So where did politics disappear to?

My first experience of attempting to influence politics is easy to date. It took place during the autumn, in the election campaign of 1973. I was twelve years old at the time, and the then Minister of Finance, Gunnar Sträng, was to speak in Umeå. As taxation policy was a hot electoral potato close to the hearts of us middle school boys, a friend and I decided to stage a demonstration. No sooner said than done. We both made placards out of cardboard on which we wrote in felt-tipped pen “Lower Taxes!” And then we went in to Town Hall Square in Umeå and stood restively with our placards right at the front during Sträng’s speech.

After this attempt at psyching out our opponent, it was time for stage two of our plan: we went up to the Minister of Finance and tugged gently at his coat tails, whereupon my mate asked the first of our meticulously prepared artillery of questions: “How can it possibly be worth while working in Sweden? With our incredible burden of taxation?” Even today I remember – to my great surprise – how amused Sträng looked, whereupon he raised his finger and said “This is something your mothers and fathers have taught you; come back when you have formed your own views on the matter!” Whereupon we had to slink away, not a little insulted by his way of answering our attempts to get him to lose his head.

The story is illustrative of how different the prerequisites for political influence were thirty years ago. Political life, at the same time much closer and much more distant, seemed to be played out in a fixed, structured world of clear antagonisms and dividing lines. If you wanted to work in politics or were at all ideological, then there was almost only one path for you and that was membership in a political party: it was just a question of gritting your teeth and working your way up the hard way, through youth organisations, party political publications, trade unions and so forth.

The political parties had their courses fixed, and in the ranks of electors political identity was so strong that it seemed to affect every millimetre of one’s everyday life. Today many of those structures have broken down, people are more changeable, and to a much higher degree than previously politicians have to be aware of trends and adapt their message to the new conditions which constantly arise. Which makes the think tanks twice as valuable: on the one hand, for creating opinions among the population, and on the other, for functioning as seismographs allowing politicians to sense new trends among the people.

But in order to understand the influence of think tanks on contemporary politics I believe we should observe to an equally great extent how the old structures continue to exercise latent influence.

In a Swedish context, one cannot ignore the fact that the advantage gained by Right-wing think tanks during the last decades of the 20th century was largely illusory. SNS may have been the first Swedish think tank, but then we are forgetting that for a long time there had been a well-established structure on the Left for the production of ideology through the trade union movement, educational associations and among the kind of book publishers and journal and newspaper production which developed under the protection of the Labour movement throughout the last century. What happened in the 1980s and 1990s can therefore be described as Liberals likewise creating networks for the production of ideology.

At the same time, it is precisely these unwieldy structures around the Swedish Trades Union Congress, LO, and the Social Democrats that seem to be restraining influences on a think tank like Arena. Whilst Timbro produces publication after publication and is always finding new ways into the social debate, finding itself regularly at odds with the Moderates, for example, the production of innovative, independent ideas that are critical of the Social Democrats can hardly be regarded as the Arena Group’s distinguishing feature.

On the other hand, differences in vitality can naturally be explained by the dominance of the Social Democrats during the 20th century. In a climate in which the governing party’s views over the years have come to permeate the world of education, the media and the entire state apparatus, it is natural that a Left-wing intellectual think tank in large part will be occupied with preserving the establishment’s intellectual constructs.

As is evident from the analysis of think tanks in this issue of Axess, a strategy of preservation, of conservation of this kind, is a great disadvantage both to the Left and to the vitality of the intellectual dialogue in general in Sweden. Arena’s position off the great Social Democratic beaten track should in the long term act as a breeding ground for a Left-wing intellectual renewal, in which one might offer a more ground-breaking and productive view of the advantages and disadvantages of capitalist society, one that is critical of the party