In the midst of accelerating crises, the past can offer a comforting retreat. Over the last year, we’ve not only been living through a global pandemic unlike any we’ve seen in generations, but the effects of climate change have become even clearer, and the economy once again threw people into turmoil as industries were disrupted and housing costs continued to soar. Faced with the stress and anxiety of events far beyond our personal control, hope for the future can retreat, leaving nostalgia to fill the void.
Major media conglomerates like Disney and Netflix use the emotion to drive audiences for productions like the revived Star Wars franchise and ’80s-inspired Stranger Things. Meanwhile, political movements have also seized on nostalgia, most notably in Donald Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again,” but also in the UK’s Brexit campaign and nationalist movements across Europe. Even Joe Biden makes appeals to the pre-Trump era. We’re living in a golden age of nostalgia, but despite the crises that seem to be driving it, the emotion tends to be deployed to maintain the status quo.
In his new book The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia, Grafton Tanner delves into the history of nostalgia and seeks to understand how it has come to serve its current role. We can be nostalgic for many things, from a place or a time to even just an aesthetic, and those feelings are not inherently reactionary or conservative. Rather, Tanner argues, “the attributes we commonly associate with nostalgia — kitsch, backwardness, gross sentimentality — are really just the products of its exploitation” by right-wing political figures and corporations that seek to commercialize it for profit. Nostalgia could potentially be deployed for other, more positive, ends — but at present, we are saddled with a conservative nostalgia that won’t be going away anytime soon.
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