Thomas Frank writes about politically noxious nostalgia for Harpers. It’s connects the bicentennial in 1976 with our current impoverished political moment. I think it strikes a chord.
Donald Trump didn’t invent the eternal return of nostalgia any more than Ronald Reagan invented the retro style of the Seventies and Eighties. Nostalgia is today a structural feature of our modern world, the emptiness and vapidity at the heart of our culture, the inevitable mass-produced sentiment of a society that permanently feels that everything is constantly going wrong but is chronically unable to identify why.
I can certainly cop to rooting around in nostalgia (see my recent post on an old DOS game), and I do feel uncomfortable about it sometimes; the politics wrapped around nostalgia can be manipulative and harmful, and even if my idle musings on the past don’t have those goals, it feels like being too close to the past in thought can lead one astray in the present. Moderation in all things, perhaps?
The essay is worth reading in its entirety, and the conclusion is interesting, if unleavened. 🇺🇸