From The Jerusalem Post
By Bruce Bawer and Daniel Johnson
These days nearly every Western European country has at least one of them - a large political party that's held at arm's length by the media, political establishment, academia and the chattering classes. Some of these black sheep - such as the British National Party, Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front and the late Jorg Haider's crew in Austria - really are beyond the pale; others are demonized simply because they challenge statist dogma and/or speak forbidden truths about Islamic immigration.
In Scandinavia, the home of statism at its statiest, the most high-profile such entity is probably Pia Kjaersgaard's Danish People's Party. Two months after 9/11, voter anxiety about Islamization swept out the Social Democrats (in power since 1924) and installed a conservative coalition - which, with strong DPP support, has since instituted effective, and popular, reforms (and stood foursquare for free speech during the cartoon crisis).
The picture in Sweden is different: Although the 2006 election exchanged Goran Persson's long-dominant Social Democrats for a "moderate" coalition, systemic changes have been modest, and the only major critics of the Swedes' essentially unmodified "see-no-evil" immigration policy have been the Sweden Democrats - a group, alas, that has a history of neo-Nazi ties and anti-Semitic rhetoric (and, in any case, has yet to win a single Riksdag seat).
Somewhere in between lies Norway, whose major antiestablishment faction is the Progress Party, or Fremskrittspartiet (FrP for short). Founded in 1973, it was run for 28 years by the charismatic Carl I. Hagen, whose tough-talking pugnacity made him a standout, in the '80s and '90s, in a largely bland political firmament. Though nothing in the party's program would raise eyebrows in, say, moderate Republican circles in the US, its rejection of long-standing Nordic assumptions about the role of the state has long led the media to caricature its ideology as dangerous, its supporters as unevolved lowbrows and Hagen as a demagogue.
By Bruce Bawer and Daniel Johnson
These days nearly every Western European country has at least one of them - a large political party that's held at arm's length by the media, political establishment, academia and the chattering classes. Some of these black sheep - such as the British National Party, Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front and the late Jorg Haider's crew in Austria - really are beyond the pale; others are demonized simply because they challenge statist dogma and/or speak forbidden truths about Islamic immigration.In Scandinavia, the home of statism at its statiest, the most high-profile such entity is probably Pia Kjaersgaard's Danish People's Party. Two months after 9/11, voter anxiety about Islamization swept out the Social Democrats (in power since 1924) and installed a conservative coalition - which, with strong DPP support, has since instituted effective, and popular, reforms (and stood foursquare for free speech during the cartoon crisis).
The picture in Sweden is different: Although the 2006 election exchanged Goran Persson's long-dominant Social Democrats for a "moderate" coalition, systemic changes have been modest, and the only major critics of the Swedes' essentially unmodified "see-no-evil" immigration policy have been the Sweden Democrats - a group, alas, that has a history of neo-Nazi ties and anti-Semitic rhetoric (and, in any case, has yet to win a single Riksdag seat).
Somewhere in between lies Norway, whose major antiestablishment faction is the Progress Party, or Fremskrittspartiet (FrP for short). Founded in 1973, it was run for 28 years by the charismatic Carl I. Hagen, whose tough-talking pugnacity made him a standout, in the '80s and '90s, in a largely bland political firmament. Though nothing in the party's program would raise eyebrows in, say, moderate Republican circles in the US, its rejection of long-standing Nordic assumptions about the role of the state has long led the media to caricature its ideology as dangerous, its supporters as unevolved lowbrows and Hagen as a demagogue.
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