Thank you. This was so interesting! The parallels to Canada’s right wing populists and their relationship to Canadian culture, which shares a lot of the same values and characteristics as Norwegian culture, is striking. Public broadcasting, support for the arts, our National Film Board, effort to be inclusive of our founding cultures and more recent cultures. It is our strength, but the right makes out that we are broken. We are not.
Yeah, and I think fellow left-wingers need to be reminded of this, that hey we actually put in an effort to promote and preserve our identity, history and national characteristics. Like we are actually proud of our nations.
I listen a bit to that Pierre Poilievre because my wife is Canadian-American, and he seems to me like he isn't proud of Canada at all. He seems ashamed of Canadian culture and identity and wants to replace it with American culture.
I mean isn't he all for shutting down all these Canadian cultural initiatives? What is left then? All your culture will be flooded with American stuff. And I guess that is fine if one has zero national pride and think one's own identity and culture is trash worth nothing. But why would anyone let that happen who actually loves their country?
So yeah that is what I really want to help rally the left all over behind. Don't let the right control the narrative on who actually loves the nation and culture. The only way they care about domestic culture and identity is when it gives them an opportunity beat some hapless immigrant and claim he isn't Canadian enough or American enough or Norwegian enough.
Like our populist right party Frp. They keep screaming how immigrants need to integrate better and then just cut funding for language training and just about anything that actually helps them integrate. It makes you wonder if they truly care about integration or if what they really look for is someone to blame and attack.
I’m afraid the people leading these far right parties are cynically catering to the prejudices of their followers. Our old Progressive Conservative Party was much more centrist, but when they merged with the western populist party the Canadian Alliance that came out of the Reform and Social Credit parties they became much more extreme and libertarian. Some of it was part of the Thatcher / Reagan revolution. It’s a nasty mix. Elon Musk’s grandfather was associated with Social Credit and the Technocracy Party, another odd western fringe party. The historian Jill Lepore made a very good podcast about Musk that goes into some of this. Social media seems to have been a big accelerant for the movement. It’s very worrying. I do appreciate your effort to inform people about this. You are a very good communicator and an effective advocate for social democracy. I have been reading Martin Wolf’s Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. It is interesting to read someone who is such a strong advocate of free markets and capitalism making a very persuasive case for a free market version of social democracy such as is found in the Nordics. I think what has happened in the US and Britain has caused his thinking to evolve on this.
Wonderful article, Erik. Norway was where I lived my first twenty years as an independent adult. (Age 18-38) The challenge for any society is adapting to change, perhaps especially when it comes to integrating immigrants. Norway, often led by social democratic and centrist politicians who understand the importance of balancing economic progress without compromising cultural values, has managed change well.
I do really think this approach to integration can work, but living in a immigrant majority area, I think a challenge we must be honest about today is that the influx is too big.
Integration takes time and I am not sure if we integrate at pace that is higher than the influx of new people. The Swedish experience worries me a bit.
To me it is important to bank a win for a humane progressive society on multiculturalism and that win can be hard to achieve if the immigrant population grows too fast.
With some moderation I believe it can be pulled off and one can show that multiculturalism done right and in moderation actually works. Rapid change of any kind is hard to tackle.
Thanks Erik. I fully agree. It’s a challenge to get the balance right. In times of economic growth or, as some countries are now experiencing, a demographically driven declining labour force, immigration is a way to solve the problem. From another perspective, if a country becomes viewed as a land of opportunity by immigrants who have built a successful life, it becomes attractive for others to follow in their path. Moderation is key, as you say, but for those in charge, it’s a challenge. Integration does take time. Indeed, in my experience, one can never fully integrate. I was functionally fully integrated when I lived in Norway and Denmark. I even had light skin, blue eyes, and a Norwegian name. But in the eyes of locals, I wasn’t fully Norwegian. As John Irving said in his book “A Son of the Circus”, “Immigrants are immigrants all their lives.”
As for where I am today, I live in the city where I grew up in Canada. We moved here in 2018 to be closer to my aging parents. Canada struggles to find the right balance on immigration, too.
