The Swedish Rorschach Test

By Noah Rothman

Friday, May 01, 2020

Tim Alberta’s book American Carnage, about the transformation of the Republican Party from an ideological vehicle for conservatism into a cult of personality, concludes with some prominent members of the GOP engaging in rather bleak speculation.

“If 9/11 happened today,” Sen. Marco Rubio opined, “unfortunately, one of the first things you would hear is the assignment of blame through a political lens.” He added that this would be as true if the disaster was natural or manmade; a hurricane, a shooting, or a pandemic. “The immediate reaction is we need a political villain,” Rubio concluded. Former House Speaker John Boehner was slightly more optimistic. “At some point, we’re going to have to realize that we’re Americans first,” he said. “It’s going to take an intervening event for Americans to realize that.” But what would impose that kind of revelation on the public, Boehner was asked. “Something cataclysmic,” he contemplated ominously.

Ever the romantic, Speaker Boehner seemed to have underestimated our commitment to culture warring. Even a global health emergency that has transformed virtually every aspect of daily life for nearly all Americans has not dampened our enthusiasm for filtering events through a partisan prism.

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In our pursuit of this pastime, we find many suitable avatars: the president, the 50 state governors and their various responses to this crisis, and even promising pharmaceutical therapies. But few proxy battlefields in our endless tribal wars are as ravaged as the country of Sweden.

For Swedes, lockdown is voluntary. Citizens are asked to stay home as much as possible, practice social distancing outside the house, wash their hands frequently, and avoid non-essential travel. Gatherings of 50 people or more are banned. But the nation’s bars and restaurants are not closed, and customers are not staying away. The parks and schools are open. People are still going to their local gyms.

The Swedish prescription for the plague has differed dramatically from those preferred by most Western nations, and so the country functions as a sort of control in our global experiment. The results of that test according to those who watch it closely are not so much mixed as unintelligible. The data out of Stockholm, to which we are all privy, is either a sign that the country has succeeded in balancing the preservation of both life and liberty, or absolute confirmation that the nation is awash in death due to its selfish and hidebound leadership.

“Sweden says its coronavirus approach has worked,” CNN reported. “The numbers suggest a different story.” The dispatch notes that Sweden’s death toll has risen to “more than 22 per 100,000 people,” which is “significantly higher than many other countries in Europe.” Sweden’s vulnerable and aged populations are enraged by the way their society has placed them in such mortal danger, The Guardian reports. The country’s scientists and medical experts are furious with the government. “We are scientists. We don’t trust authorities. We trust data,” one irate researcher told Reuters. “And we don’t see the data that supports that we should go for this strategy as the only country in the world.”

But, even without a lockdown, Sweden has absorbed a softer blow from this virus compared to countries like Italy, Spain, France, and the U.K. It’s “curve” of new infections has flattened at roughly the same pace as it has in locked-down Denmark and Norway. According to Sweden’s epidemiologists, the nation has reached a plateau of infections. Researchers believe that about a quarter of Sweden’s population (roughly 10 million residents) has developed infection and immunity to this novel Coronavirus, which is approximately the same rate as New York City (about 8 million residents). “I think if we are to reach a new normal, Sweden represents a model if we wish to get back to a society in which we don’t have lockdowns,” said the World Health Organization’s emergencies expert, Dr. Mike Ryan.

In more conservative American media outlets, this same data, which is presented as evidence of abject failure in more mainstream venues, is hailed as proof of concept. Sometimes, these contradictory conclusions are present in the very same story on the Swedish phenomenon. “Sweden will have to face its broad failing with people over the age of 70, who have accounted for a staggering 86 percent of the country’s 2,194 fatalities to date,” the New York Times reported. “That percentage is roughly on par with most other countries.” There is no elision between those two sentences. They are separated by only a paragraph break, not an intervening thought.

What accounts for this Rorschach test? Reason’s Johan Norberg offers a compelling hypothesis. The data is ambiguous enough to allow for a vast array of plausible interpretations. Nevertheless, the unavoidable conclusion with which advocates for severe restrictions on commerce and movement must grapple is that most apocalyptic predictions failed to materialize. This revelation has led researchers to draw some rather jarring conclusions. “This work thus suggests that social distancing measures, such as those applied in the Netherlands and Germany, or in Italy, France, Spain, and United Kingdom before the full lockdown strategies, have approximately the same effects as police-enforced home containment policies,” read the provocative summary of Thomas Meunier’s study published in the journal “medRxiv” ahead of peer review.

It’s almost certainly a mistake to take medical advice from politicians, but it’s also a mistake to take political advice from physicians. Assessing and balancing competing values requires an understanding of the existing political consensus, and that’s not a clinician’s job. A full-speed-ahead charge into a political buzz saw puts the social contract and societal stability at risk, the shattering of which will have profoundly negative consequences that compete with mass death.

The choices before policymakers are easy to demagogue. Is it really worth risking even one life just so you can get a haircut? Can you really justify consigning millions of people to precarity and destitution in order to protect people on the upper end of actuarial tables? These are callous restatements of the real conundrum we face. There are no good options, only less bad ones. Sweden presents a valuable counterpoint to the example set by most Western policymakers. Assessing that data through a partisan lens isn’t helpful. But for Americans for whom political combat serves as a kind of comfort blanket in tumultuous times, letting that go is easier said than done.