The politics of nostalgia

 Our politics are now dominated by the prejudices and fears of the elderly. When I was a young man in the 1960s, half the population were young adults under 40 years of age. There was a spirit of youthful idealism and optimism, as these young people looked forward to a better future. There was a ferment of ideas, usually on the left, as the new generation saw themselves as challenging those who came before. Now these same people have become old, and many of them regard the present with fear and dislike. Their response is a powerful yearning for the past - the time when they were confident and energetic and the world was comprehensible. At its most extreme, they reject any ideas which arose in the last fifty years, as if their capacity to absorb new information ceased when they were 25. These new and rejected ideas include global warming, racial and sexual equality, the rights of gay people, the globalisation of the world economy, the metric system and international mobility. New ideas often emerge from universities and from abroad, and so there is a preference for ‘common sense’ over scientific knowledge, and for isolation over international organisations. The generation which grew up after 1945 was the first to become largely immune to the common infectious diseases of childhood, largely because their parents had eagerly accepted advances in medical science. This meant that some members of the new immune generation had no experience of epidemics and therefore reacted with suspicion to immunisation against COVID. This too was, for them, a new idea to be rejected.

The population of the nostalgic has been successfully mobilised in many countries by political movements which promise a return to an imagined golden age. The chronological location of this golden age is never made specific, but it defines a policy agenda of systematically dismantling all the hated changes that have occurred in the last 50 years. The most extreme example of this is of course in the USA. Green energy policies have been repudiated in favour of oil dependency, even though the former now is cheaper and employs many more people. There is a suspicion of medical science and people are advised to avoid life-saving vaccination. Funding for scientific research has been slashed and world-famous universities are under attack. Engagement in international co-operation and trade is replaced by bullying and threats, and foreign visitors are treated with increasing hostility. There is a bizarre hostility to people who have changed their gender identity, and a desire to confine women to child-bearing by banning abortion. Women and black people in senior positions are being systematically dismissed so that promotion will once again become easier for white men of limited abilities. These policies have rarely been debated or explained beyond a kind of sneering at hated catch phrases such as ‘net zero’ or ‘DEI’.

In the past, peoples who failed to adapt to new technology or to modernise their society fell behind their neighbours and were eventually conquered. The Ottoman sultans banned the printing press for 250 years - years in which Europe sped ahead in scientific knowledge and military technology. In 1717, the Chinese Emperor banned Western books as part of his campaign against Jesuit influence. In 1793, a later Emperor rebuffed a British trade mission, responding that China set “no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.” Forty-seven years later, the entire Chinese navy was sunk by two British warships, and the country forcibly opened up to British opium sales. Thus began more than a century of humiliation and civil war for the most populous and civilised country on earth. It is rarer for societies to actually go backwards, dismantle their achievements and repudiate their scientific knowledge, but it has happened. The great libraries of the Eastern Mediterranean were destroyed in the fourth century by Christian zealots, who murdered Hypatia, the greatest mathematician of her day.

Will the USA follow this path? The country will eventually recover from Trump, just as China after many decades recovered from civil war and the cruel insanity of Mao Tse-Tung. But people will fear that the political forces that created Trump could rise again, and investors and visitors to the USA will therefore regard it with suspicion for many years to come.