Nostalgia Is a Political Weapon

The Past You Miss Never Happened

Nobody is nostalgic for the actual past. They're nostalgic for a feeling, a sense of stability, belonging, or purpose, that they project backward onto a time they've simplified beyond recognition. This is human. This is normal. And it is one of the most effective tools in the authoritarian playbook.

"Make America Great Again" is not a policy proposal. It's a mood. It works because it doesn't specify which America, or which era, or great for whom. The listener fills in the blank with whatever they've lost: economic security, cultural dominance, the feeling that the world made sense. The slogan doesn't have to be historically coherent because it isn't operating on the level of history. It's operating on the level of affect.

And this is not an American phenomenon. It's a pattern so consistent across time and geography that it ought to qualify as a law of political physics.

Two Kinds of Longing

Svetlana Boym, the literary theorist who wrote The Future of Nostalgia before her death in 2015, drew a distinction that should be required reading for anyone trying to understand the politics of the last decade. She identified two types of nostalgia: restorative and reflective.

Reflective nostalgia is bittersweet. It dwells in longing itself, acknowledges that the past is gone, and finds meaning in the distance between then and now. It's the nostalgia of the exile who knows they can't go home but keeps the memory alive anyway. It produces art, memoir, melancholy humor.

Restorative nostalgia is different. It doesn't want to remember the past. It wants to rebuild it. It treats the lost homeland not as a memory but as a blueprint. And because the past it's trying to restore never actually existed as remembered, the project of restoration inevitably requires coercion, forcing the messy, pluralistic present to conform to a fantasy of how things used to be.

Every authoritarian movement in the last century has run on restorative nostalgia. Every single one.

The Pattern

Reagan's "Morning in America" sold a vision of the 1950s: nuclear families, manufacturing jobs, churches full on Sunday, America as unambiguous global leader. It omitted segregation, McCarthyism, women locked out of professional life, and a Cold War that nearly ended in nuclear annihilation on multiple occasions. The actual 1950s were terrifying. The nostalgic 1950s were a Norman Rockwell painting.

Modi's Hindu nationalism sells a vision of Bharat, an ancient, unified Hindu civilization that predates and supersedes the pluralistic, secular republic established in 1947. This requires erasing centuries of syncretic culture, ignoring the degree to which Hinduism itself is internally diverse to the point of incoherence as a single tradition, and rewriting the Mughal period as pure foreign oppression rather than the complex, culturally productive entanglement it actually was. The Ram Mandir in Ayodhya isn't a temple. It's a monument to a past that has been fabricated to justify a present political project.

Orban's Hungary runs on the Treaty of Trianon, the 1920 settlement that stripped Hungary of two-thirds of its territory after World War I. A century later, Orban's government still puts pre-Trianon maps on official materials. The message: Hungary was great, foreigners diminished it, and only Fidesz can restore what was taken. Never mind that the pre-Trianon Kingdom of Hungary was a multiethnic empire in which Magyars were barely a majority.

Putin's Russia sells the Soviet Union minus the communism: the superpower status, the global influence, the empire from the Baltic to the Pacific. Minus, of course, the gulags, the famines, the repression, and the basic economic dysfunction that caused the whole thing to collapse. The selective memory is doing a lot of work.

The pattern is always the same. Take a real loss. Attach it to a mythologized past. Offer yourself as the vehicle of restoration. Define enemies (usually minorities, foreigners, or cosmopolitan elites) as the reason the golden age ended.

Why It Works

Nostalgia isn't just a feeling. It's a psychological response to threat.

Research by Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut at the University of Southampton has shown that nostalgia increases when people feel uncertain, lonely, or existentially threatened. It functions as a coping mechanism, connecting you to a sense of continuity and meaning when the present feels fragmented. In experimental settings, inducing nostalgia makes people feel warmer (literally, they estimate room temperature as higher), more socially connected, and more certain of life's meaning.

This is why economic dislocation is such fertile ground for nostalgic politics. When your factory closes, your town hollows out, and your kids can't afford to live where they grew up, the loss is real. The pain is real. The longing for a time when things worked, or seemed to work, is completely rational.

The manipulation comes in the diagnosis. Nostalgic politicians don't say "global capital restructured the economy in ways that benefited shareholders at the expense of workers." They say "foreigners took your jobs" or "the elites sold you out" or "we lost our way when we stopped being who we were." The solution isn't policy. The solution is restoration, going back to the way things were.

Except you can't go back. The conditions that created the remembered stability (postwar economic expansion, Cold War military spending, cheap energy, racial and gender hierarchies that suppressed competition) are gone. The factory jobs aren't coming back because the factories aren't coming back because the economic logic that sustained them no longer exists. Telling people you'll restore the 1950s economy without restoring the 1950s conditions is a lie. But it's a lie that feels true, and feeling is what nostalgia runs on.

The Things That Actually Changed

Here's what makes the nostalgia weapon so insidious: some things genuinely were better in the past for certain populations.

Real wages for American workers without college degrees peaked in the early 1970s. Union membership, and the bargaining power it conferred, has been in decline for fifty years. Housing costs relative to income have skyrocketed. Healthcare, education, childcare: all of them consume a larger share of household budgets than they did a generation ago. Social mobility has stalled.

These are legitimate grievances. People who feel economically squeezed aren't imagining it. But the nostalgic framing attributes these losses to cultural change (immigration, secularism, feminism, the dissolution of traditional hierarchies) rather than to the policy choices that actually caused them. Deregulation. Tax restructuring. The systematic destruction of organized labor. The financialization of the economy.

Nostalgic politics takes real economic pain and redirects the anger toward scapegoats. It's a bait-and-switch so effective that people will vote enthusiastically for the very policies (tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation of industry, weakening of labor protections) that created the conditions they're nostalgic about escaping.

Nostalgia vs. Memory

None of this means the past is useless. There are things worth remembering, even worth recovering. The principle of the commons, the practice of mutual aid, the expectation that public institutions should serve the public: these aren't nostalgic fantasies. They're real traditions with real histories that can inform real politics.

The difference is between reflective engagement with the past and restorative mythologizing. Reflective engagement says: "Here's something that worked, here's why it stopped working, here's how we might adapt it." Restorative mythologizing says: "Everything was perfect, enemies destroyed it, give me power and I'll bring it back."

One is historical thinking. The other is a con.

The next time a politician tells you things used to be better, ask them: better for whom? When, exactly? And what are you actually proposing to do about it? If the answer is a mood rather than a mechanism, you're being sold nostalgia. And nostalgia, as a political program, has a body count.