Johan Hassel, the international secretary for Sweden's ruling Social Democrats, visited Iowa before the caucuses, and
he wasn't impressed with America's standard bearer for democratic socialism, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). "We were at a Sanders event, and it was like being at a Left Party meeting,"
he told Sweden's Svenska Dagbladet newspaper, according to
one translation. "It was a mixture of very young people and old Marxists, who think they were right all along. There were no ordinary people there, simply."
Why would a Swedish Social Democrat favor Buttigieg over Sanders? Well, democratic socialism is different than Sweden's social democracy — the "
Nordic model" Sanders touts — "and, unfortunately, Sanders has
contributed to this confusion,"
writes MIT political economist Daron Acemoglu. Democratic socialism seeks to fix the iniquities of the market economy by handing control of the means of production to a company's workers or "an administrative structure operated by the state," he explains. "European social democracy is a system for regulating the market economy, not for supplanting it."