I remember the first time I experienced nostalgia.
It was the night before I began 9th grade. In the morning the bus would be taking me to a new school several miles away from the one I had attended since kindergarten. On that last night of summer vacation, I lay awake in bed and regretted having to leave junior high and my familiar old school building behind. At some level, I knew that if I had liked school in the old location, there was no reason to think I would dislike learning in the new location. Yet there was something almost seductive about letting myself wallow, at least until I fell asleep, in a melancholy funk over the fact that a chapter of my life — which at the time had lasted all of 13 years — had ended for good.
I got over it, of course. High school turned out fine. College did too. Like most people, I occasionally get nostalgic about this or that aspect of my younger days, but on the whole I live for the future and don't torment myself with longings for an idyllic past. I imagine the same goes for you.
Yet when it comes to politics in America these days, nostalgia — a warped and unrealistic nostalgia — drives much of what is unhealthiest in our civic discourse.
"What do populists on the left and the right have in common?" asks John Gustavsson, a Swedish economist observing American political developments from across the Atlantic. In an essay for National Review, Gustavsson argues that for all that separates the progressive left and the MAGA right, they are united by "nostalgia for a bygone era: the post-war boom."
Actually, they weren't all that nifty. |
In those halcyon days, working-class Americans — so the narrative goes — could not only support their families on a single income, they could own a home of their own and send their kids to college. Products were made in America and lasted for decades. But then, writes Gustavsson, something happened and everything began going downhill.
What was that something? Liberals and conservatives tell different stories.
Progressive nostalgists bewail the economic policies that cut taxes and freed trade, with the result that today there is far more income inequality than there was two generations ago. Nostalgists on the right yearn for the postwar America that had far fewer immigrants but far stronger traditional norms.
There are innumerable examples of left- and right-wing nostalgic thinking. The scholar Yuval Levin rounded up a number of them in his 2016 book, "The Fractured Republic," the first chapter of which was titled "Blinded by Nostalgia." The conservative commentator Dennis Prager often observes that America was a better place when he was young; in a 2018 column he argued that immigration wasn't a concern in his youth "because the vast majority of past immigrants changed their values," whereas most newcomers today are "coming to America with non-American values . . . and are encouraged to hold on to them."
Earlier this year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., promoting his independent presidential candidacy, released a video drenched in yearning for the idealized economics of the America in which he grew up.
"What happened to America the land of opportunity, where you could be sure that if you worked hard and played by the rules, that you would have a decent life?" Kennedy asks at one point. "All the new wealth of the last generation has gone to the billionaires and to transnational corporations, while our tattered middle class, our infrastructure, our industry have been hollowed out from the inside. Instead of promise, we've left our kids sick and drowning in debt. . . . Too many Americans are living bleak and hopeless lives, dreading the one medical emergency or the car repair that will tip them over the edge into homelessness."
Far be it from me to deny that America has declined in important ways. I could scarcely do so after all the times I've written about the nation's deteriorating politics, civil discourse, educational system, and ethical standards. Still, when it comes to economics, the nostalgists are simply wrong to imagine that middle-class prosperity peaked in the postwar era and has declined ever since.
Gustavsson supplies some crucial perspective.
"In 1950, the average house was 60 percent smaller than it is today," he writes. "More than a fifth of American households did not have a single vehicle in 1960, compared with just over 8 percent today. When adjusted for inflation, the cost of gas was not much lower than it is today, and the cars back then needed a lot more of it."
Moreover, as late as 1960, one-sixth of US households still had no indoor plumbing, well over 80 percent had no air-conditioning, and most high school graduates did not go on to college. Americans were spending nearly double the percentage of their income on food as they do now. And countless amenities that even most poor Americans today take for granted — color TVs, cell phones, online shopping, email — were unknown during the supposed golden age under Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.
Americans today tend to start working later in life, retire earlier, and live much longer. The average US employee as recently as 1980 put in 2,002 hours at work each year; the number now is 1,892.
In his video, RFK Jr. says that when he was a child, US "productivity, ingenuity, and can-do spirit were the envy of the world" and that Americans "had confidence in our strength, our capacity, and the limitless potential of our country."
Like many economic nostalgists, he neglects to mention that he was born into the unique circumstances that immediately followed World War II, when most of America's global rivals had been bombed into rubble, leaving the US economy as the mightiest on earth. "With minimal international competition, the US economy experienced a significant boom, particularly within its manufacturing sector," Gustavsson observes. But as Europe and Japan were rebuilt, their economies grew stronger — and the United States no longer bestrode the world's markets like a colossus.
Could it be that what nostalgists really yearn for — but can't bring themselves to acknowledge — is the social cohesiveness of the postwar era? Such cohesiveness has not been common in US history, but for one brief shining moment Americans were remarkably unified, at least on the surface. It couldn't last, and it didn't; epic clashes soon erupted over McCarthyism, civil rights, Vietnam, and more. But the memory of that midcentury moment remained and has been recalled ever since not as a deviation from the norm, but as the norm itself.
If only that were the case. I am persuaded that most Americans, most of the time, are proud of their country, grateful to be part of it, and worried about its future. Ideological hostility isn't chiseled irrevocably into our national DNA, but we have allowed our public culture to be dominated by the strident voices at the extremes. Until that changes — until the zealots on both the left and the right are repudiated — Americans will never be able to coalesce around the commonalities that bind us and our politics will keep getting more bitter and dysfunctional. Too many of those zealots use nostalgia for the past to whip up anger in the present. Learning to tune them out would be a step in the right direction.
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What I Wrote Then
25 years ago on the op-ed page
From "Speed didn't kill" June 21, 1999:
As a sometime Young Man in a Hurry — I was once pulled over by a New Hampshire state trooper for driving at a speed he claimed to have clocked in the low triple digits — I absorbed with a pang the news of Montana's surrender to the forces of automotive correctness. Until last month Montana had kept its highways blessedly free of speed limits. State law permitted motorists to drive as fast as they liked during daylight hours, so long as their speed was "reasonable and prudent.
But the Montanabahn is no more. Earlier this year the state's Supreme Court struck down the law for vagueness, leaving lawmakers with little choice but to bridle their constituents with a speed limit. On May 28, the Montana Highway Patrol began pulling over drivers going faster than 75 miles per hour and giving them — ugh — speeding tickets.
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ICYMI
On Wednesday, I noted that a fresh push is underway on Beacon Hill to legalize physician-assisted suicide and wrote about a new BBC documentary that explores the issue from the perspective of Liz Carr, an English actress, comedian, and disability rights activist. Like many severely disabled people, Carr opposes making it lawful for doctors to facilitate a patient's death. She fears, reasonably, that legalization will inevitably lead to coercion. Her film is riveting, fascinating, and at times even funny — but its message is deeply serious: Decent societies assist those who are suffering to live, not to die.
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The Last Line
"Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air." — Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus (1965)
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(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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