Thank you. This was so interesting! The parallels to Canada’s right wing populists and their relationship to Canadian culture, which shares a lot of the same values and characteristics as Norwegian culture, is striking. Public broadcasting, support for the arts, our National Film Board, effort to be inclusive of our founding cultures and more recent cultures. It is our strength, but the right makes out that we are broken. We are not.
Yeah, and I think fellow left-wingers need to be reminded of this, that hey we actually put in an effort to promote and preserve our identity, history and national characteristics. Like we are actually proud of our nations.
I listen a bit to that Pierre Poilievre because my wife is Canadian-American, and he seems to me like he isn't proud of Canada at all. He seems ashamed of Canadian culture and identity and wants to replace it with American culture.
I mean isn't he all for shutting down all these Canadian cultural initiatives? What is left then? All your culture will be flooded with American stuff. And I guess that is fine if one has zero national pride and think one's own identity and culture is trash worth nothing. But why would anyone let that happen who actually loves their country?
So yeah that is what I really want to help rally the left all over behind. Don't let the right control the narrative on who actually loves the nation and culture. The only way they care about domestic culture and identity is when it gives them an opportunity beat some hapless immigrant and claim he isn't Canadian enough or American enough or Norwegian enough.
Like our populist right party Frp. They keep screaming how immigrants need to integrate better and then just cut funding for language training and just about anything that actually helps them integrate. It makes you wonder if they truly care about integration or if what they really look for is someone to blame and attack.
I’m afraid the people leading these far right parties are cynically catering to the prejudices of their followers. Our old Progressive Conservative Party was much more centrist, but when they merged with the western populist party the Canadian Alliance that came out of the Reform and Social Credit parties they became much more extreme and libertarian. Some of it was part of the Thatcher / Reagan revolution. It’s a nasty mix. Elon Musk’s grandfather was associated with Social Credit and the Technocracy Party, another odd western fringe party. The historian Jill Lepore made a very good podcast about Musk that goes into some of this. Social media seems to have been a big accelerant for the movement. It’s very worrying. I do appreciate your effort to inform people about this. You are a very good communicator and an effective advocate for social democracy. I have been reading Martin Wolf’s Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. It is interesting to read someone who is such a strong advocate of free markets and capitalism making a very persuasive case for a free market version of social democracy such as is found in the Nordics. I think what has happened in the US and Britain has caused his thinking to evolve on this.
Wonderful article, Erik. Norway was where I lived my first twenty years as an independent adult. (Age 18-38) The challenge for any society is adapting to change, perhaps especially when it comes to integrating immigrants. Norway, often led by social democratic and centrist politicians who understand the importance of balancing economic progress without compromising cultural values, has managed change well.
Ønsker deg en god syttende mai på lørdag! 🇳🇴
Thank you Paul! Where abouts are you now?
I do really think this approach to integration can work, but living in a immigrant majority area, I think a challenge we must be honest about today is that the influx is too big.
Integration takes time and I am not sure if we integrate at pace that is higher than the influx of new people. The Swedish experience worries me a bit.
To me it is important to bank a win for a humane progressive society on multiculturalism and that win can be hard to achieve if the immigrant population grows too fast.
With some moderation I believe it can be pulled off and one can show that multiculturalism done right and in moderation actually works. Rapid change of any kind is hard to tackle.
Thanks Erik. I fully agree. It’s a challenge to get the balance right. In times of economic growth or, as some countries are now experiencing, a demographically driven declining labour force, immigration is a way to solve the problem. From another perspective, if a country becomes viewed as a land of opportunity by immigrants who have built a successful life, it becomes attractive for others to follow in their path. Moderation is key, as you say, but for those in charge, it’s a challenge. Integration does take time. Indeed, in my experience, one can never fully integrate. I was functionally fully integrated when I lived in Norway and Denmark. I even had light skin, blue eyes, and a Norwegian name. But in the eyes of locals, I wasn’t fully Norwegian. As John Irving said in his book “A Son of the Circus”, “Immigrants are immigrants all their lives.”
As for where I am today, I live in the city where I grew up in Canada. We moved here in 2018 to be closer to my aging parents. Canada struggles to find the right balance on immigration, too.