Nostalgia politics is a dead end

Romanticizing our younger days doesn't fix anything

Over the weekend, I watched “Pick it up! Ska in the 90s” on Tubi.

It is, as advertised, a documentary about ska in the nineties. And like the title, the film is not particularly subtle or ingenious. It’s a movie for people who, when they hear that someone made a documentary about ska in the nineties, think to themselves “hey, I liked ska in the nineties, I’d like to watch a movie about some of those bands!”

If you fondly remember listening to Reel Big Fish, Less Than Jake, Goldfinger, and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones during the brief period when ska punk bands were getting mainstream radio and MTV airplay, the film is a great opportunity to revisit those bands and go a bit deeper on the subject. But if you don’t happen to feel any particular nostalgia for this period, I don’t know that the movie is extraordinarily compelling on its own terms.

In other words, I loved it but wouldn’t necessarily recommend it.

I wound up watching the documentary because Green Day has a new album out this January, which led me to listen to the Green Day episode of Bandsplain and then to their other East Bay punk episodes on Rancid and Operation Ivy, and on one of them they mention “Pick it up!” The point is, I fell deep down a rabbit hole of content about music that I loved when I was a teenager but haven’t spent much time thinking about lately. And a point that was made across all of this ska-adjacent content was how much pure, infectious joy those of us who like this kind of music associate with it. I’m a lame middle-aged dad who never had any moves, but to this day, there’s one specific beat that will always get me up and dancing.

Such is the power of nostalgia.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with nostalgia as an emotion, and like most people, I find myself feeling it more and more as I get older. But I know, deep down, that nostalgia is an illusion. There was a time in my life when I lived in a DC group house near U Street, and lots of my friends lived in other group houses near U Street, and there were enough of us around the neighborhood that other friends who lived in other places were drawn to the neighborhood by our gravitational pull. We would go out in big, amorphous groups to the 9:30 Club and the Black Cat and DC 9, or just drink beers and smoke cigarettes in our backyards, and in my heart it feels like the best era ever for the neighborhood. Remember the old Taco Bell at 14th and U? That was great.

But… was it great? Taco Bell is not, in fact, that great. And the new building that replaced the old Taco Bell contains not only a good coffee shop but also a supermarket, which the neighborhood did not have when I was younger. Being closer to a Taco Bell than to a grocery store is fine if you’re 25 and out drinking until 2AM multiple times a week. But the nostalgia is not actually for a Taco Bell or for a time when the neighborhood had more vacant buildings and empty lots and fewer restaurants — it’s nostalgia for being 25 and having the physical stamina to be out drinking and eating Taco Bell.

And this is how the notorious right-wing internet persona Sargon of Akkad ended up doing a post that starts with a bunch of cliché culture war grievances and ends up talking about the 2001 Alien Ant Farm cover of “Smooth Criminal.”

These tweets took what is normally subtext and made it into egregiously literal text: A healthy chunk of reactionary politics is just literally nostalgia. Almost everyone has fond memories of some set of pop culture artifacts that didn’t really stand the test of time or enter the cannon, and they miss how that stuff made them feel. You can build a whole pile of confused politics on that! But Sargon here is talking about a cover of a Michael Jackson song by a band whose lead singer’s mother was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico.

What better example of America’s democratic polyglot universal empire could you imagine? Why the cranky right-wing politics?

The future ain’t what it used to be

Jim Pethokoukis published a book last year called “The Conservative Futurist” making the case for a deregulatory agenda to advance economic growth. I find a lot of his writing to be pretty congenial, and there were plenty of points that I disagreed with, but what’s fascinating about it is that in the cultural and political milieu of 2023, the idea of a “conservative futurist” really is interesting and provocative. The name itself sounds like a paradox. But thinking about the politics of the 1990s, the idea that conservatives favored deregulation in order to accelerate the pace of change would have been much too banal a topic for an entire book.

Bill Clinton was a pretty deregulatory pro-growth figure, but that was part and parcel of Clinton repositioning the Democratic Party to the right — of course conservatives were futurists.

This has been shifting throughout my adult lifetime, but Donald Trump really put the exclamation point on the idea that modern conservative politics was, at least in its emotional orientation, literally conservative and reactionary, embracing the belief that the past was better and the pace of change needs to be halted. Some of this is just culture war bullshit; contemporary Republicans obviously remain deeply invested in the notion that cutting rich people’s taxes is one of the most important things that one can do, and they benefit from right-wing social media influencers ignoring tax policy. But this conservative nostalgia does influence the policy agenda. One of the biggest impediments to faster economic growth is overregulation of the housing sector. Historically, liberals deserved a lot of the blame for creating the problem. But as Democrats have become more attuned to the need for reform, Donald Trump started touting NIMBYism, and he’s induced some conservative think tanks to realign to his side. Progressives normally care more about economic equality, which sometimes leads them to underrate the value of growth, but land use deregulation is an example of an area where egalitarian policy would be pro-growth, and conservatives increasingly embrace stasis and stagnation.

You also see this in more subtle ways. A bipartisan tax deal may or may not pass Congress soon, and the key provisions relate to an expansion of the Child Tax Credit that Democrats won in exchange for agreeing to some of the GOP demands for business tax cuts, tax cuts that Republicans insisted should apply retroactively — meaning a cash windfall for capital that can’t possibly incentivize new investment.

