Norway's chattering classes often claim that the American political spectrum skews to the Right. Most Norwegians, I find, imagine that the U.S.'s Democratic Party is right-wing by their country's political standards, and that the Republicans are a cabal of borderline Nazis that wants to shoot abortion doctors and hang the unemployed. Over the last few years, Norwegian pundits and foreign correspondents have informed me that John Kerry, Al Franken, and Barack Obama are all actually ultraconservatives, and that National Review in its current MOR incarnation is actually a magazine of the far Right. One could easily dismiss all this as simple anti-American ignorance, and that may well be part of the answer – but there is something else at work here as well. Scandinavian political blinkeredness is not limited to the U.S. For instance, whenever an election is won by the Sweden Democrats, whose opinions are almost absurdly moderate by any objective standard, cultural elites across the continent react with hysteria and indignation, as if extermination camps in Stockholm and pogroms in Gothenburg were just around the corner. The same sort of reaction occurs whenever Norway's Progress Party experiences a bump in the polls; they, we are told, are right-wing extremists, “right-wing extremists” here and everywhere else in Scandinavia meaning “moderate socialists.”

I suppose one shouldn't be too harsh on the people who believe these things, just as one can't hold the average North Korean responsible for the actions of his country's regime. A look at Norway's own political spectrum, particularly the Right, makes it very clear how and why we have managed to convince ourselves that everyone to the Right of Leon Trotsky is a fascist.

In his critiques of the mainstream American Right, Paul Gottfried often points out that the neoconservatives who now run the conservative movement are not rightists so much as they are rear-guard leftists. Hence his claim that the Cold War was not a conflict between Left and Right which the Right eventually won, but a conflict between two Lefts – one archaic and Sovietic, the other Trotskyist, politically correct, and culturally radical – which the Trotskyists eventually won, after which they seized total cultural hegemony. Based on the information I receive from across the pond, that analysis seems to me entirely accurate; and from what I know of Norwegian politics, it can be transplanted in many of its aspects to Norway. I would argue, though, that we are even worse off than the Americans. To indulge in a bit of justified hyperbole, Norwegian “conservatives” are the most craven, frivolous people in the world. They make David Frum and Jonah Goldberg look like paragons of erudition and principle.

The country's largest (in terms of current opinion polls) non-socialist party is Høyre (the Conservatives.) The Conservatives are considered solidly right-wing and non-socialist. They are also pro-EU, multi-culti welfare statists who violently oppose government decentralization and boast an official gay caucus. Lars Roar Langslet is a historian of ideas and a former Conservative MP and cabinet minister. His books and essays about conservatism are among the most influential written in the Norwegian language. Despite this resume, his statements about conservatism are all either tautological or blatantly false; for him, the philosophical core of conservatism is a “will to moderation.” (Answers on an a postcard if you can figure out what that means.) Langslet's “conservative” pantheon, outlined in the book Konservatismen fra Hume til idag (Conservatism from Hume To Today), is a bizarre, ramshackle affair which includes such figures as Max Weber and Franklin D. Roosevelt, but not (say) Eric Voegelin, Carl Schmitt, or Oswald Spengler. Langslet's protege Torbjørn Røe Isaksen, who is currently a Conservative MP, counts Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin among his influences while condemning Joseph de Maistre as a “dark reactionary.” On his blog, Isaksen boasts that the Norwegian Right is free of the “narrow-minded moralism” of the American Right. Neither Isaksen nor his fellow Conservatives seem troubled in the slightest by the dissolution of Norwegian majority culture. Indeed, like social scientist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, whom blogger and essayist Fjordman aptly describes as a “career multiculturalist,” they appear to be actively celebrating it. Isaksen and Langslet both edit and write for the quarterly magazine Minerva. One of the articles currently featured on the magazine's website giddily paeans the potential of Robert Rodriguez's Machete to incite a violent revolution against American “racism.” Another article argues for the use of State-owned media to undermine traditional sexual morality and the family. Several bemoan, Amnesty-style, the state of international human rights. Minerva is considered one of Norway's most important conservative publications.

The rest of the Right is equally useless. The Christian Democrats are essentially lobotomized Red Tories: their program consists  of diffuse catchphrases (“family,” “community,” “compassion”) which are used to justify everything from increases in Third World immigration to bureaucratically enforced gender quotas. And as the populists in the Progress Party have shown us, the Norwegian incarnations of libertarianism and classical liberalism consist of nationalizing elderly care and lowering alcohol and gasoline tariffs. There are, to be fair, elements within the Progress Party more critical of multiculturalism than the rest of the political establishment (which has led the media to label them racists and xenophobes), but even there they are probably in the minority.

I have claimed that Dr. Gottfried's observations are in many ways applicable to Norway. However, the Norwegian example differs from the American in some important ways. First, the archaic Left had much more power for a much longer time in Norway than in America. (Witness the quasi-Sovietic architecture of Oslo's City Hall, the autocracy that characterized the Norwegian Labor Party's political machine in the decades after the Second World War, and the influence of labor organizer Gerd-Liv Valla, who is known to have defended Stalin as late as the 1980s.) Second,  the  hegemony of the post-Marxist cultural Left in Norway is arguably even stronger than it is in America. Third, while the American Left has concentrated on winning the political support of minority groups by supporting mass immigration, establishing social programs, and excusing away antisocial behavior, the Scandinavian Left, with its gargantuan welfare state, has bought off everyone. There is no stratum of Norwegian society in which one finds serious opposition to the political establishment in significant numbers – that, after all, would imply a stop to the creature comforts of the social democratic gravy train. However puny the American non-aligned Right may seem next to the accumulated powers of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Charles Krauthammer, the American non-aligned Right at least exists.  Norway has nearly no serious and organized paleoconservatives, traditionalists, or national conservatives; it has no Paul Gottfrieds or Pat Buchanans; it has no parties whose electoral success and ideological stature parallels the Lega Nord, the Vlaams Belang, the Danish People's Party, Germany's National Democrats, or France's National Front. With the exception of a handful of half-mad recluses and obscure blogs, the Norwegian non-aligned Right does not exist – not yet.

European politics since the French Revolution has been a game of tug-of-war between two parties: One wants to reconstruct society and human nature, while the other wants to leave society and human nature as they are. Contemporary Scandinavia is what happens when the latter party suddenly lets go of its end of the rope.