Nostalgia and Politics: A Literature Review

In 2024, two billion people voted in 50 federal elections globally, and one theme emerged between countless parties running for office: nostalgia. For instance, in France, a left-wing electoral alliance, the New Popular Front, positions itself as the counterbalance to rising far-right politics in Europe, as the original Popular Front did in the era of Nazism. Meanwhile, France's right-wing National Rally capitalizes on a nostalgic longing for a cohesive national identity, arguing that it has been lost due to immigration and globalization. The unprecedented prevalence of nostalgia in global politics suggests that it is a potent tool for motivating political action, raising the question: how does nostalgia influence politics? A review of the available literature concludes that nostalgia uniquely empowers reactionary ideologies and leads to misguided policy due to psychological and social factors that distort how people perceive the past.

Ideologies Empowered by Nostalgia

Nostalgia empowers reactionary ideologies, including populism, authoritarianism, neocolonialism, anti-globalism, racism, and sexism. In their peer-reviewed article published in the Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Dr. Stefan Couperus and his team of researchers found that populist politicians often frame issues in contexts of broad national decline, contrasting that decline with nostalgic imagery (Couperus et al. 257). Populists attribute this decline to elites and politicians who, they claim, have become more despotic and unaccountable to their "virtuous" citizenry (Couperus et al. 256-257). Populists can then target elites they deem corrupt, even with dubious accusations, to justify crackdowns and discredit rivals and institutions to entrench their power. Ultimately, nostalgia accelerates the rise of populism in states where sentiments of government overreach are popular.

While Couperus' research applies to democracies with robust institutions, Ehito Kimura at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and a group of researchers at an Indonesian think tank wrote an article in the Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs about nostalgia's role in Indonesian attitudes toward authoritarianism. Despite human rights abuses under 20th-century authoritarian President Suharto, many romanticize his rule for its political and economic stability relative to present-day Indonesia; this nostalgia has recently led to the election of the pseudo-authoritarian Subianto (Kimura et al. 404-405). Since much of the Indonesian public's last memory of a stable state was under Suharto, nostalgia for the era makes voters overlook the inherent instability in authoritarian states due to a lack of accountability from free and fair elections and independent judicial systems. Politicians exploit this nostalgia to persuade voters that instability is inherent to liberalization and that democratic backsliding is justified. Neither in Couperus' depiction of populism nor in Kimura's portrayal of authoritarianism, do politicians draw causal links between the nation's instability or decline and elitism or democratization. However, such rhetoric is still clearly persuasive, as evidenced by Subianto's election.

Nostalgia does not only emerge in domestic politics, as Couperus and Kimura reveal, but also in nations' international relations, as shown by University of Oxford modern history professor Robert Gildea in Empires of the Mind. Gildea explains that nostalgia promotes neocolonialism in formerly imperial states. For instance, deep-seated nostalgia in France fuels attempts to maintain and regain influence in its former West African colonies (Gildea 97-121). This nostalgia has led the French government to maintain military bases and resource extraction projects in former colonies while providing financial aid with coercive restrictions and supporting domestic politicians favoring resource extraction and export-based economies (Gildea 97-121). These actions are detrimental because they foster dependence on France in former colonies, enabling France to punish them when they disobey the French government's will. The public's desire to maintain global influence also extends to anti-globalism. According to Gildea, Brexit supporters saw the European Union, where the U.K. had to make decisions collectively with other nations, as contradictory to the romanticized, British empire-era culture of British exceptionalism (Gildea 144-157). Yet, according to the Resolution Foundation, a think tank, Brexit has made the nation poorer because E.U. membership promotes the free movement of labor and capital, encouraging greater efficiency, innovation, and lower prices of goods ("Brexit Has Damaged"). Therefore, nostalgia can provoke neocolonial and anti-globalist policymaking, which can be exploitative towards other nations or against domestic self-interests in pursuit of regaining former glory and power.