We’re not yet at the point where Republican Party politics fully prioritizes the dead hand of old capital over the competition and instability provided by new capital and innovation. But I do feel like we draw closer every day. Right now, we have right-wing technophile entrepreneurs leveraging culture war politics for political gain, on the assumption that the GOP’s tax cutting and anti-union instincts are all that really matter or that projecting anti-feminist vibes is an adequate substitute for a pro-growth economic policy.

Trump is a master bullshitter who is great at keeping people hopeful that he either secretly doesn’t mean what he says or is he’ll be amenable to manipulation. But his ideas have taken on a life of their own, and Trump is cultivating a cohort of right-wingers who sincerely want to base the American economy around autarky, shutting down immigration, and talking a lot about how great old buildings were. And this just isn’t the kind of world that gives rise to a Tesla or whatever companies Ramaswamy is behind.

No more bad town

A key sign of the extent to which nostalgia has taken over politics is that every few months, some version of this tweet asserting that the United States of America was more prosperous 70 years ago goes viral on the right. I went through an earlier iteration of this tweet last spring, and I won’t rehash it here except to say that in this version, it’s explicitly clear that this family has only one car with no garage and, by today’s standards, a very small house.

There probably is some benefit to recognizing that lots of middle-class Americans managed to have good lives and happy childhoods despite growing up with material living standards that would be typical of poverty in the contemporary United States.

That said, nothing is stopping you from dropping out of the workforce to be a full-time domestic worker, eliminating your family’s child care expenses while cooking more economical meals at home. Yes, even with those savings, you would have less money than the average married couple, but you could also choose to live in a smaller-than-average house like the one in the picture. The problem is that you probably don’t want to do that, and your spouse probably doesn’t want you to, either. It’s fine to make the case that the norms around this today are bad and wrong as a matter of values — the Amish show that people certainly can choose to live materially poorer lives if they really want to. But factually speaking, living standards have risen dramatically since the era of that photo, and people who lived like that would be poor today.

And of course actual poor people in the 1950s lived in terrible conditions. The Census says that 35 percent of homes in 1950 lacked complete plumbing facilities; that fell to “only” 16.8 percent of homes by 1960.

In 1950, most homes in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and West Virginia didn’t have complete plumbing. By 1960, the numbers in some of those states were still chillingly high by contemporary standards, but they’d fallen a lot and every state had full plumbing in the majority of homes. To the extent that nostalgia for that era makes sense, it’s that people who lived through it got to experience extremely rapid improvements in living conditions. More recently, things have continued to get better, but they’ve gotten better more slowly.

If you wanted to knock down a bunch of old homes today and replace them with newer, taller, more modern structures offering more square footage per person and better amenities like insulation and wheelchair accessibility, you’d probably be told that you can’t damage the historic character of the community. Nostalgia for an earlier era of faster-rising increases in living standards directly impedes us from achieving further increases. There are more traffic jams now because society is richer and a larger share of the population can afford cars — and more cars per household and larger cars per person — and knee-jerk skepticism of change prevents us from adopting well-known solutions like congestion tolling.

Bad scene, everyone’s fault

Near the end of “Pick It Up,” veterans of the scene talk about how eventually, amidst ska mania, the deeper meaning and political roots of the music got lost. There’s clearly a level on which that’s true.

But on another level, I think it reflects the reality that there was less political content to any of this stuff than the people involved liked to think. There was an East Bay scene. There was a vibe. The people in the scene had political views, views that contrasted with the dominant conservative Reagan-Bush politics of their youth, and that were opposed to the atmospherics of Bill Clinton’s triangulation. And that vibe is reflected in a lot of the music. But there was no programmatic agenda or really deep political thought. Ska was mostly fun songs that made people feel happy.

Which — to be clear — is not a criticism. The music would not be better if it were more didactic.

To this day, any time I wear my Operation Ivy t-shirt around town, I get random compliments from everyone ranging from the principal of my kid’s school to a trainer I work with at the gym to random people on the street. Realistically, few if any of the people who appreciate the t-shirt were there at the time or are deeply invested in DIY collectives or whatever else. I saw “Time Bomb” on MTV and heard Green Day’s cover of “Knowledge” and followed the bread crumbs to Operation Ivy via some obnoxious record store guys years after they’d broken up. And frankly, I only really understand the content of a lot of these lyrics because we now have decades of mythologizing and explication to dive into.

But the songs are great. Or at least I feel that they are great. And they represent to me something of my teenage years and also of a process of laborious musical discovery that’s been killed off by the Internet and that I feel nostalgic for, even though I acknowledge that today’s methods are, in fact, better.

And I think a lot of contemporary conservative nostalgia-nomics is like this, but without the self-awareness. They like the 1950s aesthetic. They like the fact that it annoys liberals to praise a clearly more racist and more segregated period in American life. They like nice photographs of old buildings. Which is fine, I also like nice photographs of old buildings. I like the way my house, which is a very old building, looks. Since I live in the house, I am also aware that it is drafty and not well-insulated from outside sounds, and I am annoyed that historic preservation rules make it absurdly expensive for me to update my windows and address these issues. But that’s getting into the boring nitty-gritty of the actual laws and policies and the cost-benefit calculus of the available options.

That’s boring and tedious. It doesn’t own anyone, it’s not fun, and it’s not a good vibe.

But at its best, politics isn’t an aesthetic experience, it’s a serious effort to look at problems in people’s lives and make things better. It’s not factually accurate that things were better in the past (even if the past had some good attributes!), and it’s definitely not the case that we could make things better by reversing the flow of time. And I worry, in an era of aging population, that the psychological burden of nostalgia will weigh increasingly heavily on the entire political arena, making it harder for us to wrestle with our problems in a remotely concrete way.