I don't think "racism" is the same phenomenon everywhere. There are similarities, and the humans are predisposed to divide the world into "us" and "other", but the justification and basis for that varies tremendously. 1/

I won't try to dispute claims like "nasty", "comfortable", or "spiritually impoverished", just say that I don't find such claims all the useful in helping us devise ways of responding to problems. Trying to make people in the Nordics less comfortable, for example, would do the opposite of help. 2/

What I would say is that the basis for the mass appeal of racism in the Nordics is quite different from its basis in the United States. 3/

In the United States, I think it's because we often revert to an antebellum social contract in which absolute immiseration of sizable populations is as ordinary, necessary, result of our Way Of Life, and… 4/

social stability is purchased by granting half the immiserated relative status over and access to the free labor of the other half. 5/

As we've abandoned the New Deal, allowed debilitating gulfs in relative status to widen, replenished the ranks of the precarious and immiserated, the US political system, which seeks to stabilize the status quo, is reaching backward to its toolkit for stabilizing this sort of order. 6/

I don't think this is anything like the basis for widespread popular racism in the Nordics, even though there is widespread popular racism in the Nordics, and a kind of convergent evolution makes the worst of the racists look pretty similar and ally with one another. 7/

In the Nordics, the chink in the armor of civilation through which racists ply their creed is a profoundly strong set of norms in favor of reciprocity and social cohesion, which is the basis for these societies' remarkable success. 8/

The Nordics may have generous universal benefits, but they are not societies full of people who live on the dole, even though their system would let them live on the dole! *Homo economicus* they ain't. Labor force participation is higher there than in the mean, mean, mean USA. 9/

Political entrepreneurs who successfully deploy racism in the Nordics (it is always political entrepreneurs, not some organic "nastiness" of the general public) portray non-ethnonationals as incapable of acquiring these norms of reciprocity and participating in the cohesive social unity. 10/

For the US, becoming more Nordic would in fact address many of the root causes of American racism. 11/

For the Nordics, they genuinely have to address issues of balancing a real social imperative to assimilate and the moral dilemmas, from the perspective of US-advanced liberal values, that might result from insisting upon assimilation. 12/

(the US — due in many respects to its economic flaws! — can tolerate strong multiculturalism more than societies that function well due to an extraordinary sense of belonging and reciprocity. we are in pieces already, our welfare state presumes everyone a shirker, so sure, be another fragment!) 13/

So yes, there is racism in the US and there is racism in the Nordics, and they sometimes look pretty similar, but it is a logical and policy error to presume that means, in a US context, a genuinely more economically sane society could not help remedy our susceptibility to racism. /fin