On racism and sexism, Auburn University assistant professor of political science Spencer Goidel and colleagues wrote about the connection between nostalgia and such sentiments. They found a correlation between collective nostalgia and racist and sexist attitudes (Goidel et al.). Couperus' and Kimura's research makes this correlation causal because they describe how politicians and the public attribute societal decline to potentially unrelated sociopolitical events. By identical logic, if one's idealized image of the past is one where men of the ethnic majority dominate society, voters may blame their nation's struggles on increases in the rights of women and ethnic minorities. Moreover, collective nostalgia often resonates with those who have historical privilege, romanticizing a time that was "less diverse and less equitable, but, at least for dominant social groups, those times are remembered as simpler, safer, and more economically secure" (Goidel et al.). In contrast, those of less historical privilege may have such nostalgia outweighed by collective trauma. Goidel's research can be extrapolated to suggest that the nostalgia-tinged populism and authoritarianism mentioned in other literature are most effective when framed to restore the power of historically privileged individuals.

The Distorted, Irrational Nature of Nostalgia and Ill-Advised Policy 

Nostalgia-induced efforts to return a nation to its former glory will likely produce misguided policy because of the public's selective memory, selective historical preservation, and nostalgia's intense emotional nature, fostering irrational political beliefs. 

The foremost counterargument in the available literature against the claim that nostalgia leads to misguided policy is that past policies can inspire future progress. Jennifer Yachnin wrote an article for E&E News about the Biden administration's endorsement of creating the Civilian Climate Corps, a job relief program modeled after the highly successful New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps (Yachnin). This article suggests that nostalgia for past progress and innovation inspires the creation of similar solutions to today's challenges. Nevertheless, the logic behind the founding of the Civilian Conservation and Climate Corps exists irrespective of nostalgia, meaning nostalgia is not crucial for innovation. In contrast, as Sam Freedman writes in The Guardian, nostalgia often causes voters and politicians to attempt to replicate past successes rather than finding innovative approaches (Freedman). Such a tendency is unlikely to produce intended outcomes because solutions that worked in the past succeeded under different contexts than the present day. For instance, according to Dan Farber, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, the current U.S. government's plan to restore the American oil, coal, and gas industry at the expense of its green energy sector is an ill-informed effort motivated by nostalgia (Farber). While the former thrived in the 1950s, nowadays, its growth is vastly outpaced by green energy (Farber), illustrating how nostalgia prompts decisions based on outdated contexts and past successes that cannot be replicated. Nonetheless, some argue nostalgia still expresses legitimate grievances. Ion Marandici, a former political science professor at Rutgers University, wrote in Eurasian Geography and Economics about how political nostalgia for the Soviet Union in Moldova impacts left-wing parties in the nation. Among Marandici's conclusions was that Communist nostalgia is a "mechanism helping the losers of the market transition cope with the economic hardships of the present" (Marandici 520-521), which implies that Moldovan Communist nostalgia is founded not upon irrationality but genuine failures in Moldova's market transition. However, the argument that nostalgia expresses politically relevant grievances is flawed because much available literature suggests that a nation's past is remembered in ways that suppress memories of crucial challenges. 

A Reason Magazine article titled "False Nostalgia" by Johan Norberg examines how people recall their past and national history. He finds that people idealize the past because many of its challenges have since been surmounted and thus appear less significant, while present issues are uncertain and frightening (Norberg). People also relive memories through the lens of their younger selves when they lived ignorant of society's challenges (Norberg). When memories of struggle are suppressed or downplayed relative to current issues, society is bound to want to return to the conditions of the past and will be prone to regressing even when change is needed.

