Some guy on Politicalbetting.com is suggesting that we are witnessing the demise of Swedish Social Democracy....
Lol, hardly.
What we're witnessing is newer generations of voters growing more and more powerful in politics in Sweden, and arguably, many places over the world. A generation that grew up enjoying the luxuries of what those who came before them built, and now take them for granted as things that were always there in their lives.
You can sort of see something similar in the US in the recent political cycles. Democrats had their lock over the House broken in 1994. The greatest accomplishments of the party was decades before. The minimum wage, unemployment compensation, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, the lion's share of American infrastructure, and more, and people suddenly moved on, not really caring about those things anymore. People stopped associating everything like that that we enjoy and rely on with the Democrats and left-wing policy somewhere along the line, and started taking all of those things for granted as something that was just "there."
With the advent of the internet and more modern communication it's all just gotten worse. There's been a rightening of the political spectrum pretty much everywhere.
American Democrats are nowhere near as left-wing as we used to be economically, and we'd never do anything as ballsy as the Civil Rights Act today. Canadian Liberals are an utter embarassment and in the last 10 years or more have just gotten consistently less and less successful. The Social Dems in Germany have done about as well as garbage in the polls in recent cycles. Parti Socialiste hasn't exactly lived up to the "socialist" name in quite some time, and Labour in the UK has been a barrel of that "New Labour" nonsense. They are a bit of an anamoly in this lineup since they landslided and controlled the UK for 13 years, but even after they did, it's not like Blair turned around and undid the privatizations of Thatcher's reign.
Of course, the right-wing has also gotten more savvy in certain places. The Tories in the UK no longer seem to openly oppose the minimum wage (indeed Cameron has said openly he supports it and raising it with inflation). Canadian Conservatives know better than to take on social issues. Republicans here still dance around Medicare and Social Security (though they will still take pot-shots at it if they regain control and may actually do something radical this time, they've known better than to tackle those titans for the most part).
In short, all we see here is spoiled new generations of voters who don't know what the older folks were missing before the big bad Social Democratic policies came along, and a right-wing that, mostly, isn't as openly right-wing as they used to be and alot more electorally smart, so they can scoop up "Get your government hands off my Medicare" type voters, or people who have no clue what they'd be without because they've known nothing but the welfare state, like Swedish Cheese. The American right-wing being the possible exception to this rule.
