In 1996, accepting the Republican nomination for president, an aged (by his era’s standards, not ours) Bob Dole issued a stirring defense of the past against the present. “Let me be the bridge to an America that only the unknowing call myth,” he told his audience. “Let me be the bridge to a time of tranquillity, faith and confidence in action. And to those who say it was never so, that America’s not been better, I say you’re wrong. And I know because I was there. And I have seen it. And I remember.”
America declined Dole’s offer, choosing to stay on Bill Clinton’s bridge to the 21st century instead. But much of contemporary conservatism believes strongly in Dole’s formulation — in a lost Arcadia and a debased present. There are elements of futurism and optimism on the Trump-era right, which Donald Trump himself has occasionally encouraged. But they’re usually couched as a kind of reactionary futurism, where going forward requires first taking several big steps back. And they coexist with the more straightforward the-past-was-better pessimism you’d expect from a movement that represents a lot of discontented older Americans.
Matt Yglesias has a critique of this mentality in his newsletter, in which he begins by discussing the oddness of right-wing nostalgia for the cultural landscape of his own lost youth, just 20-odd years back and hardly a traditionalist era, and then segues into critiquing economic pessimists who imagine the America of the baby boomers’ youth as a middle-class utopia when it fact most people were much poorer than today.
He links both forms of nostalgia to the basic human preference for being young and vigorous: You don’t really miss the world when you were 25; you miss being 25 yourself. He worries about the kind of politics that this bias creates — a politics that’s romantic rather than substantive, uninterested in practical policymaking and resistant to just about all forms of change. And he warns against the growing power of nostalgia-driven politics in an age of gerontocracy, where “the psychological burden of nostalgia will weigh increasingly heavily on the entire political arena, making it harder for us to wrestle with our problems in a remotely concrete way.”
I’ve defended the nostalgic impulse in the past, but I think there’s an important truth to this critique that all forms of developed-world conservatism are wrestling with. Contemporary populism draws its power not just from pure nostalgia but from a specific nostalgia for a period of faster growth and greater optimism about the future: A slogan like “Make America Great Again” implicitly promises both a return to the past and a restoration of the brighter future that the past expected to achieve.
But that restoration depends, inherently, on making changes that would unsettle current arrangements of property and power, and since older conservative voters tend to have a lot of property, they’re unlikely to be enthusiastic about many forms that such unsettlement might take. So they want the dynamism of 1960s or 1990s America back, but without, say, building any more housing in their neighborhoods or cutting old-age entitlements to spend more money on the young. This yields a mentality of “everything is awful, change everything, but don’t change my situation” — which in turn becomes a prison for conservative politicians and policymakers. (I would say that British Tories even more than American Republicans are trapped by this dynamic.)
However, these kinds of tensions and contradictions don’t imply that all nostalgia-driven policy is counterproductive or irrational, or that you can never get anywhere useful by saying, “We need to go back.” I won’t get into the complex debate over how the American economy has changed over the past 60 years, but I will channel Dole and defend a rational nostalgia for the social and cultural world of roughly 20 years ago: Don’t tell me it wasn’t better. I was there. I saw it. And I remember.
It wasn’t better just because I was a younger man back then. It was better because Americans were happier. More likely to get married. More likely to have children. Less likely to report being depressed. Less likely to commit suicide. Less likely to die of a drug overdose. More likely to have friends.
These are not my psychological projections onto the halcyon days when I could hold my liquor. They’re big trends of the past two decades, right there in the data. They’re not the only trends that matter; you can certainly find reasons to prefer the world of 2024 to the years of George W. Bush. But they’re important enough, in ways that people of varying ideological perspectives might agree upon, to raise some doubts about Yglesias’s confident statement that “it’s definitely not the case that we could make things better by reversing the flow of time.”
I mean, sure, to be literal-minded about it, the time-turner from “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” is not the solution to our problems. But could we make things better in America by trying to undo some of the changes and choices that have contributed to our current social and cultural situation? By returning to some of the policies and practices of the not-so-distant past?
I think we probably could. Yes, some things that cultural conservatives, especially, miss about the past or don’t like about the present are (mostly) beyond the reach of public policy. There isn’t a magic wand that the government can wave and make people go back to church or get married, and the internet cannot be simply uninvented.
But if you asked me for an agenda to make America 2001 again, I would immediately offer two suggestions — both nostalgia-driven and both, I think, entirely constructive.
First, it seems pretty clear that younger Americans were happier when they spent less time on smartphones and social media and more time interacting with their friends and family in the real world. So a constructive nostalgia would try to figure out how to make contemporary American childhoods more like Yglesias’s or my own, by treating the internet and social media and the smartphone as technologies of adulthood, more like cars or firearms or alcohol, and definitely not something you just issue to 12-year-olds.
Likewise, I think Americans generally were happier when they weren’t subject to as many addictive pressures, as many encouragements to vice and torpor and distraction. The internet is one such addiction, but only one: We have spent a generation making pornography, gambling and marijuana far more accessible than they were in the very recent past. So we should simply stop doing that: Roll back the push for marijuana legalization, roll back the sports gambling industrial complex, push pornography as far as possible into the darker (by which I mean higher-expense and higher-effort) regions of the internet.
I have further ideas, but those will do as illustrations. And each one prompts the possible counter that these are not realistic plans because the public would not actually support them. Parents might welcome some limits on phones in schools, but mostly they seem pretty eager to hand their kids devices and let them be distracted by the internet. And when it comes to adult freedoms, forget it — the country overwhelmingly supports legal weed, and almost nobody wants the kind of puritanism that would try to push casinos back to Las Vegas and Atlantic City or gambling ads off the TV, to say nothing of the kind required to regulate obscenity on the internet.
These are debatable assertions, but let’s allow that there’s some truth to them — that we can’t simply “return” to a happier time because Americans prefer the immediate pleasures of addictive technologies, substances and habits. That doesn’t change the fact that these kinds of turn-back-the-clock proposals are directly relevant to contemporary problems, entirely concrete in their response to present discontent.
So if we don’t want to consider them, that’s not a problem with nostalgia for our past. It’s a problem with the present.
Breviary
Dan Hitchens on the gender theories of Joan of Arc.
Matt Feeney on the comedy of “The Sopranos.”
Maggie Phillips on the classical education debate.
Noah Millman on feminism at the movies.
Darel E. Paul on the crisis of feminist natalism.
Africa in Byzantium, Africa in Rome.
This Week in Decadence
— Ted Gioia, “Why Is Music Journalism Collapsing?” (Jan. 18)
What’s the real cause of the crisis? Let’s examine it, step by step:
1. The dominant music companies decided that they could live comfortably off old music and passive listeners. Launching new artists was too hard — much better to keep playing the old songs over and over.
2. So major labels (and investment groups) started investing huge sums into acquiring old song publishing catalogs.
3. Meanwhile, streaming platforms encouraged passive listening — so people don’t even know the names of songs or artists.
4. The ideal situation was switching listeners to A.I.-generated tracks, which could be owned by the streaming platform — so no royalties are ever paid to musicians.
5. These strategies have worked. Streaming fans don’t pay much attention to new music anymore.
… The irony is that exciting new music is still getting released — but almost nobody hears it. The system actively works to hide it.