Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be

Last week, Matt Yglesias published a characteristically smart and interesting post on his Substack (which is well worth a subscription) taking up the dangers of the politics of nostalgia.

We all tend to think well of the world of our youth, he argued, but often what we miss is being young rather than the actual social and political circumstances that prevailed when we were young. It would be a mistake to think that somehow recreating those circumstances would necessarily be good for the country or that a politics implicitly rooted in the claim that the world was great when I was 25 has much to offer the future.