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Sweden has long been shaken by violent gang wars. Young criminals, often of foreign origin, have shot each other to death. Innocent victims have come in the way. In some conflicts, the criminals have attacked innocent relatives of their rivals.
However, after the conservative center-right government that has governed Sweden since 2022 gave the police new and sharper working tools, toughened penalties and lowered the age of criminal responsibility, organized gang crime has been pushed back. Many of the gang leaders have fled abroad. Some of these have been arrested and returned to Sweden thanks to improved cooperation with police in other countries. The number of shootings has decreased radically. During the entire month of January 2026, not a single shooting took place. It was the first time since March 2018 that an entire calendar month had passed without someone being shot to death in Sweden.
So, what happened?
Well, Sweden has got a government that does not listen to what criminologists, lawyers and other legal experts say. Instead, politicians lean towards popular common sense and what is the legal understanding of many ordinary people.
It has been decided that serious crime must be met resolutely. Only repression works on hardened professional criminals. And right now, crime seems to be being pushed back. And it was not the criminologists and other experts who contributed to this. It was a conservative-oriented policy that finally turned the tide.
One of the more complex elements of Western conservatism is that it contains streaks of anti-intellectualism. There is a healthy skepticism among many conservatives towards those individuals in our societies who take a place in the public debate because they are considered to possess professional knowledge.
There is also a skepticism among conservatives towards the ability of intellectuals to reform our human societies. Edmond Burke already expressed his distrust of the social engineering that was expressed in parts of the French Revolution. How could people create a new society with the help of some crudely elaborate theories about equality, social contracts and citizenship? The old society that the French revolutionaries and their supporters around Europe wanted to throw overboard had been honed through millennia of history, conflicts, wars and social development. It was not learned thinkers who had created the old society with their intellect. It had been shaped by the collective experiences of humanity.
But Burke is just one example of how conservatively inclined people can trust history, intuition and habit more than human intellect. And the same thing is now happening widely throughout the Western world as the new conservatism questions the theories about man and society that the left-leaning academic world propagates. Conservatives have also always been wary of liberal and Marxist theories. The theories are desk products. They have not been chiseled out by evolution and history.
This anti-intellectualism certainly does not have to be complete. Conservatives have nothing against education; they have nothing against proven science. But they become skeptical when science becomes a political tool for radicals. And they become skeptical when academics in the social sciences and humanities insist that a society should function according to principles that are not in harmony with common sense. Or when well-trained lawyers in universities and in the judiciary want a system of justice that is not in harmony with the general understanding of the law.
An optimistic interpretation of this anti-intellectualism is that it is based on a well-founded insight into the fragile nature of man. And in this case, this manifests itself in such a way that even people who have studied and who possess professional knowledge are only human. Even academics, researchers and experts can be driven by motives they themselves do not understand. Their thinking can be guided by ideological preferences. And their theories can prove inadequate to handle something as complex as human society.
And then it can sometimes be better to listen to common sense, to customs and tradition. And that is what Swedish politicians are now doing, and which seems to be yielding results when it comes to criminal policy.