However, the government parties have, of course, the opportunity to initiate steps to strengthen or weaken opinion in a society, to the extent that the policy makers see viewpoint consensus as a problem; which of course they should do if they attach any importance to a number of things essential to a democratic society: free, non-politically-driven research, conceptual pluralism, aesthetic diversity in areas such as architecture, literature and visual arts; ideological and opinion-related tolerance.

Sweden has traditionally been a society where opinion convergence is great. The country’s stance during the 1900s has been underpinned by notions that it is stupid to pick a fight, that it is always more sophisticated to keep a distance from conflict and not choose sides except on idealistic grounds, when fighting for certain principles. In some sense, history has proved us right.

Sweden’s appeasement in World War II created an economic advantage in the post-war period of which we enjoyed the fruits during the 1960s – and 70s.

Encouraged by that experience, Sweden continued (at least officially) to maintain its neutrality during the Cold War, with the U.S. and NATO on one side and the USSR and Eastern Bloc on the other. Although it was obviously an unfortunate path in the sense that it created strange beliefs amongst many opinion leaders at the fringes of the ideological landscape, consisting of NATO-friendly liberals on the one hand, and Stalinist communists on the other. With social democracy as the obvious centre, it was of course an ideological map that the Social Democrats’, during their long reign, did everything to preserve (albeit that they had the same support among the common people as among journalists, politicians and cultural workers).

Add to that a historically conditioned belief in the good nature of the state, which goes back to the monarchy’s alliance with the peasants against the nobility, and an equally historically contingent sense that we have nothing to learn from the past and that the new is always preferable to the old, and we have the basic components of what has become the Swedish culture of consensus.

To the extent that those in power change, however, pluralism should be strengthened in a straightforward, almost organic way. It should be in every government’s interest to take a firm grip on policy and set it in a new direction (even if the new direction aims to reduce policy’s influence on culture, education and research).

The problem comes when this system fails, which clearly is the case with the current government. It is completing the leftist politicisation of museums with its directive that exhibitions be subordinated to the gender ideology or theoretical constructionist theories regarding LGBT issues. It completes the Left’s gender initiatives in education (whose influence on Swedish research is continuously communicated by the National Secretariat for Gender Research, which most recently spent a few million on examining gender equality in forestry). And they make it harder for alternatives to public service television by, for example, producing one entirely ideologically slanted story after another about Julian Assange (which would have been less problematic if Wikileaks had not taken a position so clearly against liberal democracies and for states and organisations who oppose liberal democracies).

Key management positions in education, culture and opinion-building go to people whose agendas signal that they will preserve the structures and reward systems built up over the Social Democrats’ long reign in government – with the consequence that the emergence of new ideas is hampered.

Anna Ekström, as Director General of National Agency for Education, and Stina Oscarsson as head of the Radio Theatre are but two examples (while the latter embraces, in the cultural sphere, the dominant notion that: ”all our Western ways of life are so deeply immoral that it is hypocritical of us to even talk about morality”, the former claimed that her dream was that every teacher should be a ”gender teacher” and that today’s teachers, precisely because they are not gender teachers, fail to give boys and girls the same education).

Against these tendencies toward single-mindedness and politicisation, Axess continues its obstinate struggle, now with an edition about precisely this Swedish culture of consensus – its pros and cons, as well as its historical conditions.