Dahl and shrimp

In preparation for my course on representative democracy in the fall, I am revisiting a true political science classic in the form of Robert Dahl’s Democracy and its critics. Thinking of all the things that democracy can be in terms of equality and emancipation, it is slightly tragicomic to read Benjamin Dousa in today’s Svenska Dagbladet asking why no one is dreaming of a better Sweden and then giving shorter airport security waiting times and privatized airports as examples of what “better” would look like.

Not that I am necessarily any better myself, eating shrimp in anticipation of the price hike that is expected when the construction of offshore wind farms begins in earnest along the west coast of Sweden. As evident from the recent catastrophic failure of the Kakhovka Dam or the 145,000 people who died from the 1975 Banqian Dam failure in China, all forms of energy have both direct and indirect environmental and human costs. Yet, one can only imagine the global trauma that would have been triggered if even a tiny fraction of those people would have been affected by something nuclear related. Clearly, there are some serious double standards at play here.