Carl-Vincent Reimers: Sjöstedt is right about the tone, but wrong about the blame

Sweden’s political conversation has taken a turn toward the harsher style associated with the United States, and Jonas Sjöstedt is right to point that out. But he is wrong to place the entire responsibility on the political right, argues Carl-Vincent Reimers of the liberal think tank Timbro.

For liberals, a decent public conversation is not a matter of etiquette alone. It is a foundation of a free society, allowing citizens to weigh competing arguments and gradually identify better ways forward. Reimers invokes Jürgen Habermas’s idea of “deliberative democracy,” in which debate puts substantive arguments and attentive listening at the center.

He accepts part of Sjöstedt’s explanation for why that model is now under strain. Social media platforms reward the most extreme material, giving participants powerful incentives to move toward the margins. The European Union’s Digital Services Act, he writes, represented an important attempt to address the worst abuses by imposing strong obligations on platforms to remove illegal and hateful content.

But the political analysis becomes one-sided when Sjöstedt assigns the deterioration entirely to the right. Reimers acknowledges that parts of the right have radicalized to the point of becoming hostile to liberal democracy, pointing to Donald Trump’s America and the now-removed Viktor Orbán as leading examples. In Sweden, he says, some Sweden Democrats use language that can make readers feel sick, and parts of the traditional right have imitated it.

Yet Reimers also argues that parts of Europe’s nationalist movement have moved in the opposite direction. France’s National Rally and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, once portrayed as dangerous nationalists, have shifted toward the center on the European Union, the rule of law and Russia. When radicalization has gone too far, he says, the traditional right has also shown that it can act, including through the liberal right’s role in removing Hungary’s Fidesz from the European People’s Party.