The Danger of Institutional Nostalgia
What is a democracy without the tools to put democratic ideals into action?
There is no emotion that I approach with more skepticism than nostalgia.
Part of this skepticism is because of nostalgia’s obvious emotional power. One of the greatest ever works of literature hinges on one man’s memory of how a cookie tastes.
Living in nostalgia is a comfort, a shield against dealing with the unknowns of the present. Nostalgia sands away the rough edges of the past, leaving only good vibes behind. As a jumping off point for reflection, nostalgia can be great fuel for increasing understanding, but wallowing on it causes problems.
Essentially, I view nostalgia as the enemy of progress. While nostalgia is primarily the province of the old, indulging in nostalgic thinking, or maybe over-indulging in nostalgic thinking is essentially juvenile, the emotional equivalent of a child clinging to their favorite teddy bear as a way to conjure a sense of the familiar in the midst of a strange world.
I was that kid, (though my teddy bear was a Snoopy doll), so maybe part of my aversion to nostalgia is rooted in wanting to bury that scared little kid who thought he needed an inanimate object to sleep safely through the night. I am not ashamed of being that kid, but I would be awfully ashamed not to have evolved beyond needing to cling to a meaningless talisman to make sense of the world.
I’ve been thinking this week about how nostalgia, in two different flavors is behind some truly dire threats.
Reactionary nostalgia
Do know about The Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025”? If not, you should. I recommend
’s primer, “What ‘Project 2025’ Would Do to America” from his newsletter. Project 2025 is steeped in nostalgia for a United States of America before we made any progress toward fulfilling the goal of becoming a multi-racial democracy where individual rights are not prescribed by race, status, gender, or other immutable qualities.Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts told Steve Bannon on Bannon’s podcast that “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Their literal intention is to return the country to its state at the time of our founding, where white, landed gentry called the shots and everyone else could lump it. The Heritage Vision is essentially a white, Christian ethno-state combined with unchecked corporate rampaging.
Oh, and let’s not overlook a healthy side dish of nuclear escalation, because who wouldn’t love a little global thermonuclear armageddon brinksmanship with Iran and North Korea?
The Project 2025 blueprint intends is a plan for dismantling the government as an administrative state, and rebuilding it into an organ that operates with total fealty to a unitary executive. The entire “Project 2025” plan is steeped in a dangerous nostalgia, one that exploits grievance and prejudice in the interests of acquiring power. It’s hardly a new phenomenon in this country, but Trump, being colossally incurious, venal, and self-serving, is the perfect vehicle for these plans because he will let his minions run rampant provided he gets his taste. Heritage’s Roberts is, in fact, being floated as a possible White House Chief of Staff in a second Trump presidency.
Roberts believes our collective democracy is a mistake. Abortion rights are a mistake. Same-sex marriage, mistake. Civil Rights and societal integration, a mistake. No-fault divorce, birth control, mistakes.
Even elections, to the extent they may empower people who believe in things different from Roberts, a mistake.
Trump, recognizing how toxic the growing impression of Project 2025 is, has tried distancing himself, claiming he knows nothing about it, except that it is authored by high level figures from his own previous administration.
The authors of Project 2025 are mostly interested in achieving power which will enable them to realize their reactionary ideological program. They’re using nostalgic appeals to voters in order to mask the incredibly radical nature of their plan, and for the moment, it appears to be working.
The nostalgia for liberal institutions
The most conservative (in the traditional sense) aspect of my world view is my belief in the importance of institutions as vehicles for realizing the fundamental American ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Schools are perhaps the ur-example of what I believe about the importance of institutions. Our public schools are essentially meant to be wholly democratic, universal access, rooted in local communities, but also part of a more expansive system of interlocking institutions.
Government, the courts, colleges and universities, houses of worship, the media, these are all institutions which I believe should simultaneously provide the glue which holds society together, and allow us the space to manage our differences. For this to work, we must maintain faith in the essential necessity and efficacy of the institutions.
In a recent post at his
newsletter, argues that people like me have probably been putting too much faith in “liberal institutions” as bulwarks against the the “unrestrained capitalism” that drives programs like that of the Heritage Foundation.In my defense, I’ve been expressing my worry about the degraded state of our institutions for quite a long time. My first thought, published at Inside Higher Ed, after the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was that “we’re going to need our institutions” as a form of protection against a figure who had no respect nor use for institutions himself.
I recall watching the news coverage of Trump’s inauguration and hearing multiple commentators talk about how Trump couldn’t help but be humbled by the “awesome responsibilities” of the presidency, as though the institution of the presidency held some kind of power over the deranged mindset of an individual. As we saw, this is not true.
My up-close disillusionment has been witnessing the utter failure of higher education institutions to fulfill their role. Some of the failures are rooted in what I call “institutional awe,” a belief that individuals are required to sacrifice themselves for the well-being of the institution, rather than the institution existing to enhance the lives of individuals.
I was recently talking to my older brother, a lawyer, in the wake of the latest round of Supreme Court rulings on the Chevron and Trump immunity cases which have radically expanded the powers of the executive. As a lawyer, he was educated in the early 1990’s and inculcated to believe in a more abstract institution, the “Rule of Law.” Lawyers are trained to believe that ultimately, their profession is rooted in this principle, and that even though their work is inherently adversarial, and different interpretations of what the “Rule of Law” means will clash, we must maintain our faith in the system that allows those differences to be adjudicated, and those differences are rooted in good-faith principles.
