were a few such humble people behind the much more visible confident young men. But I immediately saw that saving those innocent souls would be costly. Because, clearly, they were accompanied by significant numbers of opportunists who didn't hesitate to claim their place, wherever they came. Local newspapers reported a surge in crime, both violent and drug-related. No one doubted where it came from.

I might have considered myself more open-minded than the average town dweller. But my conclusion about the immigration that hit us did not deviate from that of the majority: That it didn't work as intended. For those of us who happened to live in small towns with refugee reception centers, it wasn't the least difficult to predict the large-scale segregation and crime that would become the result of the mass immigration project. What we saw was nothing less than a miniature version of the problems that were to assault Sweden as a whole a decade later.

Setting the tone of politics

For fifteen years to come, politics would be an open contest between people like me, who for some reason had come to disbelieve the immigration project, and the Woke elite who castigated us as racist, xenophobic, uneducated, misguided, unscientific… uncivilized brutes in need of correction.

In the early 2000s, people who opposed the immigration system were at a heavy disadvantage. But as more and more immigrants needed somewhere to live, more and more Swedes became their neighbors. During the 00s, more and more people, most of them in peripheral small towns, saw the things people in my town had seen.

The number of discontents grew rapidly. But since opposing or even criticizing the status quo meant being a brute of the worst kind, no respectable elite person could do it. The Sweden Democrats, a party founded in the 1980s by skinheads and neo-Nazis, were the only ones willing to take on that role. With their background they sat perfectly with the establishment elite who could now call everyone who was slightly against immigration a Nazi. 

Refuse to take the discussion

In the 2010 election, the Sweden Democrats won 6 percent of the votes. Enough to form a swing vote between the left and right blocs. But not in Sweden. Among the first things that the right-wing minority government did after the election was a migration policy deal with the left-wing opposition. The deal made the already liberal Swedish migration policy even more liberal. But the real reason for the deal, according to prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, was to show the Sweden Democrats and their voters that their entry into parliament had changed nothing, but had in fact made things worse. This behavior by the country's leading politician might have been viewed as childish. But not in Sweden in 2011. Here it was perfectly normal and applauded by the entire media and most of the population.

A few years ensued when the main number in Swedish politics was opposing the Sweden Democrats and their voters. Competition among the traditional parties hovered around one question: Who disliked the Sweden Democrats the most? Who refused to speak with them, and their voters, the most?

The most visible way to show distaste for the Sweden Democrats was to increase immigration and expand perks for immigrants as much as possible. That was also what happened. Sweden, which had a population of 9.38 million in 2010, welcomed more than 1.2 million immigrants in the decade between 2010 and 2020. Some of these were returning Swedish emigrants and invisible immigrants from our Nordic neighbors. But most were refugees from the third world with experiences and opinions vastly different from the majority population of Sweden.

Peak Woke

The modern conception of Woke generally implies being a bit detached from reality. Or, rather, not caring very much about reality in the first place, instead focusing on the perception of reality. This can work for some time. But it can not work forever. And when it stops working the heights of Woke will forever be remembered for its inconceivable detachment from reality.

I think there is a date for when Peak Woke happened in Sweden: 16 August 2014. On this date Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt gave a speech as part of an election campaign. The speech is famous enough to have its own Wikipedia page. In it the Prime Minister doubled down on the anti-racist policies of the last four years. As an election speech it is a bit odd, instead of promising to throw money around the Prime Minister solemnly stated that refugee reception was hollowing out the government budget leaving very little room for other spending. Most of all, the speech is remembered for two phrases. The first one is the notion that Sweden is a "humanitarian super power" on a par with other super powers. The other, which has given the speech its unofficial name, is that Swedes need to "open your hearts" for the refugees arriving. Especially the last one has become something of a Swedish meme, jokingly repeated again and again as reality hit us for real.

The Prime Minister's speech was considered over-the-top the moment he delivered it. In 2014, large numbers of immigrants were already arriving in Sweden, enticed by the warm welcome they were receiving. In 2015 the Syrian refugee crisis hit Europe and 150 000 people arrived in Sweden, most of them during a few months over the summer and autumn. The vast numbers meant that practically all of Sweden got to experience what I had experienced 15 years earlier. In 2015, the migrants were so many that they had to be squeezed in almost everywhere, even in chic areas that had to that point been spared most of the immigration reception. 

