You Can’t Go Home Again

FEW POLITICAL IDEALS END UP AS OBJECTS OF NOSTALGIA. The ones that thrive live on the streets and in daily life; the ones that die do so obscurely. But the Nordiska Museet, the great anthropology museum in Stockholm, houses an exhibition devoted to a single word—one that until recently breathed life into Sweden and now, in its absence, haunts its national politics. The word is folkhemmet, and the ideal it represents—and the vacuum left by its disappearance—helps explain the surge of reactionary populism now shaking the country’s political order, as well as the continent’s.

Folkhemmet also happens to have no English equivalent. The literal translation—the people’s home—is clunky, but it does capture the central concept: home. The exhibition in Nordiska Museet makes that clear. It displays an entire reconstructed apartment from the late 1940s, built by the government for a skilled worker and his family. To contemporary visitors, the apartment seems cramped, though hardly shabby. (The pastel-painted cupboards in the kitchen could even be considered retro chic.) At the time it was built, however, the home represented almost unimaginable prosperity for the family that lived there: It featured hot and cold running water, access to a communal