Nostalgia
“The past dominates the present.”
- Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
It wasn’t just “Make America Great Again” that made me start thinking about nostalgia in politics. I’ve always loved Rosie the Riveter, the history of the New Deal, and old political posters. But there’s no denying that 2016 ushered in a new era of romanticizing a nation’s good ol’ days.
Nostalgia, and specifically national nostalgia, is one of those concepts that is both widely shunned and widely held. National nostalgia refers to the emotional longing for a nation’s past, such as when that country was stronger, more united, or more prosperous. It can be a longing for a shared, yet imagined and vaugevague past or a sentimental attachment to a specific era, event, or historical figure. Some scholars might argue that national nostalgia requires a sense of the past being superior to the present, and others would content that a more subtle sense of warmth and admiration for a past era, especially when combined with a sense of loss in the present, sufficiently describes this phenomenon.
National nostalgia is notably distinct from individual nostalgia, or that sentimentality we have for our childhoods or years in our personal past. National nostalgia is inherently collective and not necessarily personally experienced. We don’t need to live through an event to feel nostalgic for how things were back when it happened. This aspect of national nostalgia is at the heart of the criticism levelled by some commentators who say nostalgia is inherently irrational and sentimental. It’s simply a feeling that require no direct observation and can fly in the face of confirmed facts. Yet, it’s incredibly powerful.
I started researching this topic in 2015 during the Brexit referendum in the UK and the Presidential Election in the US. Since then, it's become a more popular topic in social psychology, and my work has expanded into a larger project with Dr. Sandra Obradovic, including a studies conducted in Sweden as well as the US (right before the US Presidential Election in November 2020). I’m currently working on a book about our national nostalgia research.
In the presentation below, I outlined what national nostalgia is, why it's powerful in political communications, and how the left could use it to connect with more voters. I delivered this presentation via Zoom on 15 December 2020 (strong lockdown vibes) to political and academic colleagues in countries around the world.