As a teenager you are usually an ideological accident waiting to happen: You are either so eager to conform to your surroundings that you may end up supporting anything mainstream, or you are so rebellious that you are willing to advocate basically any odd-sounding idea as long as it will make your family and teachers go nuts. In my case, being a 14-year-old in the welfare state of Denmark A.D. 1981, I guess I was plenty of both.
Looking back, I probably had it coming somehow. In the big picture, Denmark in the early 1980s was – as was most of the western world – an odd mix between the remnants of ancient bourgeois values and the after-shocks of 1968. In the small picture, everyone in my family was (to cut a long story short) either extremely right wing or considerably to the left.
My father had always been a rugged individualist, who did not give a damn about what other people thought about him. If anything he seemed to almost enjoy the very outrage he could create in others. He was a fundamentally conservative, self-made industrialist, who in 1973 had been one of the early supporters of Danish tax-protester Mogens Glistrup’s populist and (then) quasi-libertarian Progress Party. My mother was largely apolitical, but liberal in a broad sense even if bourgeois in her manners. She had in the early 1970s, when she was in her mid-30s, had a late flirt with the radical chic, quit her day-job, gone back to school and experimented with her life.
Add to that that my parents were divorced and that I grew up without siblings, and then you may picture why I always had an ambivalent attitude toward authority. On the one hand, I always sought recognition from authority figures; on the other hand, there was no surer way to make me adamant than to tell me what I ought to do.
I still clearly remember a summer in the early 1970s, when my mother had moved the two of us to a hippie commune on a countryside farm. There we had to share bathrooms and kitchens and everything with everyone else, and the grown-ups applauded enthusiastically when we kids lined up and shouted "Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh!, Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh!" as we had been taught in the municipal kindergarten. I do not know how long we were there, but it seemed like years and I hated every moment of it. If there ever was a politically defining moment for me, it was when a longhaired, bearded guy scolded my mother for letting me play with a plastic toy gun. This was "aggressive, imperialistic toys, produced for profit" or something similar. We left soon after, and since then I have loved guns. Go ahead, make my day.
So in 1981, at age 14, I was a raging radical with reactionary leanings looking for a rebellious cause to join. What particular rebellion probably did not matter, as long as it was outrageous. I can still remember – to my own present embarrassment – that in the summer of 1981 I went to the offices of the youth organization of the Danish Socialist People’s Party (my mother’s favorite party that year), but the office was closed and I – fortunately – left, in search for another rebellion.
Well, not perhaps just any rebellion; I clearly had some leanings. First, many of my friends at that time belonged to the punk and mod crowds so characteristic of larger European cities in the early 1980s. With them I shared a certain disregard for "the establishment," hippies and the 1970s. Whereas the hippie types at school always were demanding more attention, more this, more that, we just wanted to be left alone. The pinkos wanted "participatory student democracy," we wanted freedom. For us, fashion wise and otherwise, the creed was "anything goes" – and so it did.
Second, in the early 1980s there was hardly anything more rebellious you could do than dress up in a blue blazer and a tie, praise Reagan and Thatcher, and attack the modern state. And so I joined the Danish Young Conservatives. This was in early December 1981, and before Christmas I was driving my 9th grade school teachers and family crazy. (Some of my mother’s leftist relatives even called a family meeting over the phone in order to discuss the matter. They finally accepted my mother’s judgment that it was not quite as bad as if I had been a juvenile delinquent.) However, in search for something truly outrageous, I initially became a rabid statist conservative of the Central-European Bismarckian persuasion. For me the ideal became something like the 1880s Europe: A strong Christian government to enforce traditional values, defend the nation, keep out the foreigners and smooth over social tensions.
So, I was, in other words, a teen, who was a punk by night, dressed in black, doing the pogo and screaming the lyrics of Sex Pistols’ "Anarchy for the U.K." with my friends, while in daytime I was a conformist neo-conservative, dressed in blue, handing out leaflets for local conservative candidates and praising God, King and Country. As Dave Barry says: I am not making this up! It was a fascinating time, but clearly not a stable equilibrium ...
