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e Church in Sweden may have ceased to be of religious significance, but it has a residual political function. It takes its place alongside the ABF, the trade unions and all the other corporate bodies whose purpose it is to maintain a hold on the population. The ABF study circle and the Church service each perform the same function, on different people of differing tastes: keeping them attached to the State and, by inference, the party. The Swedish Labour movement may seem unduly preoccupied with the question of keeping the Swedes under control. But that is the natural consequence of having held power too long. After a certain time, a party, no matter what its political complexion is, loses its concern for ideology and becomes obsessed instead with the perpetuation of power for its own sake. 9. Economic Security and Political Servitude If the propaganda of the Swedish Social Democrats has been so effective, it is because the recipients are so wilfully impressionable. Concerned only with economic security, the Swede is prepared to sacrifice most other things in life. For fear of quenching material progress by disturbing continuity of government, he has, with impressive regularity, returned the same party to office decade after decade; as the price of its maintenance, he has willingly surrendered to official regimentation. Whatever the moral arguments in favour of unseating a government too long in power, or of defending personal liberty against the advance of a technocratic State, economically there is none. mbt discount Prosperity secured, the Swedes consider that they have fulfilled themselves, and they therefore see no reason to question or to doubt. In the country of the affluent, ideology is dead, and politics are a matter of economics alone. But even if an affluent electorate may be lazy, contented and unadventurous, material prosperity by itself need not necessarily be a guarantee of power ad infinitum. “When Harold Macmillan told the British public that they had never had it so good he was speaking no more than the literal truth. Yet, within a year or two, his party was tasting the bitter dregs of opposition. Less than a decade afterwards, Harold Wilson in his turn was summarily dismissed by an electorate that had never ceased to have it better still. Nor did a bulging economy save the German Christian Democrats <a href="http://www.mytimberlandshoe.com/specials.html"><strong>timberland shoes</strong></a> in 1969. The proper comparisons with Sweden He, however, in her Economic Security and Political Servitude 167 Scandinavian neighbours, Norway and Denmark. In neither are there the political tensions and social discontent that Britain and Germany know, and that may obscure economic forces. In neither is mbt there the poverty that is supposedly the spur to political action. And yet in both, during the 1 cheap mbt 960s, the electorate unseated socialist governments that, like their counterparts in Sweden, had held office since the 1930s, and whose rule coincided with the establishment of prosperity and the consolidation of social welfare. In both, non-Socialist coalitions of the right and centre were returned to power instead. The Swedish Social Democrats palpably had other advantages. They enjoyed, as it were, another dimension to security of office. In both Norway and Denmark, there was no economic reason to turn out the sitting governments. Their fall was on truly political grounds. The Norwegian electorate voted as they did on a matter of principle. The government had been guilty of contempt of parliament. A Cabinet mbts outlet minister had concealed certain facts about the running of a State-owned mine. Economically, it counted for nothing, morally and constitutionally for a great deal. On several occasions the Swedes had been presented with issues of a similar complexion, of which the nationalization of the chemists is a good example. Yet the public scarcely reacted, because economically the consequences were negligible, and constitutional and moral considerations carried no weight. To be fair, Norway, Denmark and Sweden are not strictly comparable. All are admittedly Welfare States, and the heartland of Social Democracy. But Norway and Denmark, having suffered Nazi occupation during the last war, learned that principles must sometimes be put above material comfort. The Swedes never learned that lesson. The concept of principle seems not to exist for the Swede: he sees the mbt shoes world in economic terms alone. In the late eighteenth century, when Catholicism and Judaism were prohibited in Sweden, a 168 The New Totalitarians pamphleteer called Anders Chydenius proposed the admission of Catholics and Jews to the country on strictly utilitarian grounds. Sweden, poor and backward, needed capital and creative talent, and Chydenius <a href="http://www.mytimberlandshoe.com/designer-handbags-outlet-mulberry-handbags-c-46_66.html"><strong>mulberry handbags </strong></a> suggested that, to remedy the deficiency, rich and clever men ought to be enticed from abroad. Assuming that the most desirable acquisitions would either be French, which meant Catholic, or Jews, he proposed that they ought to be permitted to retain their own forms of worship. His suggestion was accepted and foreigners settling in Sweden were allowed to practise a religion other than that of the State Church. Swedes themselves had to wait a century for the same privilege: Chydenius was interested in political economy, not toleration. By contrast Macaulay, the champion of Catholic and Jewish emancipation in England, was concerned solely for the well-being of his fellow-citizens. When in 1834 he helped to carry the removal of their civil disabilities (religious toleration was already old) in the House mbt clearance of Lords he spurned economics, and argued on moral principles alone. Again, in 1864, the Swedish government refused to help the Danes in the war with Prussia over Schleswig-Holstein, although their king had promised to do so, on the grounds that it would imperil the economic development of Sweden. For good or ill, then, the Swede recognizes none but economic motives. He accepts economic determinism as an article of faith. He has for centuries regarded the proper business of all mbt lami human endeavour as the pursuit of economic goals alone. Today, he considers politics exclusively as a means to guarantee all forms of material security. Approximately the same might be said of many Western States. But the Swedish situation has lasted far longer. In other countries, the vestige of a politically directed past has survived to delay