Social Democratic Hauntings: On Swedish Dissociation and Melancholia

Once seen as a Western frontrunner of social progressivism and equality, Sweden has undergone momentous changes since the aggressive neoliberal dismantling of the postwar universal welfare state model started in the 1980s; today it is a stronghold of the European far right and has one of the highest levels of wealth inequality in the world. This essay analyzes the contemporary post–social democratic political landscape in Sweden, arguing that it is characterized by a state of both dissociation and melancholia, interlinked affective responses to the intensifying social pressures and structural crises the country faces. While the Right mobilizes racial melancholia to conjure up the stability of the past, significant segments of the political spectrum—including the Left—have long been demobilized by the stranglehold of a form of tragic optimism produced by a post-1991 fusion between the twentieth-century social democratic construction of Swedish exceptionalism and a neoliberal Fukuyaman triumphalism that disavows history and historical change. The essay traces this crisis of historical consciousness back to the hegemony of the Swedish Social Democratic Party in the twentieth century and the genre of folkhemmet nationalism that underpinned its project and whose affective afterlives continue to inform the political impasses we see today.