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A nation that has 44 Michelin stars, earns a fortune from visiting diners and then invents the appetite suppressant Ozempic is either multitalented, or very foolish. Either way, I am in the Danish capital again. If it isn’t the restaurants that make Copenhagen my favourite city in the world of this size, then it might be the architectural mix, or the unforced bohemia. It was said of the Frederiksberg-born Michael Laudrup that he would have been the greatest footballer ever, but came from too benign a setting. This always seemed to me like determinist nonsense. Looking around, I wonder . . .
For a politics nut, Denmark has another point of interest. It is one of the hardest countries to place philosophically. It presents as left-liberal, but is tough-ish on immigration. (The foreign-born are 12 per cent of the population, to Sweden’s 21.) Welfare is generous but bosses can hire and fire with some freedom. (“Flexicurity” is the unbeautiful word for this blend of market forces and paternalism.) Even in its foreign dealings, Denmark is a cuddly aid donor and founding member of Nato, with none of the neutrality that Sweden kept up until it became unsafe and unconscionable.
It is almost as if — can you believe it? — the country approaches each issue on its own terms. Regular readers might be familiar with Ganesh’s Vibes Theory of Politics: that people don’t work out their beliefs, but take them as a kind of bundled software once they decide they are Team Liberal or Team Maga. It explains why, once you know someone’s view on Gaza, you can extrapolate with depressing accuracy their view on austerity, climate, lockdowns, DEI and other such miscellany.
Well, those who buck the habit, who think case-by-case, need writing about too. The retired judge Jonathan Sumption is the only person of note I can think of in British public life who supports the EU but not the European Convention on Human Rights. This is despite his stance being entirely consistent (and, who knows, the future policy of the country). There are people of sublime intelligence and round-the-clock political engagement who don’t know the two institutions are different. What matters to them, I sense, is that both are liberal “coded”, and therefore both good, or both malevolent, depending on one’s priors.
Who else has what we might call a Danish — that is, heterodox — cast of mind? The journalist Peter Hitchens is a church-and-king conservative with un-Tory views about trade unions, government housing and even the second world war. (Just as his brother Christopher, at the height of his leftism, backed Margaret Thatcher over the Falklands.) Who among Jeremy Clarkson’s fans or enemies knows that he has favoured a “liberal United States of Europe”, with “one army”, since long before the shocks of the past month or so?
The tragedy is that, in a tribal era, this kind of thing comes across as scattiness or wilful contrarianism, when it is just the mark of a thinking person.
And “tragedy” isn’t too histrionic a word. How bad things get in the coming years, how much of the democratic west survives, depends on whether conservatives who now sense that something hideous is going on can resist the impulse to stick with the team. I have peers who came to Maga through one reason or another — hatred of woke, typically, but the lockdown was another factor, as was bourgeois boredom — who will have to make a decision soon enough. Will they approach issues on their own terms, and therefore see the obvious economic, constitutional and geopolitical reasons to get off the train? Or will the emotional comfort of a political tribe, the structure and belonging it provides in atomised times, carry them along to who knows where? The likes of John Bolton show that one can be a nationalist, even a jingo, without signing up for the entire Trumpist creed. Next to him, the British right seems tongue-tied and almost catatonic of late.
In the end, the case-by-case pragmatism of Danish statecraft is only so much of a model. If everyone worked out their beliefs on every subject from first principles, not much else would get done. If nothing else, then, the tribalist approach to ideas is efficient. Just mind you get the right tribe.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
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