The Politics of Memory: How the Right Masters Nostalgia — and How the Center and Left Could Steal It Back

I admit that my self-imposed goal of an article every other week this summer has...not been met. My latest reason was COVID. Like most other trends, I adopted it five years too late, but luckily, it was mild. However, as I was locked in my room and unable to hug my newly minted 8-year-old on her birthday, I was looking back fondly at when we didn't have to hide ourselves away or take special care if we were sick because life was somewhat predictable. Those wonderful days of yesteryear, when your signal to come home was when the street lights went on and there weren't any mini-zombies glued to their screens all day - they were just glued to larger screens playing Zelda or watching MTV.  

All of this has happened before...from Xkcd, original here.

Nostalgia is one of the most underestimated political tools in modern politics. It works quietly, slipping past the rational filters we think govern our decisions and plugging directly into memory, identity, and emotion. If you want people to move, to act, or even to vote against their short-term self-interest, nostalgia is one of the shortest routes there. The political right, in the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, has understood this far better than the center or the left.

The right doesn’t just sell policies. It sells time travel. “Make America Great Again” was not a policy platform. It was a four-word time machine. “Take Back Control,” the winning slogan of the Brexit campaign, didn’t require an economic argument. It was an emotional one — a promise of return, of restoration, of a vaguely defined “before” that people could fill with their private memories and beliefs. It was effective because it didn’t have to be specific. Vagueness is a feature, not a flaw. When the details are fuzzy, people supply their own best memories to fill the gaps. For many people, yesterday was a happier, simpler time when everything was cheaper, safer, and better.

Meanwhile, the center and the left have largely abandoned the nostalgia market. If anything, they treat it as suspect — too sentimental, too rooted in the past, too entangled with traditional hierarchies. Instead, they talk about the future, often in the sterile language of policy frameworks and five-year plans and it's pretty hard for the average voter to become emotionally invested in a white paper on trade. This is important work, but it rarely stirs people in the way a single remembered image can. The right understands that nostalgia is a form of emotional shorthand. The left seems determined to write everything out in long form.  In other words, grandma's apple pie will win every day, no matter the preservatives that were crammed into it.

Nostalgia isn’t really about the past. It’s about the present and future seen through the filter of memory. It is selective remembering, filtering out discomfort and contradiction, and leaving only the emotional highlights. Neuroscientists will tell you it activates the brain’s reward pathways, releasing the same chemicals that help reinforce trust and belonging. A good nostalgic appeal doesn’t ask you to analyze. It asks you to feel. And once you’re feeling, persuasion becomes easier. Gen Xers such as myself live off this stuff with industries pivoting towards feeding that eternal desire to see Super Mario on the big screen (we just won't talk about that movie from the 90s).

This is why the right’s nostalgic narratives are so potent. They tie into cultural myths that are already in the collective consciousness — the self-reliant frontier spirit in America, the plucky island nation in Britain, the restored grandeur in Hungary or Poland. In rejecting nostalgia as a reactionary tool, the left has ceded an entire emotional terrain. When they do reference the past, it’s often to remind people of its flaws: “We’ve moved beyond that” or “Those days weren’t as good as you think.” These statements may be true, but they’re emotionally flat. They do nothing to motivate. Of course, we should not paint over the injustices of history or how it was awful for massive groups of people, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater means the right is winning everyone who finds anything positive with the past, even if the right isn’t responsible for it - or actively opposes it today, such as welfare or government investment in general.

The irony is that the left has an incredibly rich nostalgic inheritance. It can lay claim to the New Deal era, the postwar expansion of the social safety net, the civil rights movement, the moon landing, and moments of national and community solidarity in the face of crisis. These are not only progressive achievements but moments many remember — or were taught to remember — with pride. Yet in political rhetoric, these images rarely appear. Instead, the focus is on abstract descriptions of future benefits, which are harder to picture and easier to dismiss as untested.

NASA's received almost 5% of the total federal budget in the late 60s. Today it's less than 0.5%

To reclaim nostalgia, the center and the left need to stop treating it as inherently conservative. Nostalgia is just memory wrapped in emotion, and the past isn't the sole domain of the political right. As imperfect as the past is, the left has much to be proud of. All the things that made America "great" in the 1950s and 60s that MAGA harkens to were thanks to the massive government spending that brought us the Interstate System and the Apollo program, which we could afford because the wealthy were taxed several times more than they are today. The civic improvements from the New Deal a generation before were maintained, and international competition was practically non-existent, mainly because Europe was literally rebuilding from World War II and Asia was still largely agrarian. We can't undo the progress other countries have made in the past 75 years, but we must adapt to the world of today, and the center and the left can be honest to the voters and explain that all the things that actually made America great cost money, but it was an investment and there is an way to pay for it (although look up my last article on populism on how that message might be hard to get to the people.)

It can mean telling the story of the farmer who kept his land because of rural electrification, or the grandmother who stayed independent because Medicare existed. It can mean linking the moon landing to clean energy, polio eradication to cancer research. The right says, “We can go back.” The left could say, “We can carry this forward.”

Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal sold itself on hope and action, but it was also laced with nostalgia for a sense of community and self-reliance that many felt had been lost in the Great Depression. The imagery was of people working together, reclaiming dignity, and rebuilding towns. “Make America Great Again” used the same basic emotional structure, but tied it to a more exclusionary vision. One looked to the future through the lens of the past; the other used the past as the destination. The right wants the culture and society of yesterday with the spending of today. That simply isn't possible. The center and left need to show us how the culture of tomorrow is possible by building on what happened before.  

In moments like this, nostalgia becomes even more powerful because it offers the illusion of predictability. People are drawn to the idea that there was a time when things made sense, when roles were clear, when they could count on their communities and institutions. Bread and gas were always cheap (let's ignore wartime rationing). People were healthy (let's ignore that the average American lives about 15 years longer). The danger for the left is that if it doesn’t provide its own version of that comfort, the only nostalgia on offer will be the kind that excludes and narrows.

Of course, nostalgia can be dangerous if handled poorly. Reference points must be chosen carefully, because one era’s stability can be another era’s oppression. The goal is to find moments that unite rather than divide, and to tell those stories in ways that invite participation. Don't point to the cultural norms of the past; that's what the right wants to return to. Point to the investments that will enable tomorrow.

The truth is that memory is a political battleground. The right has learned to fight on it. The center and the left still treat it like an old family album gathering dust in the attic. But people don’t just vote for policies. They vote for the world they believe they’re stepping into. If you can convince them that the best parts of yesterday can survive and even thrive in tomorrow, you’ve entered the same emotional terrain the right has dominated — without surrendering your values in the process.

Nostalgia isn’t about going back. At its best, it’s about carrying forward the things worth keeping. The right already knows this. It’s time the center and left remembered it, too.