I’ve been thinking a lot about the dangers of nostalgia as a political ideology. I wrote about it in a column last year, focusing on Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan and Bernie Sanders’ call to take our country back. Both are backward-looking slogans — “again” and “back” implying some more Edenic past that is as much myth as it is reality.
Nostalgia is paralyzingly politically — and personally. If we can only look backward, then we lose the ability to function honestly in the present or to look forward without baggage.
Daniel Zamora explains why in a piece at The Jacobin: “a ‘return’ to the past is neither possible nor desirable.”
At most, it’s a fantasy that has no chance of being realized in genuinely emancipatory ways. On the contrary, this feeling of nostalgia is today at the heart of the political success of far-right parties, but also, increasingly, of the mainstream right.
This return to the past is seductive to a non-negligible fraction of the working class. In advocating for a radical reversal of cultural liberalization, and of the cultural effects of neoliberal globalization, these parties have managed to win both the ideological and economic battle. They propose no real alternative to capitalism, while winning the political struggle on the terrain of family values, work, and responsibility.
This nostalgia, with its clearly conservative effects, nevertheless hides within it a progressive dimension. Thus, like religion in Marx’s account, it is “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” But this opium is “at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.”
This is why, I think, there was some overlap between the Trump and Sanders’ camps, even if there was almost nothing ideologically that would tie them together. Even on trade, an area that might seem on first blush to be a common bond, the differ greatly. Trump’s argument is not about protecting workers, but about getting a better deal for America, which in turn would help workers. It is a nationalism that promises undefined benefits to a class of people who would continue to lack power under these renegotiate trade pacts.
Sanders’ argument on trade is based on the concept of worker power — the new trade regime robs workers of their ability to control their own fate by making it easier for large corporations to undercut union power. Trade deals that lack worker input only further empower the bosses.
But this matters little in our dumbed-down version on contemporary politics, which relies on accepted narratives set in place decades ago and tends to be visual in a dangerous, omni-directional and consumerist way. We are passive receivers of wisdom, of information, expecting the people we elect to operate on our behalf. And while that is how representative democracy is supposed to work in its broadest outlines, there always has been an assumption embedded in our founding documents that we would be more than passive observers. Not that we’ve ever been the fully engaged polity we need to be for this government of ours to function on our behalf. Part of this is structural, as Howard Zinn points out, baked into the original cake by an elite that was fearful of too much self-government. Part is an inertia created by the stresses of the modern economy, which conspires to keep most of us chained to our desks or machines and focused only on earning enough to pay the rent. And part is a modern version of the Roman bread and circuses — an array of entertainments and distractions that leaves us as passive recipients of pre-digested pablum that, in the political realm, takes the form of cable news, empty slogans (“I’m with her,” “Make American Great Again,” etc).
Nostalgia, as Zamora writes, is an opiate. It insures us to the real questions, keeps us docile by presenting a simple narrative that makes use of our own faulty or biased memories. Yes, there were better times in the past, we can say, when factory jobs were plentiful. When we could expect our kids to do better than we did, and so on. But these good times were not good times for all — African Americans were conspicuously excluded both by law and by a set of unstated rules from this version of the American dream. Barack Obama’s rise to the highest office in the land only proves the point, the inconceivability of his story and the backlash his election caused among many whites are indications of the exceptional nature of his accomplishment. (Exceptional in that he exceeded a limit that had been imposed on African Americans, not that African Americans are incapable, which is a lie racists tell themselves.)
Opiates mask the pain, protect us from the immediate suffering. While they can moderate pain and give the body a chance to relax and heal, they more often end up insulating the user from the reality of his or her existence — until the opiate runs out and the user is left in withdrawal. My pain is go e, so I don’t have to address where the pain comes from; I can ignore the structural issues and pretend it’s all OK. I don’t have to change anything.
We can continue to ignore what has actually happened — the growth of corporate power, the erosion of unions, the willful destruction of the social safety net and social cohesion — and maintain the mythology of the Edenic past.
Hank Kalet 
Drawing an equivalency (even on a very limited basis) between Bernie and the monstrous Trump is giving me extreme agita and acid reflux.