Comparative politics is very useful, but it needs to be performed with the required rigour and appreciation of local nuances. It's at its best when used to unsettle, not confirm, what you’ve come to believe based on your own country’s political culture. (7/7)

In conclusion: please be sceptical of pundits who tell tales of some far-off country where the pivot that pundit has always already wanted was tried and found to be the perfect panacea to all political ills.

3) The 2019 elections were just one election. Since then, the Danish populist right has regrouped and the social-democrats are bleeding voters on both sides: losing anti-immigration voters to the populist right while losing pro-human-rights voters to the more principled left.

This gives the Danish social-democrats a path to win at conservative identity politics that has no equivalent abroad. E.g., the Dutch PVV or the German AFD voters are radicalised against “the left” and (often falsely) blame social-democracy for post-war immigration into their countries.

2) It's a locally specific feature of Danish political culture that social democratic values are seen as a national pride. Danish culture explicitly associates the 20th century post-war “golden age” with social democratic policies.

1) Research shows that in 2019, while the social-democrats won over significant numbers of populist-right voters, they did NOT win on immigration issues. Voters whose biggest issue was immigration stuck with the populist-right. Voters who crossed over reported their biggest issue was social welfare.

The argument for the “Danish model” is based on the Danish elections of 2019, when the social-democrats tacked right on immigration and inflicted an electoral trouncing on the populist right. However, there are three issues with turning this election into a model for the centre-left worldwide:

While there are many reasons for the decline of academic humanities, imho one of those is definitely that the humanities as a project writ large never developed a succesfull alternative to the classical/modernist "civilizing" mission you describe. It still hasn't recovered from that lost faith.

The advantage of a democracy is not that the people never make a bad choice.

The advantage is that no one is stuck with the bad choice for decades unless they *keep making it.*