Don't Dump on Denmark

What is it about Denmark that seems to antagonize right-wing American commentators so much? Fox News pundits Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham are particularly prone to lashing out at Denmark, even though they seem to know virtually nothing about the country. In April, Ingraham suggested that President Barack Obama was probably closer to the president of Denmark [than of the United States], blissfully unaware of the fact that Denmark doesn’t have a president – it has a queen and a prime minister.

More recently, O’Reilly, host of The O’Reilly Factor, the most watched program on American cable news, voiced a grim warning about the consequences of Barack Obama’s policies for the United States. The president, he told viewers of Fox’s Glenn Beck show, intended to make the United States into Denmark – as if that were some kind of terrible fate!

Mr. O’Reilly may, or may not, know the following:

• Two separate independent surveys have ranked Denmark the world’s happiest country, most recently in May 2009. (In one of the two studies, the United States failed to make the top ten; in the other it came 23rd.)
• Denmark is the world’s least corrupt country, along with Finland and New Zealand, according to the latest rating by the anti-corruption organization Transparency International. The United States shares 18th place with Belgium and Japan.
• Denmark is a staunch ally of the United States, and, in Afghanistan, has suffered the highest casualty rate relative to population of all the NATO allies, including the United States. Denmark also contributes the highest share of troops to Afghanistan, relative to its size (again higher than the United States), and the new secretary-general of NATO is Danish.
• The Danish government is led by a center-right party committed to free markets, not by left-wing Socialists, as O’Reilly and Ingraham appear to have assumed.
• Turnout in Danish national elections is consistently around 85 percent, compared to percentages ranging from about 50 to the low 60s in the United States.
• According to the European Commission, well over one third of Danish homes and businesses have fixed-line broadband Internet access, the highest percentage in the word. The United States is 17th, about the same as Spain.
• It is true that Denmark has the world’s highest taxes, according to some calculations, but reforms are under way.

Too many American commentators automatically assume that the whole of Europe, and especially Scandinavia, is led by anti-American, socialist governments that have driven their countries into the ground, economically and politically. Of course, few Americans want to make their country a carbon copy of Denmark, which is in any case impossible, despite the Danes’ many admirable qualities. But Ingraham and O’Reilly should choose some other country to beat up on. The errors of these throwaway lines should be a lesson to all those in the media who jump to conclusions about Europe without doing their homework.