Last week, Matt Yglesias published a characteristically smart and interesting post on his Substack (which is well worth a subscription) taking up the dangers of the politics of nostalgia.
We all tend to think well of the world of our youth, he argued, but often what we miss is being young rather than the actual social and political circumstances that prevailed when we were young. It would be a mistake to think that somehow recreating those circumstances would necessarily be good for the country or that a politics implicitly rooted in the claim that the world was great when I was 25 has much to offer the future.
Ross Douthat responded a few days later, in his own newsletter (which is also very worth your while). Although Yglesias was right as a general matter, Douthat argued, the circumstances that prevailed in his own youth (say, in the early 2000s) actually were pretty great — and in any case nostalgia politics doesn’t always steer us wrong and sometimes it really is important to learn about today’s problems by considering an era that was not yet bedeviled by them.
I thoroughly enjoyed the exchange and learned a lot from it. This was in part because it’s fun to watch two of today’s best public thinkers rise into middle age, when minds tend to run clearest and deepest. But it was also because observing two people slightly younger than me (Douthat and Yglesias are two and four years younger than me, respectively) wax nostalgic clarified for me a disagreement with their understanding of nostalgia politics.
I actually think the weight of nostalgia on our politics has lifted quite a bit in the last few years, because the peculiarly intense nostalgia of the Baby Boomers is dissipating. People will always miss the time when they were young. We all do that, and Yglesias and Douthat miss a time that’s just a little later than the one I miss. But that is not what the political power of nostalgia has involved for most of my lifetime. That power has been especially a function of the cultural power of the Baby Boomers, and particularly the oldest Boomers, those people whose sense of the world is rooted in their having been born in, say, the summer of 1946 — when Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump were all born within a few weeks of each other. I think our culture as a whole, and not just the older Boomers, has pined for the era when those Boomers were young for a long time, and has understood itself through their eyes. The end of that pining is likely to point toward a far less nostalgic political culture in the years to come, for good and bad.
It’s hard to convey to people who didn’t experience it just how profoundly Baby Boomer nostalgia shaped the political conversation in America even ten years ago — say, between 2010 and 2015. It was the premise of essentially every political argument.
For a sense of how it sounded, consider for instance Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Address, when he said this:
Many people watching tonight can probably remember a time when finding a good job meant showing up at a nearby factory or a business downtown. You didn’t always need a degree, and your competition was pretty much limited to your neighbors. If you worked hard, chances are you’d have a job for life, with a decent paycheck and good benefits and the occasional promotion. Maybe you’d even have the pride of seeing your kids work at the same company. That world has changed. And for many, the change has been painful.
This bit has all the classic facets of a nostalgic appeal: Obama called upon his audience’s (supposedly) personal recollections of a lost ideal, described that bygone time as possessing everything we now take ourselves to lack, and defined progress as a recovery of what that earlier age had to offer. I point to it not because it was unusual but because it was utterly characteristic. And it was also a kind of second-hand nostalgia for Obama. He was a much younger Boomer, and his experience growing up in Hawaii wasn’t like what he describes in that passage. He just thinks that’s what America was.
But most of the Boomer nostalgia we lived with was even more intense than that because it was even more personal. Politicians and writers used it to define and describe themselves to a very unusual degree. For Republicans, this kind of rhetoric tended to emphasize the cultural experience of the Baby Boomers’ youth. Here’s how Mitt Romney introduced himself to America in his acceptance speech at the 2012 Republican Convention, for example:
I was born in the middle of the century in the middle of the country, a classic baby boomer. It was a time when Americans were returning from war and eager to work. To be an American was to assume that all things were possible.
The Republican who had effectively come in second to Romney in the primaries that year, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, put this sort of case at the heart of his political appeal. In his book Blue Collar Conservatives, Santorum began his assessment of the country’s problems this way:
There was a time not long ago when Americans without college degrees could expect to earn a decent and steady income in exchange for hard work. This income and job stability provided a foundation for families and communities that, with their churches, Little Leagues, Boy Scout troops, and a hundred other civic organizations, fostered the strong values and the work ethic that underpinned American life. Millions of Americans came of age in these communities and took those values with them as they started their own families and thanked God for his blessings. With good incomes, Americans could afford new cars, kitchen appliances, and trips to Disneyland. Demand for such new goods kept others working and employment strong. With stable marriages, children enjoyed the gift of security and neighborhoods where values were taught at home and in church and enforced by parents. This is how I grew up.
On the left, the same kind of appeal, in the same sort of remarkably personal terms, tended to emphasize the economics of that lost era rather than the culture of it, but it was otherwise nearly identical. Here is what Elizabeth Warren told the Democratic National Convention that same summer of 2012:
I grew up in an America that invested in its kids and built a strong middle class; that allowed millions of children to rise from poverty and establish secure lives. An America that created Social Security and Medicare so that seniors could live with dignity; an America in which each generation built something solid so that the next generation could build something better. But for many years now, our middle class has been chipped, squeezed, and hammered.
And it wasn’t just politicians who talked this way. Paul Krugman, the progressive economist and commentator, published a book called The Conscience of a Liberal a couple of years earlier, which he began like this:
I was born in 1953. Like the rest of my generation, I took the America I grew up in for granted — in fact, like many in my generation, I railed against the very real injustices of our society, marched against the bombing of Cambodia, went door to door for liberal political candidates. It’s only in retrospect that the political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional episode in our nation’s history.
Krugman then framed his economic and political analysis and his prescriptions for country in unabashedly nostalgic terms as a recipe for a recovery of what that lost golden age had to offer.