This concept of historical over-romanticization is reinforced by powerful institutions that selectively preserve history to mold desired narratives. In an essay titled "Of Memory and Our Democracy," former United States Secretary of State Colin Powell explains the significance of many monuments to American history (Powell); these monuments almost exclusively portray America positively. Norberg's logic would suggest that this may be because the public forgets national failures over time. Furthermore, as state-funded monuments, there is an incentive to portray American history positively, commemorating nostalgic national triumphs in war and social progress to increase patriotism and state legitimacy. This notion that powerful institutions distort collective nostalgia, illustrated in the government-commissioned monuments in Powell's essay, is claimed to be intentional by Victor Roudometof, director of the Historical and Literary Archives of Kavala, in the Journal of Political & Military Sociology. Roudometof wrote that governments portray history in biased ways to legitimize themselves and certain policies (Roudometof 166). Government institutions such as nationalized media organizations and educational institutions have incentives to suppress history that discredits the government and its ideologies. Therefore, governments can weaponize nostalgia to obscure their failures to avoid accountability while framing historical events to legitimize policies on grounds other than the policy's logic. Jeremy D. Stoddard, professor and researcher at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, wrote in Film & History that the profit-driven United States film industry disproportionately highlights stories designed for the white middle and upper class because they are America's largest consumer base (Stoddard and Marcus 28). Thus, films from the past or those that depict it can propagate undue nostalgia as the film industry's hyperfocus on the lives of the relatively privileged provides an inflated impression of the era's average living standards. Famed social critics Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky write in their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media about how media organizations also reinforce privileged perspectives because their primary sources of information, investment, and advertising revenue are business and government elites, which coerce media organizations out of publishing anti-business, anti-government stories (Herman and Chomsky). Currently, society can access information about the injustices and failures of such prominent institutions through social media and democratized online news. However, assessing the past based on news media of the time, which Herman and Chomsky show biased in favor of those institutions, can instill an overly idealistic view of how government and corporations once behaved such that people may advocate for a return to the era's politics without knowing that it may be against their self-interest.

Finally, nostalgia produces ill-advised policy because of its emotional and irrational nature. A group of academics at the think tank The Century Foundation wrote a report on the politics surrounding moral panics, or uniquely controversial events or ideas claimed to damage society's fundamental morality. Politicians and media amplify panics and push people to highly emotional, irrational states where they become prone to supporting radical decision-making without considering other perspectives (Allouche et al.). Moral panics rely on society's nostalgic conception of the past being morally upstanding to paint controversial changes as a cause of moral collapse. In this irrational state, the public is also susceptible to entering cults of personality, as described in Anne-Mette Sundahl's political science thesis for Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. For example, Vladimir Putin has used nostalgic imagery of Soviet glory to make himself a savior figure that voters rally around uncritically (Sundahl 1). When this compelling imagery and rhetoric blinds voters, they become desperate for such prosperity. They are then likely to hastily support efforts deemed to return society to its former glory, even if the political effort is dubious in efficacy. The relationship between nostalgia and irrationality means that populists claiming that the government is unaccountable or authoritarians claiming that it is unstable, as discussed by Couperus and Kimura, can increase their power, even when their grievances are illegitimate. Genuine grievances will exist irrespective of nostalgia because of rational incentives to improve one's conditions; nostalgia is an irrational agent that can promote regression when it is unnecessary or harmful. 

Conclusion

The available literature reveals that nostalgia has likely emerged as a pervasive political tool in recent years because of its ability to irrationally radicalize and make voters support policies they otherwise would not. As societies face new crises or sensationalized moral panics, many blame the current political and ideological consensus for causing them and look to history to model how to solve them. Those people are taught to yearn for a time of simplicity, stability, and national glory, and such nostalgia plays into the ideologies of populist, authoritarian, neo-colonial, anti-globalist, sexist, and racist politics. These policies are often misguided because they seek to return society to the politics of eras overromanticized due to psychological factors and institutions' selective preservation of history, and such nostalgia is frequently weaponized to create irrational moral panics and personality cults. This literature review synthesizes why nostalgia in politics will not return society to morality or stability but stagnation, regression, and inequality.

Works Cited

Allouche, Sabiha, et al. "The Politics of Moral Panics." The Century Foundation, 9 May 2022, tcf.org/content/report/the-politics-of-moral-panics/. Accessed 28 Feb. 2025.

