I believe Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. coined the phrase “politics of nostalgia” in a 1955 article in which he observed, “Today, we are told, the bright young men are conservatives; the thoughtful professors are conservatives; even a few liberals, in their own cycle of despair, are beginning to avow themselves conservatives.”

This article is light but disdainful. Schlesinger dismisses the intellectual conservatives of his day as “irrelevant” and a “hothouse growth.” They feel nostalgic, and they officially endorse a principled form of conservatism that respects ancestors and inherited ways. But the USA “is a dynamic and expanding economy” whose elites are not landed aristocrats but plutocrats. So the real power on the right is not conservatism but business, which seeks lower taxes and less regulation and welcomes rapid change.

Schlesinger wrote a long time ago, and nostalgia seems much more widespread today, when relatively few people celebrate a dynamic economy or its attendant technological and social advances. Even our plutocrats (Silicon Valley barons) often sound scared of the future or bitter about present obstacles to their genius.

Not only is MAGA nostalgic, but so are never-Trump conservatives and, I think, many across the broad spectrum of the left. To be sure, progressives insist that progress occurred in living memory, especially on social issues. Nevertheless, they (or perhaps I should include myself and say “we”) tend to be deeply nostalgic for a remembered time when society seemed to be moving in the right direction and when crises–from climate change to polarization–had not reached their current levels.

Analytically, it might be worth distinguishing these political attitudes:

• Despair: the attitude that things cannot or will not improve.
• Fear, in the sense of Judith Shklar’s “Liberalism of Fear” (1989). Shklar’s starting point: “somewhere someone is being tortured right now.” Her philosophy is “a response to these undeniable actualities, and it therefore concentrate[d] on damage control.” She is “entirely nonutopian,” motivated by memories of disaster, not by hope for a better state. Her main recommendation is to limit state power.
• Caution based on pessimism. Montaigne (1588) writes, “Our morals are extremely corrupt and have an amazing tilt toward getting worse; among our laws and customs, several are barbaric and monstrous: however, because of the difficulty of putting ourselves in a better state and the danger of further decline, if I could plant a peg in our wheel and stop it at this point, I would do so willingly.”
• Nostalgia: A bittersweet appreciation for a past state, combined with regret for its passing. Nostalgia is compatible with hope, and it need not imply pessimism. However, the following common features of nostalgia can be obstacles to progress or can simply prevent clear thinking:

1. Nostalgia often assumes that a harmonious and integrated condition continued over a whole span of the past. “This is how things were back in the day … This is how my life was back then …” In contrast, we often perceive our present selves and our current society as inconsistent or even contradictory and as constantly changing (Hart 1973, Brewer 2023). This contrast biases us against the present.
2. Envy easily attaches to nostalgia. We wish that we could be like the people back in the time for which we feel nostalgic. We may envy individuals or groups who benefited from causing those good times to end for us. However, as Walter Benjamin notes, we never seem to envy the people of the future. Someone living in 1925 might have anticipated the amount of technological and economic progress that has occurred since then, yet they didn’t envy us. Likewise, we don’t envy our successors, even if we are optimistic. Envy is problematic because it is zero-sum and promotes conflict.
3. Nostalgia can erase the salutary kind of fear that Shklar recommends. Near the beginning of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera’s narrator says that everything is bathed in nostalgia in the face of dissolution, even the guillotine. People feel nostalgic for moments of crisis and action, such as the French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” (Wordsworth). They forget the violence, confusion, failure, and vices of the moment. Of course, good things also happened, but nostalgia distorts our estimation and causes us to discount present dangers.
4. Nostalgia suggests that the best choices were obvious and makes us angry at those who chose badly, or self-critical if we think that we were unwise. We think: Why didn’t they (or we) prevent harmful change? But we always act under conditions of deep uncertainty and confusion, and the best choices are rarely obvious until it is too late.
5. Nostalgia tends to discourage action. It is not a sharp analysis of trends that can recommend concrete reforms to restore broken institutions or to reverse declines. Nostalgia is a hazy, elegiac, twilight feeling; an attitude for spectators rather than actors.

To summarize: Nostalgia can cause symptoms of bias, envy, complacency, anger and/or disdain, and passivity. As one who exhibits all of its symptoms, I recommend trying to avoid it.

See also: nostalgia in the face of political crisis; phenomenology of nostalgia; nostalgia for now.

Sources: Judith N. Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Nancy L. Rosenblum, ed. Liberalism and the moral life. Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 27, 26; Montaigne 2.17 (“Of Presumption”), my trans.; Marshawn Brewer, “Sketch for a Phenomenology of Nostalgia,” Human Studies 46.3 (2023): 547-563; J.G. Hart “Toward a phenomenology of nostalgia,” Man and World 6 (1973), 406-7; Walter Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte (1940), II.