Sweden used to pride itself on moderation – until US-style culture wars poisoned our politics | Martin Gelin

Donald Trump gave our resentful reactionaries a playbook to copy. The vitriol will be hard to put back in the bottle

As a Swedish correspondent in the US, I have sometimes braced myself on trips back home for some drastic societal change I'd heard about, only to return home and find that things were in fact exactly as they'd always been. Drivers still followed the little white arrows on the road - government recommendations for maintaining safe distances between cars and a symbol of Swedish society's strong adherence to rules and compliance. On the evening news, bureaucrats would have heated debates about such things as infrastructure and highway tolls. Politics was reliably boring; a sure sign of a healthy democracy.

But over the past few years, something has genuinely changed. The political discourse is aggressive, focused on the culture wars, and seems stuck in a constant mode of outrage. The shrill vocabulary often seems to be lifted straight from American cable news. Gun violence and gang crime is at record levels - September was the most violent month for shooting deaths on record - and has helped stoke a culture of fear and an ever-escalating political blame game over immigration and asylum policies.

Martin Gelin is the US correspondent of the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter and the author of Den vita stormen: Rasismens historia och USA's fall (The White Storm: How Racism Poisoned American Democracy)

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