The whole of Sweden now reacted like my town had reacted when the refugee center came there. Murmurs of disgruntlement could be heard throughout the population while the elites were busy lauding themselves for their humanitarian greatness. From this period we have some of the most hilarious examples of Woke gone wild in Sweden. Like the response from the police to an epidemic of public groping by recently arrived Afghan youths: The police handed out wristbands that said "Don't grope". If the aim of the campaign was to tell the public that the police most of all spent their days politely asking criminals to stop committing crimes, it was a great success.

Business as usual - in a new way

In general, Swedes didn't like their new demography. The refugees have been hard to integrate into Swedish society. They have problems getting jobs on the closed Swedish labor market where unqualified jobs are scarce. They are clustering in ethnic ghettos. Most Swedish towns, middle-sized or larger, now have an ethnic enclave. Street crime has soared and Sweden now has the second highest gun homicide rate in Europe (they only shoot more people per capita in Croatia). 

One could expect that unpopular policies that overwhelm an entire society get reversed. That didn't really happen in Sweden. Anti-immigration sentiment was universal, like in this opinion poll from March 2016 where 70% of Swedes wanted less immigration and only 7% wanted more. Being anti-immigration was still a taboo position. But since it was no longer feasible to be publicly pro-immigration the politicians and the media did the second best thing: they ignored the subject.

This, I believe, is a central pillar of post-Woke: never, ever, admit you were wrong. The Swedish government did tighten immigration policy somewhat. But they never admitted that it had been wrong before. The explanation was that new times required new policies and no one could have been expected to figure out that huge immigration would have led to huge integration problems. "We didn't see it coming", the then Prime Minister blurted out in 2019 concerning the sharp increase in organized crime among immigrants. Among the more cynically minded, that sentence became another meme symbolizing the ineptitude of the elite. 

For those who do not want to admit a mistake, there is one classical option: Blame someone else for the failures. That was what the Swedish elites did. When the Prime Minister said we didn't see it coming, that sounded stupid to us who had seen it coming for at least a decade. But more importantly, it shifted the blame to those who failed to live up to the elite's expectations: The immigrants themselves. The elite had expected the immigrants to be as civic minded and loyal as the indigenous population. Apparently, some of them chose not to be. And that was a foolish choice from their side. The elite could never have expected anyone to act that irrationally. 

Subsequently, wrong choices that immigrants make would become a recurring theme. During the years that came, immigrants were criticized by the elites that brought them to Sweden for having too many children while being on welfare and of believing Islamists more than Swedish authorities. It was a creeping, complete reversal of the Woke dogma of absolving minorities from any responsibility. It was, in itself, the end of Woke and the beginning of something new.

Simply the best

The Swedish people did not protest against the reversal. For them, Woke had only been a fluke. It had been just one of many expressions of Swedish exceptionalism. More were to come after Woke. 

Fundamentally, Woke builds on a sense of society being immensely powerful. Yes we can! We can do it! Barack Obama proclaimed in some kind of Woke prelude in 2008. Wir Schaffen das! exclaimed German Chancellor Angela Merkel when a million Syrians entered Germany in 2015.

Woke people abhor ideas of individual responsibility for one reason: They believe society to be capable of almost anything. Why cruelly ask unfortunate individuals to improve their own situation, when society can help them instead? Woke builds on the idea of an almost supernaturally strong society that can do almost anything for anyone.

For that reason, Woke suited Sweden better than most. For most of the 20th century, the people of Sweden were strongly convinced of society's ability to do good. In general, Swedes never doubted that our country was more benevolent, more sophisticated, simply a little more developed than other nations. 

That attitude was probably founded in the 1960s and 1970, when Sweden was one of the world's richest countries and its most ambitious welfare state. Once upon a time, Sweden actually was exceptional. But its success didn't build on any rocket science and others could easily catch up. By the early 2000s, Sweden was just an ordinary country in the periphery of Western Europe. An ordinary country with a population that expected their country to be something more than that. The role as crazy Woke paradise almost came by itself. 

When Woke obviously failed, that didn't lead to a lot of self-critical introspection. People didn't ask: Why were we so overconfident? Why did we believe ourselves to be better than others? Instead, the elite and people of Sweden quickly sobered from its immigration megalomania, ready to look for signs of their specialness elsewhere. 

Probably the best experts in the world

Such signs showed up in 2020, when the news of a new virus broke. World leaders and experts hesitated. Should action be taken? As the virus showed itself capable of both spreading rapidly and killing a significant proportion of those affected, experts all over the world made the conclusion that without efforts to slow the spread of the virus, millions of people would die and health care facilities would be over-strained.

