Technology

Humans being as they are, just as it is naive to expect that a Society were everybody has the same (i.e. the actual Communist utopia) even if created instantly by magic would remain Equal for more than a few seconds, it's naive to expect that in a Society were personal monetary wealth is valued as the greatest quality of a person and the core political message is that "Greed is Good", the Makers of Laws (a.k.a. Politicians) and the Enforcers of Laws would be - uniquelly in such a society - not driven by personal upside maximization and instead work for the common good.

In the game of Capitalism, there is no greater Return On Investment than that of buying rules and referees and the more it get invested in overall on those with the power to subvert the system that defines and imposes check & balances the easier it gets to treat law-making and law-enforcement as services for sale.

Scandinavian nations are degrading along with everybody else at this point, it just took longer and was harder to subvert governance in the heavilly supervised version of Capitalism of countries with a general pro-social culture than it did in "free for all" US of A were there none of the social, non-Capitalist, ideological elements are about considering others and not just one's own satisfaction and ego (which is how you end up with Libertarians rather than Equalitarians and pure ego-driven Moralists rather than Conservatives).