Robert Putnam, the great political scientist, started his important 2015 book Our Kids like this:
My hometown was, in the 1950s, a passable embodiment of the American Dream, a place that offered decent opportunity for all the kids in town, whatever their background. A half century later, however, life in Port Clinton, Ohio, is a split-screen American nightmare.
Scholars on the right tended to argue this way too. Charles Murray’s important 2012 book Coming Apart is basically a compilation of data about how America had gone downhill in cultural terms since 1960.
My point is not that all of these people were wrong. America has gone downhill since 1960 in many of the ways they describe, though it has also gone uphill in some other important ways. It wasn’t crazy to describe the decades in which the Boomers were in their prime as really exceptional. They were a time when our country was remarkably free of some of the most significant burdens it now confronts — economic, political, and cultural.
In particular, though, the America they describe was more unified. And although few of them ever put it this way, a lot of the Boomer nostalgia of the Obama era seems to have been nostalgia for a more cohesive America, and a kind of mourning of the various ways (again, economic, political, and cultural) in which that unified society had come apart.
I wrote a book about all this in 2016, which began with a chapter warning of the dangers of nostalgia politics (from which some of the above quotes are drawn), and what I really came away with after drowning in the Boomer talk of that period was a powerful sense that what they particularly thought was lost was that intense cohesion.
And it’s true, the America of the middle of the 20th century was extremely (almost bizarrely, in relation to both what came before and what has come after it) cohesive. It wasn’t that America had always been that way and this somehow ended after the 1960s, but that America has actually usually been pretty divided except for the decades of the Boomers’ youth, which saw an unmistakable dip in some of what are now our biggest sources of division. Here, for instance, are a few measures of how income inequality, political polarization, and cultural diversity (measured as the foreign-born percentage of the population) looked over the century that ended in the Obama era:
It’s easy to quibble with the particular measure used for each, but the overall picture they paint is hard to deny. The era the Boomers missed was the era of their youth, but it was also a peculiarly cohesive and unified moment for the country. And a decade ago, American politics overflowed with nostalgia for that unity, expressed by the left as nostalgia for an America with fewer billionaires, by the right as nostalgia for an America with fewer foreigners, and by the center as nostalgia for an America with a much less divisive politics.
The thing is, our society gave up that unity for a reason. Basically, Americans found it too confining and in order to be liberated from its constrictions they pursued a politics of liberalization — economic, cultural, and political. The time the Boomers miss the most was the period in which that liberalization had begun but had not yet weakened America’s cohesion, so the country had the best of both. It was a strong and cohesive society that was having all the fun of liberalizing. This was an inherently ephemeral set of circumstances. It couldn’t possibly last, since the liberalization was bound to (and intended to) break down the cohesion. By the turn of the 21st century, although we did not want to restore the constrictions of 1950s America, we wanted the unity back. And by now we want it back so intensely that we (imagine we) are willing to restore the constrictions, though we disagree about which ones.
How all this happened is a long story, and that book of mine was one attempt to tell it. Many others have done that much better. But our politics now doesn’t think about this story in the same nostalgic terms as we did a decade ago. We are so divided now that we can’t even admit we miss a time when we were less divided.
The nostalgia we find in our politics now is much less focused and coherent. And when Americans younger than the Boomers think about ways in which the past might have been better than the present, they tend not to point to their own lives but to prior generations, for whom they imagine it was really easy to buy a home or build a middle class life or start a family, or whatever it is they now find hard to do. Younger Americans refer back to the America not of their own youth but of the Boomers’ youth, or to the hazy golden images we have of it.
These historical contrasts are often badly misinformed, but that’s actually beside the point: They aren’t really ways to praise the past but only to malign the present. The left and right, in different ways, have both become significantly more embittered about their inheritances. Millennials and Gen-Zers don’t really claim America was great in their youth, or for that matter in the Boomers’ youth. Young progressives aren’t persuaded that any progress was actually made against economic or racial inequalities in the second half of the 20th century. Young conservatives can’t think of anything that was conserved.
Both of those judgments strike me as pretty ridiculous, but I’m middle-aged, so maybe that’s only natural. What’s more relevant is that neither of those judgments is particularly nostalgic. They don’t involve people looking back to a moment in their own lives which they think was much superior to the present. And to the extent that we younger Gen Xers are nostalgic in a more traditional sense, I would imagine that sentiment will have the same null cultural effect as all our other sentiments have. Nostalgia for the 1990s and early 2000s just isn’t going to be very persuasive.
The decline of Boomer nostalgia, or of the Boomers’ cultural influence more generally, could point us toward a more grim and sour politics. That’s certainly how things have felt in the past decade or so. Without the memory of a more unified society, we could find it difficult to work toward such a society, or really to believe in the future at all.
We certainly seem to be having trouble thinking clearly about the future. Everyone in our politics now seems to think that there is going to be some kind of utterly disruptive calamity between the present and the future — a climate catastrophe, a fiscal crisis, a cultural collapse, the end of democracy, a geostrategic explosion, take your pick. No one seems able to think of the future as continuous with the present and therefore as our responsibility and something we need to be building.
It’s hard to say whether this overwhelming catastrophism is the final chapter of the Boomers’ identification of America’s fate with their own or the first chapter of a post-Boomer politics of despair, or a bit of both. But it does seem to me that the antidote to it would need to look like a politics that understands its purpose as defined by obligations to the old and the young and sees the future as something that will come one day at a time and that we might as well prepare for. In other words, we need a middle-aged politics with high hopes but low expectations, like the politics we had when I was young.