The experts at the Swedish Public Health Agency in Stockholm were exceptions. In January 2020, they declared it very unlikely that the virus would reach Sweden. When it obviously did a month later, they instead downplayed its alleged dangerousness: It was no more dangerous than the flu, they declared. In March, they predicted that it wouldn't be a classic pandemic, only a contagion that jumped between different hot spots like Wuhan and Northern Italy.

During the spring, a few men at the Public Health Agency always found different excuses why the virus shouldn't be taken too seriously. Sometimes those reasons contradicted each other. On the one hand, they said the virus was not especially contagious. Asymptomatic spread was not significant, they said, so if people just stayed home when they felt ill and washed their hands often that would be enough to curb the spread. On the other hand, the virus was so contagious that a large proportion of Swedes had probably already been infected without knowing it. Herd immunity was coming soon, they declared in April 2020. And everything was always someone else's fault. If a lot of people died in retirement homes, that was because Sweden had badly run retirement homes. Not because the authorities failed to stop the virus from entering the very retirement homes we had.

Other scientists and doctors were aghast. Thousands of academics challenged the Public Health Agency. To little avail. Although a vast majority of experts, abroad and probably in Sweden too, thought the virus was both contagious and rather deadly, the Swedish people preferred to listen to what the mass media and the government called our experts. No matter that those experts disagreed with almost all other experts. In mainstream mass media, doctors and scientists who dared to speak up against the Public Health Agency were described as a A shame for Sweden. 

After a few frantic months, the nationalist euphoria subsided. It became increasingly clear that our experts weren't completely consistent. When it became obvious that Sweden’s liberal pandemic response had come at the price of significantly more deaths than comparable countries, the Public Health Agency was quietly sidelined. From then on Sweden’s pandemic response was firmly in the hands of the politicians and from the autumn of 2020 it stayed close to the international consensus. Officially there was no change in policy. Our experts just got less and less mass media space, their role petering out almost unnoticeably.

The Swedish population at large didn't think it was strange at all that their experts were right and almost all other experts wrong. During the first year of the pandemic, a large percentage of the Swedish population believed Sweden's coronavirus strategy to be great. The assertions of the Government's public health experts were both unscientific and contradictory. But they struck a nerve with the Swedish people. They knew they were better than others and just waited for someone to give them a reason why. 

In America, there was a clear left-right division around the coronavirus restrictions, where the right defended freedom and the left defended the protection of vulnerable people. In Sweden, the division became the opposite. Right-wing alternative media criticized the Public Health Authority and questioned our experts. Mainstream media acted as their megaphones. As the immigration issue had become unfashionable, the Swedish elite found a new outlet for their ambitions for a while: They had the best experts in the world.

A nation under attack 

During the pandemic a new paradigm was established: The reason why others criticized Sweden was that Sweden was the best. If people complained about Sweden, it must be due to envy and malice. An attitude not very unlike that of Russia as Western sanctions intensified: The more others disapprove of us, the better it must mean we are. And if anyone within the country disapproves, that must mean they are traitors. 

This new, defensive attitude began with the reporting about the gang violence. In the late 2010s, the expression Sverigebilden (the image of Sweden) became popular. Politicians and journalists started talking not about how gang violence affected Swedish society but how gang violence affected the outside world’s view of Sweden. The few Swedes who talked about this in English aimed at an international audience were openly accused of disloyalty and a lack of patriotism. In 2020, critics of Sweden’s pandemic response met the same fate.

Shortly after the coronavirus pandemic, a new enemy of the nation emerged: In early 2021 videos started appearing on social media of immigrant children being taken from their families by Swedish child protection services. A movement was quickly formed that complained openly about what immigrants perceived was racism and prejudice against them. 

The response from Swedish society was as unified as it was resolute. There was no discussion about the methods and outcomes of the child protection system. Instead it was immediately declared that the image of Sweden was under attack by… Islamists. 

Islamists were a known enemy of all things progressive. Even more, islamists were a familiar enemy of the xenophobes of the last decade. Suddenly the entire political and journalistic elite were on the same side as the anti-immigration crowd. Finally, the whole nation was united in its fight against hostile Islamists. 

The fact that Islamism had little to do with the discontent seemed to bother no one. The child snatching videos were shared widely, including by some known Middle Eastern Islamists, but it was clear for everyone who looked that the movement in itself was not Islamist. If nothing else, immigrant women without veils were giving speeches at the rallies (1,2). No one ever succeeded in, or even bothered, to explain why Islamists would deliberately target Sweden of all countries. 

