This July will be the two-hundred-fiftieth birthday of the Declaration of Independence, but for me, the far more notable occasion is the fiftieth anniversary of the great and glorious bicentennial celebration of 1976. None of us personally remembers the American Revolution, but the triumphant, red-white-and-blue-soaked summer of ’76 is something that people of my generation will never forget: the fantastic outpouring of bicentennial-themed products, the commemorative coins and stamps, the fireworks displays, the restaurant where my father and I went on the afternoon of July 4, Winstead’s, on the Plaza in Kansas City, where we ordered for the first time ever the special, extra-large ice-cream soda that was big enough for everyone at the table.
As Americans relax, once again, into the reassuring kitsch of tricornered hats and Founding Fatherly wisdom, this is the species of memory that interests me: Not the imagined past of the Revolution, but our wistful recollections of that reassuring kitsch of fifty years ago. Nostalgia for a time when our commemorations of the past seemed more robust and even—despite the era’s crass commercialism—more innocent than they do today. I speak of the vertiginous and little-understood phenomenon of nostalgia for nostalgia itself.
In the early Seventies, demand for gauzy evocations of the past was nearly endless. The decade was an unhappy panorama of inflation, gas shortages, military humiliation, and revelations of political corruption. The familiar, coherent society that many thought they recalled from ten and twenty years before had been shattered by the radicalism and repression of the late Sixties; the consensus liberalism that had been the country’s dominant political philosophy for decades was clearly dying, to be replaced by who knew what.
In the midst of such uncertainty, Americans reached for anything that would help them retreat into the world before the fall. The beginnings of this phenomenon are sometimes traced to Grease, which opened on Broadway in 1972, or else to the 1973 film American Graffiti, a teenage car drama set in 1962, just before the defining cultural and political events of that decade came to pass. Together, the two initiated an enormous wave of Fifties movies, high-school observances of “Fifties Day,” and Fonzified TV entertainment that anyone alive back then will remember.
In the Seventies, Fifties nostalgia was just the beginning of the search for a lovable past. There were fond memories of the Truman era to relive; the obsolete manliness of Humphrey Bogart to rediscover; an Art Deco revival; snappy songs from World War II—that is, World War II as it was experienced in the prosperous and triumphant United States of America. There were even the glamorous hard times of the Depression, reimagined for us in the 1973 movie The Sting. Then there was 1962 all over again, via the 1978 movie Animal House.
Back then, nostalgia wasn’t just postmodern pastiche; it was something very close to the spirit of the age: a “national cult,” as my friend Rick Perlstein puts it in his history of the period, The Invisible Bridge. “Everyone wanted to be somewhere else,” Perlstein writes, somewhere other than this awful moment of economic recession, vulgarity, corruption, decadence, and decline. In all those chrome-plated DeSotos and ducktail haircuts, people of the Seventies saw symbols of a time when the country was supposedly at work and the culture didn’t insult you at every turn.
The bicentennial was the moment of nostalgic gluttony that topped them all, with its reenactment of battles, its old-fashioned sailing ships, and its outpouring of sappy patriotic products printed with the magic numerals 76. All of this was a lot of fun, and I imagine for some people it was also satisfying in some deep way. But an air of crankiness hovered over it all. I think of the artist and writer Eric Sloane, the author of a series of wonderful books about antique hand tools and sturdy barns and assorted early Americana—a dealer in high-octane nostalgia whose works I myself devoured in the troubled Seventies. To celebrate the bicentennial, Sloane produced a volume called The Spirits of ’76, in which he checked off the ways modern American civilization had failed to live up to the ideals of its ancestors. He gestured at our wanton consumer culture, our shoddy mass-produced goods, our mountains of trash, but he also took swipes at what he saw as ungrateful welfare recipients, burdensome tax regulations that were supposedly driving farmers off their land, and labor unions, which in his telling had ruined a business run by one of his friends.
Critics have long regarded nostalgia as a purely reactionary impulse, but this is not automatically or universally the case. One could just as easily feel nostalgia for the radicalism of Thomas Paine as for some libertarian fantasy of the Boston Tea Party. In fact, in the Seventies, just about everyone was bidding to be the bearer of the Spirit of ’76, from Jimmy Carter to the rock band Kiss. There was even an outfit called the People’s Bicentennial Commission that tried to put a left-wing spin on the events of two hundred years before.
