MICHAEL MOYNIHAN: Stockholm Syndrome: Spotify threatened to abandon Sweden if the government didn’t address over-regulation and sky-high taxes.

Not much had changed since 1969, when Susan Sontag observed that a “strong conviction of their country’s moral superiority” made Swedes “extremely sensitive to, and defensive about, any criticism published about their country abroad.” My political heterodoxy made the already difficult task of befriending Swedes something approaching an impossibility. By 2007, I had convinced my partner that her expatriation would engender less controversy than my own. In a decision that neither of us has since regretted, we fled to the United States.

So it was with interest that I picked up Finnish journalist Anu Partanen’s book “The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life,” her account of a quiescent existence in the Nordic welfare state upended by love: While I moved from New York to Sweden, Ms. Partanen had made the opposite journey, lured from Helsinki to New York by a charming American academic. In 300 pages, Ms. Partanen offers an expanded version of what my Swedish antagonists could summarize before the herring and schnapps were served: America is a pretty horrible place and would be less horrible if it were more like Finland. Or Sweden. Or Norway. Employing anecdote and meticulously cherry-picked data, Ms. Partanen argues that on virtually every metric the U.S.—a massive, sloppy collection of religions, ethnicities and distinct regional cultures—is bested by tiny, homogenous Finland. Unlike the ersatz liberty she found in America, her native country had achieved “real freedom, real independence, and real opportunity.”

It’s funny, they say that nationalism is evil, but they actually mean other people’s nationalism. And if an American moved to Sweden or Finland and wrote a book about how smug, insular, and close-minded people there are, that would be Ugly Americanism.