The spirit of the times is suspicious of power. Forty years after 1968, the radicals of the West are inspired more by Michel Foucault than by Karl Marx. If Marxists wanted to capture power with the aim of establishing classless equality, today’s radicals prefer to abolish power as such. It is Power with a capital P that is seen as the threat to equality, because every exercise of power necessarily differentiates between those who decide and those who do not. If Marxists saw the taking of power as the means to realize their utopia, the abolition of Power is the actual utopia for post-Marxist radicals. Anything that can introduce differences between people or that requires individuals to adapt is opposed as an expression of the interests of dominant groups.

Marks in school are wrong, because they ”label” weak pupils. Requiring Swedish language skills means ”excluding” people born abroad from the labour market. Detaining criminal juveniles means ”stigmatizing” them. Taking legal measures against hooliganism, graffiti and vandalism on the streets and market squares is synonymous with ”repression”, and closed-circuit cameras in crime-ridden places are seen as ”offensive to one’s personal integrity”.

These radicals bristle whenever they suspect the presence of norms that encourage some kinds of behaviour over others. ”Adapt” is a four-letter word. Anyone who asks the question of whether we nonetheless have the right to make demands on each other as members of the same society can be put off with the counter question: ”Who is we?” It is implicit: there are no shared values or universally valid moral principles upon which one can legitimately distinguish between desirable and undesirable behaviour. The fact that this radicalism, which criticizes power, has been so successful is because it can be linked to two influential 20th century ideological trends.

One trend concerns the victim’s perspective, which is a component of the welfare state project; specifically, the state’s task is to help weak groups. However, opinions are divided as to what a weak group is and how such a group should be helped. At first, this meant poor people, who lacked the resources to help themselves. Today, weakness is defined increasingly in terms of ”marginalization”, and the problem is now supposedly about how established power structures exclude certain groups. The solution is thus assumed to lie in various measures against a presumed discrimination against women, young people, ethnic and religious minorities, homosexuals and so forth.

This means that it has become politically impossible to place demands on groups that have been assigned the status of victim. As a member of a victim’s group, one has more rights and fewer obligations than other members of society. In school, it becomes difficult to discuss rules of behaviour. The assumption is that the problem can be ascribed as it was in Ingmar Bergman’s film Hets [‘Torment’], where the abuse came presumably from the teacher’s desk and not the students’. In the same way, it becomes difficult to criticize Muslim hate propaganda and jihadism, because Muslims were defined from the beginning as a vulnerable group. Questioning the values in the Muslim group can thus be dismissed as ”Islamophobia” and an expression of the oppressive power of the majority culture. In the same way, hate crimes become defined in terms of violence or threats against vulnerable minorities defined beforehand (immigrants, Muslims, homosexuals), but cannot include violence and threats by members of these groups against members of the majority group. Men’s violence against women can be given special attention, but not women’s violence against men or men’s violence against men.

The second trend is made up of a mix of subjectivism and relativism on value issues. Moral values are reduced to expressions of the speaker’s feelings or his cultural background. If one takes this position, then he can find satisfaction in the sociological or anthropological assertion that there are differences between the value systems of various groups, but he cannot say that one system of values deserves more respect than the other. Instead, it becomes natural to consider every attempt by society to claim shared values as the vulgar language of power.

But what should one do in confronting religious fundamentalists who believe that anyone who caricatures the prophet Mohammed should die, or who forbid their daughters from having a Swedish boyfriend? How does one face these kinds of groups, when one has become used to treating morals as a matter of feelings and considers requiring someone to adapt to be oppression? One’s own values seem to weigh less when another group considers itself ”violated” by such questioning. It becomes easier to criticize oneself for being prejudiced than battling attitudes and practices that challenge the secular citizen state. Whoever feels most violated and can also lay claim to belonging to a victim’s group is well disposed to get their way with politicians who are daunted by their own power.

Yet the opposite of power is not equality but rather powerlessness. Thomas Hobbes understood this when he set unregulated existence in a state of nature against a social order predicated on laws. The state of nature held none of the institutional structures of power that radicals are so suspicious of – no laws, no police, no distinctions between law-abiding people and criminals, no requirements to adapt. But this did not mean that the state of nature was an idyllic state of equality. Here, instead, the rule of the fist and the law of the jungle prevailed. ”During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man.”

The state of nature is quickly re-established when society withdraws. It begins with graffiti on building facades, which indicates that the norms of the gang, not of society, apply. After this comes vandalizing and misdemeanours, the flight of the well-to-do to quieter neighbourhoods, security measures, drug trafficking, closed communities. Society’s retreat is visible in the police reports that fail to appear or are filed away for lack of evidence, the unpunished assailants, the rubbish left in the streets. But the retreat starts with intellectual disarmament, with the unwillingness to maintain dividing lines between right and wrong, between those who contribute to the common good and those who sabotage the common good, and between power that gives individuals freedom and power that strips them of their freedom. Considerable responsibility for this disarmament rests with the radical line of thinking that identifies justice with equality and sees all social exercise of power as evil, because this exercise of power must necessarily differentiate between those who are loyal and those who are not loyal to the common good. For justice is not treating everyone the same, but rather – as Aristotle noted – treating those who are equal the same and those who are not equal differently, that is, treating everyone as they deserve.

Translated by Susan Long