"Brexit Has Damaged Britain's Competitiveness, and Will Make Us Poorer in the Decade Ahead." Resolution Foundation, 22 June 2022, www.resolutionfoundation.org/press-releases/brexit-has-damaged-britains-competitiveness-and-will-make-us-poorer-in-the-decade-ahead/. Accessed 24 Mar. 2025.

Couperus, Stefan, et al. "Historical Legacies and the Political Mobilization of National Nostalgia: Understanding Populism's Relationship to the Past." Journal of Contemporary European Studies, vol. 31, no. 2, 2 May 2023, pp. 253-67. Taylor & Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2023.2207480. Accessed 28 Feb. 2025.

Farber, Dan. "The Dangerous Politics of Nostalgia." Legal Planet, 12 June 2017, legal-planet.org/2017/06/12/the-dangerous-politics-of-nostalgia/. Accessed 4 Mar. 2025.

Freedman, Sam. "The Big Idea: Is Nostalgia Killing Politics?" The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 21 Oct. 2024, www.theguardian.com/books/2024/oct/21/the-big-idea-is-nostalgia-killing-politics. Accessed 24 Mar. 2025.

Gildea, Robert. Empires of the Mind: The Colonial Past and the Politics of the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Print. The Wiles Lectures.

Goidel, Spencer, et al. "Longing for the 'Good Old Days' or Longing for a Racist and Sexist Past?" Research & Politics, vol. 11, no. 2, Apr. 2024, https://doi.org/10.1177/20531680241246387. Accessed 28 Feb. 2025.

Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. 1988. Bodley Head, 2008.

Kimura, Ehito, et al. "Authoritarian Nostalgia and Democratic Decline in Contemporary Indonesia." Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, vol. 43, no. 3, Dec. 2024, pp. 387-408. SAGE Journals Online, https://doi.org/10.1177/18681034241252452. Accessed 28 Feb. 2025.

Marandici, Ion. "Nostalgic Voting? Explaining the Electoral Support for the Political Left in Post-Soviet Moldova." Eurasian Geography and Economics, vol. 63, no. 4, 2022, pp. 514-42. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/15387216.2021.1918565. Accessed 4 Mar. 2025.

Norberg, Johan. "False Nostalgia." Reason Magazine, Jan. 2022, reason.com/2021/12/05/false-nostalgia/. Accessed 28 Feb. 2025.

Powell, Colin L. "Of Memory and Our Democracy." U.S. Department of State Archive, 2 May 2004, 2001-2009.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/32053.htm. Accessed 28 Feb. 2025.

Roudometof, Victor. "BEYOND COMMEMORATION: THE POLITICS of COLLECTIVE MEMORY." Journal of Political & Military Sociology, vol. 31, no. 2, 2003, pp. 161-69. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/45293737. Accessed 28 Feb. 2025.

Stoddard, Jeremy D., and Alan S. Marcus. "The Burden of Historical Representation: Race, Freedom, and 'Educational' Hollywood Film." Film and History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies, vol. 36, no. 1, fall 2006, pp. 26-35, http://doi.org/10.1353/flm.2006.0018. Accessed 24 Mar. 2025.

Sundahl, Anne-Mette Holmgård. Postmodern Personality Cults: A Comparative Analysis of Visual Leader Representations in Russia and the US. 2023. Te Herenga Waka—Victoria U of Wellington, PhD dissertation. Open Access Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria U of Wellington, openaccess.wgtn.ac.nz/articles/thesis/Postmodern_Personality_Cults_A_Comparative_Analysis_of_Visual_Leader_Representations_in_Russia_and_the_US/24202329?. Accessed 28 Feb. 2025.

Yachnin, Jennifer. "New Deal Nostalgia Plants the Seeds of a New 'Climate Corps.'" E&E News by Politico, Politico, 10 Sept. 2021, www.eenews.net/articles/new-deal-nostalgia-plants-the-seeds-of-a-new-climate-corps/. Accessed 28 Feb. 2025.