The politics of nostalgia by SAMUEL EARLE
Faced with a future that presents itself
as non-negotiable, the temptation is to turn towards the past.
When Harry Potter
discovers the Mirror of Erised in The
Philosopher’s Stone—a mirror that shows us our deepest
dreams—he repeatedly returns to it in secret. Each night in its reflection he
lives his longed-for life: his parents are by his side, his relatives surround
him, and all are smiling. When the wise headmaster Dumbledore discovers Harry’s
nostalgic habit, however, he is dismayed. This is no harmless moment of
fantasy. “It does not do to dwell on dreams Harry,” he warns, “and forget to
live.”
In today’s political
climate we would do well to heed Dumbledore’s advice, since Britain is slowly
turning into a hall of Erised Mirrors itself. Whichever way we turn, we see,
not only an idealised picture of a past that can never be the present, but a
past that never was. Since Brexit, the Sun has run a campaign demanding
that British passports be returned to their traditional blue covers as a
“symbol of British independence.” The Daily Telegraph has called on
the UK Government to resurrect the Royal Yacht Britannia (decommissioned
in 1997), so that it can “rule the waves” and secure international trade deals
for post-Brexit Britain.
These newspapers stare
into their mirrors and see the British, unchained from the bureaucracy of
Brussels, blue passports in their pockets, the Queen by their side, new-found
sovereignty in their lungs, sailing the seven seas again. Aboard the Britannia, carried
along by the winds and waves of nostalgia, Britain will once again parade its
freedom around the world.
But Brexit and its
nostalgic outpouring is part of a broader phenomenon that extends well beyond
Britain. Throughout the world, populist political movements are taking shape
with nostalgia at their heart. “Make America Great Again,” Donald
Trump exclaims. For his supporters, Trump is a breath of fresh air that
smells like home. We may not have seen someone like him before in modern
politics, but his popularity rests on promising people what they have already
seen, or believe that they have seen. The change he offers is not one of
innovation but one of restoration—of old values, identities, industries and
jobs.
In France, Marine
La Pen echoes this call, reminding her fellow citizens of “our
glorious history” and laying out a yellow-brick road to its return. In Germany,Frauke
Pertry, the co-chair of the rising Alternative
für Deutschland, harks back to a historical identity and set of values
including homophobia. She recently
called for the de-stigmatisation of the German word ‘völkisch’, which
signifies a people characterised by a specific race—a word that carries heavy
connotations from the Nazi era. Even in Australia, Pauline
Hanson, leader of the One
Nation Party, has been re-elected to Parliament after a twenty-year hiatus.
“When I was growing up,” she said in a recent
speech that referred to a mythical moment in time, “we had jobs for
everyone.”
Faced with a
neoliberal, globalised future that presents itself as non-negotiable, our only
strategy seems to be to turn towards the past. Wages stagnate, home ownership
plummets, pensions diminish and debt proliferates. So we retreat into safe,
warm waters. Feelings of meaninglessness are escaped by memories that give
meaning; the discontinuity between past and present is dissolved by
re-packaging the past; and the ideal of political revolution is replaced by the
alternative meaning of that word: turning in a circle.
Such nostalgia isn’t
limited to populists. In mainstream politics, new policies often amount to
simplistic ‘bring-backery.’ British Prime Minister Theresa May, clad in
Margaret Thatcher memorabilia, calls for the return of
grammar schoolson the grounds that they were good enough for her and the
Leader of the Opposition, so they are good enough for the rest of us. Jeremy
Corbyn began his Labour leadership tellingly, with a
speech in which large passages had been lifted word for word from
another one that was written by Richard Heller in the 1980s. Now the
re-nationalisation of the railways is presented as his flagship policy. His
rival Owen Smith promised to re-establish
the Ministry of Labour that was abolished by Harold Wilson in 1968. ‘Make
the old new again’ is the universal cry.
“One is always at home
in one’s past”, Vladimir Nabokov writes,
and so the alienated move there en masse, not only politically but in cultural
matters too.. read more
