I have known people who left the Soviet Union following 1991, and went from being university professors only to get caught in the Nordic model and get stuck on welfare. I was an immigrant in one of these places, and lived in a community of people from many former socialist republics. They all said life, and work for that matter, was far better under socialism.

In socialism, they had skilled labour, everything from aerospace construction, mechanical farming, and the aforementioned professorship, they never got anything close to that in the west because they had thick accents and foreign religions.

Similarly, I myself have a very well paid technical job now, but in the Nordic model I was unemployable. I had to steal and work for gangsters just to survive, it was miserable. I applied to maybe some 30+ jobs, but they don't hire foreigners. The job postings I saw for foreign work was always the worst. No union, no minium wage, always demeaning labour. One time I even saw a posting that was basically like being an indentured servant, they expected you to work as a gardener in exchange for room and board, and also to pay rent on top of this.

The reason why social democracy works is because it divides the working class into "middle" and "poor." And they never talk about who the poor are, or what they have to do.