How politicians weaponize nostalgia

An interview with psychologist Clay Routledge about the threats of weaponized nostalgia during an election year.

I hope it’s okay that I’m temporarily deviating from my Cultish audio commentary! It’s hard not to get distracted by my current work. Similar to my post last week, this interview was pulled from a conversation I had with a source for a freelance op-ed I’m writing about nostalgia, which is one of the central themes of the new book. For the article, I spoke to Clay Routledge, a research psychologist and author of Past Forward: How Nostalgia Can Help You Live a More Meaningful Life. This bit of the interview centers on how politicians weaponize nostalgia for personal gain, a relevant subject for the current year to say the least, and I thought it was such a cool conversation, I wanted to share it with you all. Would love to hear your thoughts on the pros and cons of nostalgia in the comments below!

I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on the benefits of nostalgia (it’s fun, it helps us cope with the present and inspires hope for the future), but then of course we're in an election year and I can't help but notice how there's a sort of like, quaint “personal nostalgia” and then there's a weaponization of nostalgia on a broader scale or a political stage. Could you talk about how, in the modern age, certain public figures could exploit these very sort of sweet inclinations toward nostalgia for personal gain?  

Yeah that's a really good question, and I liked your frame, you know, the weaponization, because I think there’s a lot of good, but it can be exploited or manipulated or kind of twisted in a way to push us maybe in directions that are not helpful for society or healthy. [Politicians may] start by provoking dissatisfaction with the present.  The reason I bring that up is because in our research on the more autobiographical form of nostalgia, which tends to be more helpful and generally good for us, we often become more nostalgic when we are anxious or dissatisfied. It’s kind of like a regulatory mechanism in our own brains to say, okay, you're not having fun right now. How do you feel better? And you kind of look to the past for guidance. So I think a lot of politicians and public figures use this method.

They're saying, oh look, the world's not going well. We have all these problems and then you can kind of plug and play which problems depending on which side of politics people are on. I think we tend to associate this with right wing populism, which is definitely true. But you also see this on all sides of politics. Particularly kind of an extreme politics, because the idea is that the status quo is bad. And so the way for me to improve your life is to do something more radical. Then you have the sentiment towards the past, when things were better. On the right, you see this with the MAGA stuff. And on the left you see it with some environmentalism, harkening back to a time before these like evil corporations, destroying the planet, when we lived in harmony with nature or something, even though we didn’t.

That's the first thing I thought of when you said that was this ridiculous tweet where this sort of leftist podcaster said something like, “Damn. Can you imagine being a human during the paleolithic age, just eating salmon and berries and storytelling around campfires and stargazing. No jobs, no traffic, no ads, no poverty, no capitalism-caused traumas, just pure vibes.”