Nostalgia

As we get older, more of life lies behind us than ahead, and what remains to look forward to isn’t always inspiring—unless one counts hemorrhoids, lower-back pain, and menopause as perks. The reality of aging is that loss begins to take center stage. We lean more on memory to make sense of our feelings and the world around us. The sadness of losing family and friends becomes tempered by warmth and comfort; grief softens into recollection. We become nostalgic.

The word "nostalgia" combines the Greek "nostos" (homecoming) and "algos" (pain). It captures the ache for what has passed and the yearning for the comfort, security, and innocence we associate with “home.” Nostalgia plays on fundamental human needs. We all access the past to soothe ourselves, especially when the present feels unstable. It is powerful, and it can be triggered—sometimes manipulated—with Pavlovian precision.

One of my favourite online public intellectuals, Vlad Vexler, recently made a fascinating observation about nostalgia and its political uses. Drawing from his childhood memories of the Soviet Union, he uses ice cream as a symbolic entry point into a broader phenomenon: nostalgia as a political balm. His argument hinges on the idea that political nostalgia sells a past that never was and promises a future that will never be.

Authoritarian regimes have always understood this. Nostalgia is deployed to make older citizens feel good about themselves at moments when conditions are, in reality, quite grim. It pacifies and depoliticizes. We see this plainly in the propaganda machines of Putin’s Russia, Kim’s North Korea, and Xi’s China. But it is also at work in Western democracies drifting toward illiberalism—Orban’s Hungary, Farage’s UK right, Le Pen’s France. In its most extreme form, as in Nazi Germany, nostalgia emerges out of acute social, economic, and political disarray and becomes the foundation of a new/old moral order.

The United States is hardly immune. You could argue that part of the genius of the American political system was its ability to harness nostalgia in constructive, relatively benign ways. The system’s traditional balance depends on a kind of dialectic: a backward-leaning conservatism in the Republican Party, which thrives on one form of nostalgia (a nativist, frontier experience), offset by a forward-looking progressivism in the Democratic Party, which offers a different variety (the refugee immigrant experience).

Viewed this way, today’s political imbalance reflects a failure of Democrats to offer a compelling narrative that counterweights the Republicans’ nostalgia. As Vlad notes, “If you suppress the benign forms of nostalgia, the malign forms will come to get you.” The myth of the American Dream once served as a benign national nostalgia. It is now being displaced by the malignant nostalgia of White Christian Nationalism.

Political nostalgia almost always intensifies during periods of technological upheaval. It is no coincidence that the myth-soaked fantasies of Nazism flourished alongside the revolutionary new medium of radio. Likewise, the rise of social media—and its tendency to isolate and atomize—has coincided with the ascent of MAGA. Nostalgia is, at bottom, a longing for connection in a hyper-individualized world. It is also a search for authenticity, which is why memories of the past become so idealized.

The antidote to this surge in political nostalgia is reality: the reality of what actually was - not the gilded, soothing version we prefer to remember - and the reality of the present, unfiltered and undistorted. Admittedly that is a tall order in a post-truth age, especially when nostalgia itself is now algorithmically amplified and fed to us as content.

The first step is simply recognizing that nostalgia is not always benign. Sometimes it signals that we may not be prepared for tough times, and we need to re-calibrate.