I appreciate all the info you posted and found it interesting, but I'll point out that even Denmark's Prime Minister has come out to correct the record and point out that they're not a socialist country (no matter how many times Bernie says they are):
Denmark Tells Bernie Sanders It's Had Enough Of His 'Socialist' Slurs | Investor's Business Daily
And here, an economics professor at the University of Georgia weighs in on the question:
Sorry Bernie Bros But Nordic Countries Are Not Socialist
As he points out--and as I've seen others point out in recent months as well--a lot of people today are essentially re-defining the word "socialism" and it's only under this re-definition that you might be able to fit the Scandinavian countries under the socialist umbrella. As he says--and just as the Denmark PM also affirmed--economically they simply do not act like true socialist countries, despite all their welfare programs and a generous government-provided social safety net.
I would argue though that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her DSA cronies DO want to usher in an era of actual socialism in America. She is on record as saying that "capitalism will not always exist in the world" and that she is working toward the goal of tearing capitalism down in the United States, which means that her goal for the US is fundamentally different from what we see in capitalist democracies like Denmark and Sweden. She may very well call herself a "democratic" socialist, but I have little doubt that if she and those like her were somehow put in power in the United States that we wouldn't be democratic for long.
Lars Lokke Rasmussen is the current prime minister of Denmark. He's part of the Venstre party, which is the political right in Danish politics. Venstre has a platform of libetalization and has been working to disassemble aspects of the welfare state. But that welfare state was put in place by guess who?
The Danish Social Democratic party, which reigned from the 1920s until well into the 1960s and created the system the Danes enjoy today.
In Finland, the social welfare system was put into place in the 1950s and 60s by guess who? The Red Earth government, a coalition between the Social Democratic party and the Centre Party. The SDP was a member of the socialist international and held majority seats in Parliament for much of the 60s-80s.
In Norway, the welfare state was created by the social democratic Labour Party, which has been in power since roughly 1927, though they did undertake a campaign of libetalization in the 1990s. Their main competition has been from the Socialist party who briefly broke their reign in the 1970s and as a consequence of their liberalization and a resurgent right they've lost clout in the 2000s.
In Sweden, the Social Democrats were the ones who organized the social welfare system and reigned for much of the 20th century, sometimes losing seats to the further left Communist party and Left party, though since the mid-2000s they've consistently been losing out to the right wing Alliance Party. The party also had an extensive infusion of liberalization when that was all the rage in the 80s and 90s.
So reducing the nation-state to a static image or descriptor is folly. It's a story of historical struggle and in each of the cases in the Nordic model, it was Social Democrats, mostly in the model of Bernsteinian revisionism (which by the way isn't mutually exclusive with capitalism, unlike what's called "vulgar Marxism" or orthodox Marxism). For that matter, neither is Leninism which ultimately was a form of state based capitalism.
So when you say Ocasio Cortez wants to usher in an age of "actual socialism," understand there is no "actual," that can be applied to the term, as there are a variety of interpretations. Ocasio Cortez is a part of the Democratic Socialists of America platform, which I already laid out in exhaustive detail.
And there's nothing so insane about saying capitalism won't always exist. A major part of Marx's critique of capital was that embedded in it were the seeds of its collapse. Some believe we're already in the period of "late capitalism" (I don't). Others believe we're accelerating toward something that's not capitalism, but worse. It's hard to make such judgments. But capitalism and democracy don't necessarily need one another to exist, as we know from ancient Democratic societies like Athens, which certainly wasn't anything close to capitalist. And also from capitalist societies like Russia, which is hardly Democratic.
Slough off the Cold War rhetoric and see that socialization, like liberalization, democratization or centralization are processes--Simply instruments for making societies more manageable depending on the historical moment. None of them are boogeymen.