Nostalgia and Politics

E.D. Kain takes a look at Paul Krugman's and his own politics, and how each's nostalgia shapes his views:

At some point you become your own special interest group. You suddenly see the public library as a symbol of everything that has been lost or that you imagine has been lost. You want to retake or protect what is valuable to you, and what you believe is valuable to others. The key question that needs to be asked is this: do these things you value inhibit the freedoms of others? Is your nostalgia inadvertently causing someone harm?
Krugman’s vision of the 1950’s really is a vision of an insulated world, locked precariously in amber. Can it ever really come back? Did it rely too much on the plight of the disadvantaged – women, minorities, post-war Europe? I cannot help but think that the 1950’s never really happened. That my childhood in 1980’s Montana never really happened.
So maybe we should look forward toward a new vision of the good life. If we do, in some ways it will require us to look back at freedoms lost, and that will require some level of nostalgia. But it will also require us to recall that coercion and oppression exist on many levels, that the state is often just the arm of our culture, enforcing whatever freedom-quashing cultural trend exists at the moment – whether that is a long history of women as second-class-citizens or the relatively new (and far more benign) tendency to ban smoking in restaurants and bars.
Krugman talks about an era when kids were free to go out and play in the streets all day, unsupervised and pretty much safe. I’m not thirty yet and I remember that freedom myself.

I think it is interesting that most (white) Americans, including myself, seem to idealize the '50's, and look upon the time as a time to get back to. I think that tends to hold across Republicans and Democrats.  And yet, when it comes to civil and women's rights, Democrats tend to, rightly, look askance at the decade.  Meanwhile, actual Republican policies are more tied to the 1920's or 1890's, as opposed to the 1950's.  Very few people recognize that the U.S. wouldn't have reached such an economically dominant position without the destruction of World War II unleashed on the U.S.S.R., western Europe, Great Britain and Japan.  That position can never be reattained.  The nostalgia is extremely powerful, but misleading.  We now need to determine what sort of a state we want to live in, and how we can afford that.  None of that is fun, but all of that is necessary.