Re: [Marxism] Denmark's democratic socialism

[MM via Marxism]

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> On Feb 19, 2016, at 8:47 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> "I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway and 
> learn what they have accomplished for their working people."
> 
> --Bernie Sanders

That word “their” toward the end is the giveaway.

Social democracy: the gated community as political ideology.
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[Marxism] Denmark's democratic socialism

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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"I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and 
Norway and learn what they have accomplished for their working people."


--Bernie Sanders

Liberal, Harsh Denmark
NY Review of Books, MARCH 10, 2016 ISSUE
by Hugh Eakin

1.

In country after country across Europe, the Syrian refugee crisis has 
put intense pressure on the political establishment. In Poland, voters 
have brought to power a right-wing party whose leader, Jarosław 
Kaczyński, warns that migrants are bringing “dangerous diseases” and 
“various types of parasites” to Europe; in France, in December, only a 
last-minute alliance between the Socialists and the conservatives 
prevented the far-right National Front from triumphing in regional 
elections. Even Germany, which took in more than a million 
asylum-seekers in 2015, has been forced to pull back in the face of a 
growing revolt from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s own party and the recent 
New Year’s attacks on women in Cologne, allegedly by groups of men of 
North African origin.


And then there is Denmark. A small, wealthy Scandinavian democracy of 
5.6 million people, it is according to most measures one of the most 
open and egalitarian countries in the world. It has the highest income 
equality and one of the lowest poverty rates of any Western nation. 
Known for its nearly carbon-neutral cities, its free health care and 
university education for all, its bus drivers who are paid like 
accountants, its robust defense of gay rights and social freedoms, and 
its vigorous culture of social and political debate, the country has 
long been envied as a social-democratic success, a place where the state 
has an improbably durable record of doing good. Danish leaders also have 
a history of protecting religious minorities: the country was unique in 
Nazi-occupied Europe in prosecuting anti-Semitism and rescuing almost 
its entire Jewish population.


When it comes to refugees, however, Denmark has long led the continent 
in its shift to the right—and in its growing domestic consensus that 
large-scale Muslim immigration is incompatible with European social 
democracy. To the visitor, the country’s resistance to immigrants from 
Africa and the Middle East can seem implacable. In last June’s Danish 
national election—months before the Syrian refugee crisis hit Europe—the 
debate centered around whether the incumbent, center-left Social 
Democrats or their challengers, the center-right Liberal Party, were 
tougher on asylum-seekers. The main victor was the Danish People’s 
Party, a populist, openly anti-immigration party, which drew 21 percent 
of the vote, its best performance ever. Its founder, Pia Kjærsgaard, for 
years known for suggesting that Muslims “are at a lower stage of 
civilization,” is now speaker of the Danish parliament. With the backing 
of the Danish People’s Party, the center-right Liberals formed a 
minority government that has taken one of the hardest lines on refugees 
of any European nation.


When I arrived in Copenhagen last August, the new government, under 
Liberal Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, had just cut social 
benefits to refugees by 45 percent. There was talk among Danish 
politicians and in the Danish press of an “invasion” from the Middle 
East—though the influx at the time was occurring in the Greek islands, 
more than one thousand miles away. In early September, Denmark began 
taking out newspaper ads in Lebanon and Jordan warning would-be 
asylum-seekers not to come. And by November, the Danish government 
announced that it could no longer accept the modest share of one 
thousand refugees assigned to Denmark under an EU redistribution 
agreement, because Italy and Greece had lost control of their borders.


These developments culminated in late January of this year, when 
Rasmussen’s minister of integration, Inger Støjberg, a striking, 
red-headed forty-two-year-old who has come to represent the government’s 
aggressive anti-refugee policies, succeeded in pushing through 
parliament an “asylum austerity” law that has gained notoriety across 
Europe. The new law, which passed with support from the Social Democrats 
as well as the Danish People’s Party, permits police to strip-search 
asylum-seekers and confiscate their cash and most valuables above 10,000 
Danish kroner ($1,460) to pay for their accommodation; delays the 
opportunity to apply for family reunification by up to three years; 
forbids asylum-seekers from residing outside refugee centers, some of 
which are tent encampments; reduces the cash benefits they can receive; 
and makes it significantly harder to qualify for permanent residence. 
One aim, a Liberal MP