What decade had the best music? When was America at its safest? When was America actually the best to you personally? Try asking a MAGA supporter when America was previously great, and you’ll usually get two responses. The first one is “except for maybe black people, America was great when…”. The other response is mostly dependent on how old they are, because MAGA is little more than wistful nostalgia.
Throw Back Thursday, Flashback Friday, Retro gaming–Nostalgia is big
A common theme among nostalgia social media pages is showing a visual with happy teens hanging out in the 70s, with phrases like “we had the best music, the best cars, and best friends.” Often then it will say something about how glad they are the didn’t grow up with “I-phones,” computers, etc. Everything else is garbage.
My partner and I are in our mid forties. The hill she was willing to die on was mid 90s grunge was the best music ever.
Science shows the best music ever was roughly the music we listened to from the time we became teenagers to when settled into adult hood in our early to mid twenties. You know, the time we had hormones, strong emotions, and turned to music to explain our generational angst and make sense of the world . It’s also nostalgia to a time when we were optimistic and excited about our future, before adulthood came and crushed our childhood dreams. I’m assuming people reading this are not astronauts or the president.
America has never been safer for children, yet people believe now is the most dangerous time for kids in America.
America was also at its safest when we were pre-teens. I mean, we were invincible, fearless explorers who stayed out until the streetlights came on. It didn’t matter that there’s a good chance the crime rate was higher than today, or things were far less safe—you weren’t aware of the danger. You weren’t sitting down after work each night reading the paper or religiously watching the tv news. Violent crime and murder were a bigger problem when I was a kid, but I felt way safer then than I do today, even though I’m less likely to be murdered.
Nostalgia erases the bad parts of history
MAGA has weaponized nostalgia because it is powerful. Arguing reality with these people is always going to fail because perception is stronger than fact. An example, a very conservative older MAGA thinks they believe in low taxes and small government. So they were teenagers in the late 50s to 1970ish. This is a time of massive government expansion—the interstate highway system, modernization of schools, the space program, all of which were extremely expensive. This was a time where the marginal tax rate exceeded 90%, meaning the as you made more money, those higher income brackets were taxed at higher rates in a form of progressive taxation. They may have lost friends or had friends permanently scarred from childhood polio, as it was the number one infectious disease killing children before vaccinations became available. When vaccinations were created there was a massive government program to inoculate children at doctors offices, in schools, or wherever else children could be found.
It was a terrible time. Huge government programs, massive taxes on wealth, a vaccine developed in lightning time (3 years), being forced on Americans under a massive government propaganda campaign. It was a conservative nightmare, save for the nostalgia; before they were taught to hate taxes, government, and public health. When you point these things out, they don’t fit that nostalgic view, and their brains dismiss it as too alien an idea.
It’s impossible to compete with an imaginary time of Nostalgia–so don’t do it!
MAGA harkens back to an imaginary, undefined time and there is no way that 2024 and its immediate problems can compete with an idealized fantasy. It holds true even for many people of color, who remember family, love, and feeling safe and protected by their parents. and Things like racism are often minimized in nostalgia because we like to look back fondly at our childhood memories. Racism is also a constant. The grass was green in 1960, and it’s green in 2024. America had a problem with racism then that has never been addressed. We like to remember the good parts of our past and minimize the painful ones—especially in nostalgia.
Progressives fall for the nostalgia weapon every time because our brains are hardwired to remember the best things from our childhood. The air and water are cleaner than ever before, consumer products are safer, and no one would want to go back to using the medicines from 1960 and give up the miracles of modern medical science. We are in a safer time, because we are able to track and measure crime, allowing us to be better prepared and aware, instead of leaving our doors unlocked because of a false sense of security.
Every time we mention MAGA, we reinforce the idea. We use the Republican framing of imagining and idealized America that used to be great. They think we are idiots when we attack the idea because they define the word and the movement on the best of times, and what kind of moronic America hater would hate on that time period?
When progressives hear MAGA, we think of antinostalgia—everything that was wrong with America. We think of fascist dictators on the march to take over. It’s why we compare MAGAs to Nazis. They represent the worst of times, and Nazism as an idea has never really gone away.
Using the term MAGA to fight MAGA is not helping
We are not clever with our red hats that say Make America Kind Again, because the first thing people see is the red hat and the distinctive font of MAGA. It reinforces in everyone’s mind MAGA because that’s the first thing we think of when we see it. Same with the sophomoric “MAGAt” types online or said out loud.
We need to stop self sabotaging our own brains and our arguments by letting the right control the narrative. We can’t beat nostalgia, so we stop the nostalgic narrative and instead articulate why America is better now, and how we want to move forward, to progress, and live in reality instead of exist in some liminal nostalgia dream. So get out your swear jar, and put in a dollar every time you use that filthy word.