I think we had in some ways a favorable history and we learn a lot from others. That is what I hope to get across myself as I write about the Nordic experience.

Everyone may not have had the fortunate historical circumstances that gave rise to social democracy, but others can learn from our experiences what worked and what didn't.

For me the most positive message about social democracy is that it shows faith in humans: You can succeed by emphasizing cooperation, trust, compromise etc. Success does not need to come from following a cynical rat race, or from glorifying an elite.

At its core it is about placing trust in the abilities of the common man and woman and raising them up.

It is what I am working on describing in my next article: While many other nations had top ranking universities and intellectuals, countries like Norway remarked itself more in the 1700s in giving basic education to regular poor people. In the 1800s literature and reading culture spread to regular people not just to intellectual elites.

One of the most successful prime ministers in Norwegian history was a common road worker, digging ditches. That is the kind of message I want to send.

I see far too many right-wingers in America who want to convince the world that Nordic countries is what you get if you have all white people. I really want to combat this racist message and show that it is about ideas, policies and how you actually run society. It may not be easy to adopt those ideas, but they can inspire.

The most important lesson from the Nordics is perhaps that the Nordic region itself succeed in large part due to the willingess to steal the best ideas from anywhere. Nordic parliamentarism was inspired from Britain. Nordic bureacracy was inspired from North German states. The Dutch helped us in Norway a lot setting up saw mills in the 1700s.

Iceland solved their youth delingquency problems by learning from American research. Norwegian oil industry took lessons from Iraq which had began producing oil much earlier, and of course much technology came from the US.