Political nostalgics

From Mark Lilla, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024):

Nostalgia can sometimes be enjoyable. Anyone with a good internet connection can now research their lineage themselves or with the help of very profitable businesses that promise an ancestry worth celebrating. But when an entire nation or people or faith begins searching for lost time, darker emotions and fantasies emerge. Political nostalgia transforms a feeling that things are not as they should be into the conviction that things are not what they once were. Everything hangs on that once . Once we were innocent and pure, now we are not. Once we were kings, now we are prisoners. Once we lived in Eden, now we live in Los Angeles or Cairo or Dubai. Once we were nigh unto gods, now we must grovel for assistance.

There is a trap hidden in that once . The more we dream about a lost Eden, the less bearable the present feels, and this feeling then inclines us to yearn even more for what we imagine we have lost. Soon we become incapable of seeing the world as it presents itself to us without the shadows of an imagined past cast upon it. Political nostalgics are sick with history itself.

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