Within the bounds of culture and the fates of history, societies are often characterized most sharply by the political ideas that evolve to guide public debates. Governing ideas and the market mechanisms that act upon them (parties, finance arrangements, interest processes, and mass communications media) structure national debates on policy questions like tax reform, and they affect the clarity of choices, the credibility of promises, and the degree of party loyalty in elections. More generally, governing ideas set the terms for conflict and change in society.

In this chapter and the next, we explore the great domestic political debates of the twentieth century in Sweden and the United States, showing how two grand sets of governing ideas arose in response to the economic crisis of the 1930s and continued to set the tone of national politics until the 1990s. T h e important differences we identify are not so much the obvious contrasts between the Swedish and the American ways of thinking about society and its problems, but the deeper structure of political rhetoric itself. In the Swedish case, we find the development of an ideology that broke free of earlier conservative ideas, articulating a coherent set of social principles and goals, along with guidelines about how government should promote those goals. T h e key, and the irony, here is that this ideational break with Swedish conservatism was accomplished not through a forcefully articulated socialist ideology but with a more broadly appealing image of a government that would provide security, order, and respect for the members of society, much as a well-functioning home cares for all the members of a family.