In early 2016, with a Trumpified Republican primary raging, GOP presidential hopefuls were quick to stoke nativist passions by rolling out one of the party’s oldest tropes: bashing Europe for being, like, so socialist.
“Bernie Sanders is a socialist,” Sen. Marco Rubio mocked. “[He’s] a good candidate for president—of Sweden.”
As many Swedes were quick to correct, their nation doesn’t have a president—but it does have a long history as the butt of hack Republican jokes about socialism being a dangerous European import, unfit for a country as free and proud as America. But as the GOP flails for support in its all-out effort to obstruct President Joe Biden’s fight against COVID-19, Sweden has emerged as Republicans’ preferred example of a nation Biden should be emulating.
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On Monday, Florida’s far-right Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo added to his long record of politically-motivated pandemic guidance by declaring that Florida would officially recommend against vaccinating healthy children. Ladapo’s decision flies in the face of CDC guidance that recommends vaccinations for children five years and older. And many Republicans’ go-to justification—that Sweden also recently decided against vaccinating young children—falls apart in the Florida breeze.
Ladapo last demanded our strained national attention with his controversial decision to go maskless while meeting with an immunocompromised Florida lawmaker battling breast cancer. Now Ladapo is putting forward an unscientific position which threatens a state that just two months ago faced a seven-day average of nearly 70,000 new COVID infections.
Claiming inspiration from Sweden isn’t just disingenuous, it shows a GOP willing to spin superficial data points toward dangerously incorrect policy conclusions. Donald Trump may no longer be president, but his penchant for building political unrealities continues in Trumpist proteges like Ladapo and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who cheered the state’s decision.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that a party as devoid of guiding values as the modern Republican Party has no problem bouncing between ideological extremes. The party has made a proud tradition of scraping together whatever policy viewpoints best help them block progress in Washington, regardless of whether they actually understand the details. For a party whose animating principle since Trump came on the scene has been “F*ck your feelings,” a staggering amount of the modern GOP depends on ignoring basic facts in favor of raw emotional arguments.
Lawmakers like Sen. Ted Cruz latched on to the Swedish government’s recent decision to recommend against vaccinating children aged 5 to 11 against COVID-19. Among right-leaning anti-mandate zealots, Sweden’s decision is a godsend: if even socialist countries are backing away from requiring vaccination, what does that say about the United States? Is Joe Biden, or even Bernie Sanders, too leftist even for the Swedes?
Setting aside the fact that most Republicans couldn’t pinpoint Sweden on a labeled map, right-wing pundits touting Swedish policy have achieved a new level of bad-faith data cherry-picking.
While it’s true Sweden did recommend against vaccinating young children, the public health realities in America and Sweden are markedly different.
Nearly 75 percent of Swedes are fully vaccinated, lapping America by a full 10 percentage points. And while Sweden largely eschewed lockdowns, a far higher percentage of Swedes voluntarily masked up and socially-distanced during the height of the pandemic, preventing the kind of direct hit that has devastated the U.S. for the past two years.
You’re less likely to hear from a conservative bobblehead that last year Sweden posted one of the worst COVID-19 infection rates in all of Europe relative to its population—and only thanks to the nation’s expansive universal health care system did it avoid death on a massive scale.
Universal health care isn’t a cure-all, either. Sweden’s decision to keep schools open during the pandemic was driven more by a critical need to keep doctors and nurses in hospitals as rates rose. Closing schools would have moved nurses out of hospitals and into home child care at a time when Sweden needed fully-staffed ICUs. And like in the U.S., the end result was predictable: those lax school policies doubled Swedish teachers’ COVID exposure risk.
When given the choice between doing their homework and seizing an opportunity to bash Biden, Republican lawmakers followed their Trumpist operating procedure and went for spectacle over substance. Which raises an interesting question: when did the GOP start looking to Scandinavia and the lefty nations of Europe for guidance on how to manage American domestic affairs?
Conservatives might still be deeply wedded to the nativist, white supremacist origins of “America First,” but Republicans are eager to Europeanize as much of America’s COVID response as possible—as long as that doesn’t mean creating the public health system that makes those strategies possible.
And that’s one of the new, Trumpified GOP’s many problems: it has long since chosen polemic over policy, and the latest pro-Trump party purge has driven out Republicans at every level who actually cared about developing realistic ideas.
Ladapo—like DeSantis and Trump and nearly every prominent Republican today—is primarily a performer. The nuts-and-bolts work of governing comes in a distant second to using official government platforms to espouse right-wing conspiracy theories that undermine America’s economic and public health recovery.
In their eagerness to give Biden a political black eye, Republicans are once again offering non-solutions that are designed to sow division and render America’s COVID safety protocols less effective. They’ll even praise Sweden, so long as it owns the libs.
Sadly, their strategy is working: a quarter of adults nationwide remain unvaccinated. The vast majority of those are self-identified conservatives who view vaccine resistance as a key marker of their political identities. To those Americans, the “Sweden model” is not designed to make our country safer from the pandemic. It’s an excuse to justify inaction and open resistance to trustworthy public health guidance.
