Trump’s rear-view politics
Nostalgia can be a powerful emotion and it’s hardly surprising people try to exploit it to get elected or to sell a particular set of policies
f Donald Trump’s presidential campaign had an official theme song, it would probably be ‘The way we were’, or maybe Archie and Edith Bunker’s rendition of Those were the days. More than anything else, Trump’s campaign rests on nostalgia for a bygone era when America was indisputably “great”, immigrants came through Ellis Island (and only in small numbers), and where everybody (and especially women, minorities and journalists) knew their place. The fact that his campaign slogan says he’ll make America great again tells you Trump’s gaze is firmly in the rearview mirror.
But he’s not alone. All of the remaining candidates indulge in their own forms of nostalgia, defined as “sentimentality about the past, typically for a period or place with strong personal associations”. Hillary Clinton wants Americans to hearken back to the 1990s, when somebody with the same last name occupied the White House. Bernie Sanders would like America back to those halcyon days when Glass-Steagall was still in place and 1 percenters didn’t earn vast sums while tanking the world economy. And Ted Cruz would like Americans to think he’s the reincarnation of former president Ronald Reagan.
Unfortunately, nostalgia is a poor guide to choosing a president or constructing a foreign policy. Human memories are notoriously unreliable and the past that we look back on with fondness was probably nowhere near as idyllic as we now believe it was. Even the happiness we associate with some bygone era may be wholly illusory; we may well have been just as anxious, insecure, angry, or frustrated then as we are today. We just don’t remember it that way.
More importantly, nostalgia can actively mislead us when it comes to choosing policies for the here and now.
First, policymakers and pundits with an axe to grind often use rose-tinted versions of the past to convince you that their preferred course of action will yield a seemingly familiar set of benefits. Case in point: Robert Kagan’s eloquently one-sided defence of American liberal hegemony in the New Republic, which used a potted history of the 20th century to argue that the muscular US foreign policy he has long advocated — and which produced a steady diet of recent disasters, most notably in Iraq — was almost single-handedly responsible for a (supposedly) long period of post-Second World War peace. In Kagan’s telling, America’s steadfast willingness to serve as global policeman after Second World War produced a long era of peace and prosperity and America tampers with that formula at its peril.
The problem, as historian Andrew Bacevich quickly pointed out, is that Kagan’s glowing portrait of a global Pax Americana was mostly a fiction. US engagement may have helped keep the peace in Europe and Northeast Asia (at least once America fought a pretty serious war in Korea), but it didn’t keep the peace in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa or the Middle East.
Constructing a fictitious past
Second, nostalgia also blinds us to our own misdeeds, thereby making it harder to understand why others see us as they do. All countries sugarcoat their own history, constructing a fictitious past in which the virtuous moments loom large and the mistakes, injustices and cruelties are airbrushed away. Once this collective amnesia takes over, however, we’ll no longer remember why Iran, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iraq and a number of other countries have valid reasons to be more than a little upset at Uncle Sam.
Third, choosing politicians or policies on the basis of nostalgia assumes that it is possible to turn the clock back. But time runs in only one direction, and policies that made sense decades ago may be wholly unsuited to present conditions. Gazing solely in the rearview mirror discourages one from thinking about the actual problems faced today.
Finally, politicians who try to sell themselves or their policy preferences on the basis of nostalgia invariably cook the books in another way. Trump or Cruz promise to restore American military might so that “nobody will mess with us”, and both suggest that the US will enjoy the sort of military dominance that it supposedly had in earlier periods. But you don’t hear them saying they will also restore marginal tax rates to the same level as those earlier periods, or introduce the financial regulations that existed under former presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Reagan.
The lesson: When a candidate or a pundit says they have a Wayback Machine that will magically catapult America back to some earlier Golden Age, they are probably hawking something that is long past its sell-by date and more than a little bit rancid. Caveat emptor.
Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer professor of International Relations at Harvard University.