But it was the right, under the leadership of the former California governor Ronald Reagan, a walking hunk of Americana right down to his pompadour, that ultimately captured the nostalgic impulse. This is the grand theme of Perlstein’s book: Reagan had been a sports broadcaster in the age when baseball players were radiant heroes and, later, a Hollywood star when movies dealt in monochromatic moral contrasts. Finally, in the late Seventies, he positioned himself as the great symbol of the era’s longing for the vanished, pre-Sixties culture of reassurance.
The nation’s fall from an era of small-government righteousness was Reagan’s refrain over the course of his political career, to which he coupled the inevitable slogan, “let’s make America great again.” Restore its greatness, that is, by cutting taxes, hacking back the regulatory state, and hugely expanding the military. As president, one of Reagan’s favorite rhetorical pastimes seemed to be expatiating on the things that had formerly made America “great”: he would speak of our religiosity, our values, our agricultural heritage, all either threatened by the modern state or on the rebound under his leadership.
Reagan hung a picture of Calvin Coolidge in the White House Cabinet Room, but the true object of his nostalgia was Franklin Roosevelt, the liberal hero of Reagan’s Democratic youth. Economic crisis followed by revitalization had been the grand narrative of Roosevelt’s presidency. Under Reagan, that powerful, distant set piece was put back into service in the name of an altogether different vision of national redemption, but the goal of restoring civic confidence was straight out of Roosevelt’s book. In 1984, Reagan even got FDR’s old train car out of mothballs to perform a whistle-stop tour of Ohio.
It is slightly dizzying to think that “make America great again” has been a recurring catchphrase of the past three presidential elections—a nostalgic incantation that rolls on and on even though we are further removed from the Reagan revolution today than the voters of 1980 were from World War II.
Asked in 2015 to pinpoint the exact era of greatness to which his slogan referred, Donald Trump was as clear as his rhetorical style allows: “I would say during the administration of Ronald Reagan you felt proud to be an American,” he told the NBC analyst Chuck Todd. “You felt really proud. I don’t think since then to any great extent people were proud.”
By “you,” of course, Trump clearly meant “I.” For him, the greatness of the Eighties is a matter of personal experience, because that was when his real-estate career took off and he first felt the narcotic kick of media attention that he has sought ever since. To describe Donald Trump with the word “wistful” feels like an act of violence to the language, and yet the man clearly regards the postmodern, big-city Eighties, presided over by the nostalgic Reagan, as a time of remembered enchantment every bit as much as the wholesome, small-town, long-ago America was for Reagan himself.
Maybe it is all just another put-on, another brazen attempt to manipulate his followers. Then again, like Reagan, Trump is an actor with a throwback hairstyle who has played the same role his entire life: the very successful business tycoon. Except on matters of free trade, Trump’s political vision is essentially Reagan’s, slightly updated: tax cuts, deregulation, enormous Pentagon spending. Like Reagan, Trump understands the back-and-forth of the two-party system as a grand pageant of technocratic failure and muscular renewal, with the woeful Jimmy Carter role filled by Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or whoever it is that currently represents the Democratic Party. (Of course, Trump differs from his idol in his incompetence, bitterness, and vindictiveness.)
Donald Trump didn’t invent the eternal return of nostalgia any more than Ronald Reagan invented the retro style of the Seventies and Eighties. Nostalgia is today a structural feature of our modern world, the emptiness and vapidity at the heart of our culture, the inevitable mass-produced sentiment of a society that permanently feels that everything is constantly going wrong but is chronically unable to identify why. The world offers up endless remakes and extensions of Eighties movie franchises, an ongoing pastiche of old architectural styles, the umpteenth return of preppy fashion, those Nirvana T-shirts you see everywhere, yet another biotech-stock bubble, and the constant Broadway revival of Broadway revivals. I am quite certain that Grease must be playing in some troubled city.
As Trump has aged, the precise object of his politicized nostalgia has receded ever further into the historical distance. In his second term, he has begun to locate American greatness in the days of the McKinley Administration, with its tariffs and territorial expansionism. Sometimes he can be quite specific about this: “You know, our country was the strongest, believe it or not,” Trump told journalists last year, “from 1870 to 1913.” That age of soaring prosperity ended, the president went on to assert, when the Wilson Administration replaced high tariffs with the income tax.
