Nostalgia is a profoundly human and universal feeling. Virtually everyone experiences nostalgia at some point in their lives. It's inevitable: as time passes, we change. And so do the people around us and the places we inhabit. Sometimes these changes are slow and only become apparent when one day you look back and find yourself longing for a world that no longer exists. Sometimes looking back can be comforting. Other times it hurts more. Especially when the changes are sudden and your world suddenly collapses.
In any case, we must always be vigilant, because nostalgia is often built on fiction. What we long for is not the past we actually lived, but the memory we have of it. And memory is selective. We remember some things and forget others. And sometimes we want to believe that we long for a place, a person, or a moment, when what we really miss is being children or young adults.
But nostalgia is not just an intimate emotion. It also has a more dangerous political use. And it's becoming increasingly prevalent. For some time now, all sorts of political leaders and cultural figures from almost the entire ideological spectrum seem to have agreed to cultivate narratives of nostalgia. We've gone from a decade in which our collective conversation revolved around the future to a period dominated by looking back. The political grammar of change and emancipation has given way to that of lament and loss.
They invite us to feel nostalgia for a country, a city, a neighborhood, or a school that no longer exists. For a past that we "remember" as familiar, comfortable, tidy, and predictable. A world in which society was more homogeneous, hierarchies clearer, and life paths more predictable. They make us yearn for a world in which, they say, everyone understood you when you ordered a café con leche in Catalan. You knew the neighborhood because it was the same as always. In the local shops, everyone knew you, and if you didn't have any money, well, you could pay me tomorrow. You could buy an apartment in the neighborhood where you grew up. At school, the teachers talked and the students listened. If you did what was expected, a good life was within your reach.
Many of these things aren't true, but it doesn't matter. What we long for is only part of the story. Perhaps you could buy an apartment with a few years' salary, but you couldn't get a divorce or take a vacation. The city wasn't overrun by tourists, but heroin was rampant and robberies were commonplace. You didn't feel like a stranger in your own neighborhood, but it was difficult to escape. Catalan was spoken in the streets, but most people hadn't learned to write it. Childbirth was "natural" and not "medicalized," but many more mothers and babies died. The workers were proud and united, but they lived trapped in alienating jobs, grueling shifts, and workplace illnesses and accidents. And the women were stuck at home or underemployed. The students were quiet and wrote neatly, but most didn't understand anything they recited from memory and dropped out of school at fourteen. In small towns, everyone helped each other, but oppression and social control stifled those who didn't fit in, whether they were gay men and lesbians, liberated women, or simply people with dissenting sensibilities.
There can be no politics of nostalgia without forgetting. And since memory is an exercise of power, what is usually forgotten is the history of the vanquished, the subaltern, and the marginalized. And that is why the politics of nostalgia is always profoundly reactionary. In fact, as the historian of ideas Mark Lilla explains in The shipwrecked mindNostalgia is precisely the defining characteristic of reactionary political thought and action in modernity.
Political nostalgia seems harmless, but it is very dangerous. The risk of yearning for a return to a past that never existed is that it ends up leading us somewhere else, not what we thought we remembered. Yesterday's world will not return. If anything, we could return in a different place. And worse, that's where counter-revolutions always lead.
We have recently seen a great example of this: some influencers of the movement tradwife Women like Lauren Southern—who idealized the life of the housewife, raising many children, baking cakes, and embroidering pillows—have ended up trapped in abusive, dominating, and mistreating relationships. In extreme cases, nostalgia leads to dystopia. Margaret Atwood's fiction masterfully illustrates this. The Maid's TaleOr, in real life, the tragic and brutal experiment of the Islamic State caliphate. But we don't have to go that far. In our own homes, the sterile longing for a homogeneous society is now spreading. But that world will not return, and any attempt to bring it back would lead us to a violent and authoritarian nightmare like the one already looming in Trump's America.
It shouldn't surprise us that the main promoters of nostalgia politics are reactionary movements, such as the European radical right or political Islam. It is more disturbing that some sectors of the left are also falling into the trap of nostalgia politics. Cultivating a sense of loss and looking to the past always ends up strengthening the forces of reaction. Among other things, because all the space and time we dedicate to vainly yearning for the past cannot be invested in imagining and building a different future. In the case of Catalan sovereignty, the tension is evident: the moment the 2017 defeat and the repression made it difficult to imagine a different future and broke the spell, looking back began to take hold.
We must question, and resist, this wave of political nostalgia. But the alternative cannot be fatalism or uncritical acceptance of the present and any future presented to us, nor contempt for our own roots, nor a naive belief in linear progress. Collective progress can only come from a profound critique of the present and a shared hope in the possibility of a different future.