Nor did anyone ever bother to examine the child protection cases at the root of the uproar. Since I have written a book about the Swedish child protection system I was contacted by one of the original immigrant protesters and I examined their case. I could see that they were most probably not victims of overt racism. But they were victims of an aggressive and arbitrary child protection system. There are few texts in English that explain that system. In 2016 BBC wrote an article about the thorough lack of justice in the Norwegian child protection system. The situation in Sweden is similar. 

The systematic arbitrariness of the child protection system is perplexing even to its Swedish victims. Immigrants could be excused for trying to make sense of it by blaming racism. But the mass media and the public were not interested in the system’s weaknesses. They preferred to describe people complaining over children taken from their parents as an attack against the Swedish nation.

Always in need of an enemy

I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that Woke originated in Sweden. I can't think of any other country that was overwhelmed with this kind of political correctness before it happened to Sweden. The other Scandinavian countries were no later, but the Woke craze didn't get as strong there. They voted in anti-immigrant parties in their parliaments with less open conflict. On the whole they appear to have handled the elite-people conflict in a somewhat more civilized manner. If society-wide Woke is a Swedish invention that would certainly be ironic, because one important part of Swedish Woke was to claim that Swedes never, ever invent anything on the cultural level.

What makes societies go Woke in the first place? I think it might be something very simple: The need for an enemy. Societies that lack outer enemies have to find an inside enemy: It's own populace. Woke is a movement where the elite allies with a certain part of the population against another part of the population. 

Every society needs an enemy to unite against. The purpose is to cultivate a sense of superiority: We are better than them. In the early 2000s, when Sweden was developing ultra-Woke, America already had an enemy, far far away. American society didn't need to seek an enemy inside its border, because it had one outside. When America invaded Iraq, we were the whole American people, its superior technology and its great cultural values celebrating freedom. It was classical nationalism. A project that fell apart when costs amassed and victories failed to materialize.

Woke, on the other hand, is a civil war. The Woke we is the state. The them is civil society. Basically, Woke builds on a high estimate of official society and a low estimate of civil society. Woke expects the state to fix all injustices because it assumes it can fix them. As such, Woke is wishful thinking on steroids. When Woke fantasizes about how much official society can achieve, it automatically makes the family and civil society look suspicious. Surely they are filled with old-fashioned, prejudiced people that stand in the way of the great projects of the glorious state and its extremely rational and efficient institutions.

That way, Woke has an important thing in common with fascist ideologies: It puts great trust in the state at the expense of the organic components of society. 

Life after Woke

Woke is a symptom of a society that needs an enemy - something that tends to happen after prolonged periods of peace. It is also a symptom of a society where the elite is able to set the agenda and focus on their own petty conflicts instead of serving the people. 

When Sweden was in full Woke-mode, it was too easy to see Woke as a state of mass-psychosis that had arrived quickly and would disappear just as quickly, returning the country to a sane condition. Woke did indeed weaken and dissolve. But the public debate became no saner. Because the underlying cause remained. 

The elite still controls the mass media. It can still choose its own adversaries. For a long time, it kept Woke going in spite of the public opposition against it. That was possible because the elite could build their own strawmen of public opinion. They could pick the most confused, extreme and disagreeable of its opponents and argue against them, making themselves look like the only sane alternative. 

That thing didn't change at all after Woke. When Woke became untenable, the elites quietly discontinued their project of calling everyone who opposed immigration a racist or a Nazi. Instead, they chose other, equally deplorable opponents. Everyone opposing the Swedish line in the coronavirus question was unscientific, probably a crazy anti-vaxxer. Everyone opposing the decisions of child-protection services was an Islamist. Everyone who talked too loudly about gang violence was a traitor.

Woke was the frenzy that killed every debate between the state and civil society: Before Woke, there were left-wingers who believed in the state and right-wingers who believed in market forces and civil society. Woke made the positions change, so left-wing came to mean Woke and right-wing came to mean non-Woke. After Woke, there is no one left to defend civil society and individual freedom. Every fraction of the elite of present-day Sweden heartily agrees that the damage brought on by Woke is to be cured by the actions of a strong, all-encompassing state. 

Swedish Woke was the beginning of a new degree of authoritarianism. A largely non-violent, dull shade of authoritarianism. On the road towards a society where the state is always right and civil society and the individual are considered misguided, Woke was only a temporary fluke. The underlying forces were much stronger.