It is easy to prove Trump wrong about the past, but it is also pointless, as futile as it would have been to remind TV audiences in the Seventies that the Eisenhower era wasn’t, in fact, Happy Days for all Americans. That is not how nostalgia works, either psychologically or politically. Crisis and renewal are strictly a matter of marketing now, a fiction that permanently assigns the Democrats the role of technocrats managing national decline while Republicans get to stand for muscular optimism and economic expansion. When the GOP holds the White House, America is great; when it doesn’t, it isn’t. Simple. One day, the eagle screams in triumph; the next, we remember our forsaken Old Glory through the noble haze of patriots’ tears.
Nostalgia is usually a kind of dissatisfaction with the present or a backlash against excessive change. What makes this particular species of perpetual nostalgia so powerful, however, is that it has it both ways: it sees utopia in the past but it is also enthusiastic about the American doctrine of technological advancement.
This might sound counterintuitive, maybe impossible. “Progress,” as it is defined nowadays, ruthlessly deletes industries and traditions and makes redundant whatever it is you learned to do when you were in school. Progress is the permanent revolution of the marketplace, at war not only with the past, but with everything that currently exists. It is nostalgia’s mirror opposite. “There is nothing less conservative than capitalism, so itchy for the new,” wrote the historian Garry Wills in his 1987 book, Reagan’s America.
And yet for Reagan, the two visions were completely intertwined, one and the same: progress and nostalgia, the future and the past, the coming Space Age and a gauzy dream of a Midwestern town circa 1900. One sees further traces of this peculiar coupling, Wills points out, in the work of people like Walt Disney and Henry Ford, but it was Reagan who made it into a political doctrine.
“Progress is our most important product,” ran the slogan of General Electric in the days when Reagan was the star of its television programs and advertisements. Back then, Reagan lived in a suburban home in California that GE filled with the latest in ambient lighting and kitchen appliances. The House of the Future, it was called: a curious place for the embodiment of American nostalgia to dwell. But for Reagan it all came together seamlessly: small towns and high tech; memories of Old Hollywood and a future so glorious it was untethered from material reality. “In the new economy, human invention increasingly makes physical resources obsolete,” the former GE pitchman would go on to say in a speech at Moscow State University in 1988. “We’re breaking through the material conditions of existence to a world where man creates his own destiny.” He was referring to advances in microchips and satellites, but as America moved ahead, the president claimed, we were also “returning to the age-old wisdom of our culture, a wisdom contained in the Book of Genesis in the Bible: In the beginning was the Spirit, and it was from this Spirit that the material abundance of creation issued forth.”
One hardly expects similar eloquence from Donald Trump, but even for this man who believes America reached its zenith in the late 1800s, the technological future still beckons. The Republican platform for 2024, a consummate Trumpian document, was dedicated “To the Forgotten Men and Women of America,” and it opened with a lachrymose invocation of American greatness prostrate under the iron heel of liberalism. It was the familiar nostalgic pattern—decline and renewal—all over again. The platform then went on to declare Trump’s intention to “champion innovation” by deregulating cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. Since then, Trump has proven himself fully versed in the clichés of bold futurity, describing the “new frontier of scientific discovery” that’s ahead of us, “defined by transformative technologies such as artificial intelligence.” The road from Betsy Ross flags to AI slop may be winding, but it is exceedingly well traveled.
The long triumph of what we call conservatism has clearly been bound up with this strange dialectic, this combination of nostalgia and its opposite: past greatness plus future greatness, interrupted only by the degraded liberal present.
It’s a funny thing, though: these days really are a time of danger and degradation, of bigotry and war, and it’s all due to the politics I have been describing. In these circumstances, it is tempting to dismiss nostalgia itself, to declare the past to be nothing more than the stupid and brutish present in embryo—a place of wickedness, sin, and guilt. But a wiser course might be to emphasize a kind of counter-nostalgia, reclaiming a mythic past for the forces of tolerance and democratic generosity. After all, the half-forgotten dreams of the long-ago liberals sound pretty good these days: progress that includes everyone, freedom from domineering corporate power, a universal middle class, clean government, sanity. Remember, the heroic symbols that Ronald Reagan deployed so effectively were swiped from liberalism’s salad days in the Thirties and Forties. Surely the trick can be played the other way around.