the advent of an economically motivated future. In Sweden, economics rule political institutions and form the national mentality with an absoluteness difficult to match elsewhere. The Swede rarely talks about social welfare or the Welfare Economic Security and Political Servitude 169 State. The concept which obsesses him is mbt something <a href="http://www.mytimberlandshoe.com/designer-handbags-outlet-chanel-handbags-c-46_50.html"><strong>chanel handbags </strong></a> rather more profound. It is an extreme form of security in all its senses, expressed in an untranslatable native word, trygghet. It means both safety and security: the safety of a harbour in a storm, and the security of the womb. It implies the absence of all things unpleasant and uncomfortable, and always has a connotation of escape from danger or of a frightened child running to his mother. It is perhaps the most belaboured word in the Swedish political vocabulary; no mbt shoes discount orator will speak without mentioning it; all slogans must contain it. In the political sense, trygghet means neutrality, the avoidance of war and insulation from the troubles of the outside world. At the same time, it conveys full employment and a certain comfort, and reassures the citizen that he is being looked after, and that the State has a paternalistic concern for his well-being. It is a highly emotive word. Many a careless politician has come to grief by accidentally threatening his voters’ sense of trygghet. On the other hand, clever men have succeeded by bolstering it, and by playing on fears of its removal. It is one of the undertones of trygghet that it can be easily lost, and that without it there is nothing but the outer darkness. All Swedish politicians have tried to play on this fear, but it is the Social Democrats who have appropriated it as their own particular weapon. In the grind of everyday politics, economic security is that particular branch of the all-embracing trygghet which is most easily exploited, because it is so tangible. The Social Democrats have buy mbt shoes imprinted on the electorate that economic security is the only issue to be considered at the polls. They have further impressed on them that its loss is the only evil, and that a change of government would bring about that loss. Absolute stability, a tinge of Nirvana, is another component of trygghet, and a view of change as a threat to that state is, so to speak, built into its definition. By exploiting this fear, the Social Democrats have induced the Swede to mbt stockists associate 170 The New Totalitarians political change with economic decay. The fear of change, thus promoted to an angst, has ruled Swedish society for decades. It is this, more than anything else, that has enabled the Social Democrats to remain in office for almost forty years. The concept of economic security has been extended with the rising of affluence. It no longer means exclusively the absence of need, but the maintenance of a particular degree of affluence. A pair of related concepts have been attached: prosperity and the standard of living. ‘Prosperity’ is a symbol for the corporate economic standing of society; ‘standard of living’ refers to the condition of the individual citizen. They have meant more things with the years: a wireless set, then TV, washing-up machine, then a motor car and so on. Although such things are the rewards of hard work and personal selection, general conditioning and political propaganda have presented them as the gifts of a paternalistic State. Equally important, from a political point of view, these Cheap mbts possessions have been raised to the status of essentials. Prosperity and mbt shoes australia standard of living have become words of incantation to invoke the emotions of trygghet. By suitable manipulation, the government has associated a threat to the lesser concepts with danger to the greater one. In this way, the sensitivity of the electorate has been attuned to the advance of society. It would be futile to play on fears of the hungry 1920s and 1930s in order to affect the well-fed generations to whom these are but the blatherings of turgid folklore. The achievement has been to give to the dislike of losing a washingup machine or T v set the same kind of angst which the fear of unemployment held in a harder decade. Political change, in most constitutionally governed countries, appeals to the electorate at certain intervals as something desirable in principle. Where life is hard there is less to lose, and where there is conflict and political tension voters may take principle into account. In Sweden, however, Economic Security and Political Servitude 171 voters may take principle into account. In Sweden, however, change can only threaten material standard, and therefore, almost by mbt uk definition, the desire of the opposition to unseat the ruling party repels the electorate and arouses their fears. Even when progress falters, the opposition has been unable to offer a convincing reason for a change of regime. Sometimes, they appear unwilling to bring it about. Like their supporters, the politicians are afraid of change. The economic nature of the Social Democrats’ appeal neatly emerges from a demonstration that their electoral support follows the growth in the GNP.* From 1971 to cheap mbt shoes 1973, both dropped in unison. During those years there was a recession, and unemployment reached the level, unacceptable by Swedish standards, of 4%. Predictably, the Social Democrats’ vote dropped at the General Election in 1973. Nevertheless with the aid <a href="http://banienel.com/galeria/displayimage.php?album=lastup&cat=0&pos=5"><strong >Kappa – Nike Air Jordan 10 shoes &amp;amp | 名鞋库</strong></a> of the Communists they managed to retain power – if by the skin of their teeth. Social Democratic strategists consider the fear of change to have been their salvation. Beforehand, they believed that the compulsion on the conscience was so strong that in the awful solitude of the voting booth sufficient strayed sheep would return to the fold, even against their better mbt judgement. The Swedish fear of change can indeed take bizarre forms. After 1932, the first real chance of unseating the Social Democrats occurred in the 1968 General Election. A housing shortage had undermined their position. But at the last moment there was a stampede, and the government won handsomely. Frightened at the prospect of change, the electorate had rallied round the established power. And opposition leaders admitted afterwards that they had made the fateful mistake of convincing the electorate that mbt shoes clearance a change of governmen