If the mask was not already off regarding the Supreme Court’s institutional failure prior to these recent rulings - and it should have been - there’s no longer denying what we’re being told. As Tressie McMillan Cottom puts it at The New York Times, “There is no other way to read its decision than as a signal that whoever owns the Republican Party also owns the power to break the law. Whether he wins or loses, Trump owns the G.O.P., lock, stock and barrel. I’m not sure the country has fully accepted what that means.”
It’s really the institutional failure of the Republican Party to identify Trump as an invasive agent bent on destroying it, accommodating him until he became the party that’s led us to this moment of impending crisis where a convicted felon is the odds-on favorite to become President. In some ways the sturm and drang over President Biden’s candidacy shows that the Democratic Party at least sort of still exists.
Looking back, it’s clear that I was not naive about the state of things, but it’s also clear that I was unable to see a route forward that did not involve revivifying these institutions. I don’t know if I believe that project is possible anymore, certainly not on a grand scale.
In hindsight, I kick myself over my individual, and our collective shrug at the Supreme Court’s 2001 decision in Bush v. Gore, handing the presidency to George W. Bush in a partisan vote truly via bizarro world legal reasoning that even the ruling’s authors said should be treated as a one-off, non-precedent. This was the Court declaring a willingness, even an eagerness to abandon the Rule of Law to achieve nakedly political ends. The entire episode (spoiled ballots, hanging chads, et al) was an example of an institutional failure to hold an election that could accurately capture the will of the people.
We treated it as an anomaly, but it was a harbinger. We are now captive to institutions like the Electoral College and a Supreme Court that are, arguably, thwarting the democratic will of the people. Perhaps you recall pre-2020 election chatter about plans to expand the size of the Supreme Court or end the Senate filibuster in order to protect precedents like Roe v. Wade. These were rejected by institutionalists, like Joe Biden, but look where we are now.
Things like Project 2025, or the current so-called “school choice” movement, which primarily puts public tax money in the hands of people who are already sending their kids to private schools, and which is explicitly meant to undermine the role of public schools in our democracy are direct attacks on what remains of our institutions. Things begin to feel a little hopeless, as we’re forced to admit that our institutions are largely broken and dysfunctional, and yet they’re the only defense we have against a true authoritarian threat that’s aiming to roll back rights.
I do not know what a democratic society looks like in the absence of these institutions, but maybe we’re about to find out.
Links
This week at the Chicago Tribune, I offer my two-cents of appreciation for
’s When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s which identifies all kinds of hindsight harbingers for the mess we find ourselves in today.Book Riot offers some data on which book genres are most popular. Anyone who follows publishing won’t be surprised.
I really appreciated this newsletter from
on “Seeing with an Artist’s Eye” that explores what it means to be “critical” n terms of issues of storytelling craft and execution.At her newsletter
Lenz describes what it’s like to find that your entire book has been stolen, run through generative AI, and is being sold online. A terrible sign of what’s to come.Here’s one for my fellow Gen Xers from McSweeney’s and by Wendy Aarons: “Peri(Menopausal) in Pink.”
Recommendations
1. Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
2. Trust by Hernan Diaz
3. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
4. The Frozen River by Ariel Lawson
5. We Are Too Many by Hannah Pittard
Kathleen F. - Michiana Shores, IN
For Kathleen I’m recommending a slim, but emotionally spiky little novel, Grown Ups by Marie Aubert.
1. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
2. Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles
3. Exile in Guyville by Amy Lee Lillard
4. All Fours by Miranda July
5. Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
JoDee B. - Exeter, NH
For JoDee, another slim and also quite emotionally spiky novel, Luster by by Raven Lelani.1
Am I wrong about nostalgia? Can we instead see it as a vehicle for progress? What do you think of the state of our institutions? Where do you see hope? All thoughts are welcome in the comments.
See you next week.
JW
The Biblioracle
All books (with the occasional exception) linked throughout the newsletter go to The Biblioracle Recommends bookstore at Bookshop.org. Affiliate proceeds, plus a personal matching donation of my own, go to Chicago’s Open Books and an additional reading/writing/literacy nonprofit to be determined. Affiliate income for this year is $79.00.
At the age of 27 I already fall prey to too much nostalgia. I remember watching debates in '08 as a 7th grade kid. I remember the feeling of optimism that first Obama campaign imparted and the feeling of pride in our nation's solidarity in democracy watching Senator McCain graciously cede the race to our first black president—something of note back then. I remember President Bush at noon during the peaceable transfer of power, and the smile, genuine as a painted portrait on his genial face. These are good ol' days for me. They are real.
There have been efforts from both parties to constrain that image to its sepia-toned filter of nostalgia. I think of Sanders' snub in 2016 and wince at the language in this 2025 project. I bemoan the left's abandon of populism and the right's reversal from democratic ideals.
I long for the time when John McCain and Barrack Obama shared a stage smiling. While the rougher edges of my polished memory may prove that they were figureheads of larger, covert interests, those figureheads at least still claimed that while they disagreed on policy, they believed in the same America.
The Democratic Party began its demise when capitalist party elites railroaded democratic socialist Henry Wallace from FDR’s VP slot in ‘44, in lieu of Truman, who brought us national security state hell after he became President. The final nail in the coffin was the takeover of the party by Clinton, Gore, Fromm, and the rest of the DLC neoliberal corporatists in the early 90s.
Chris Hedges’ book ‘The Death of the Liberal Class’ documented the failure of liberal institutions to respond to the neoliberal economic onslaught, and also the rise of Christian nationalism. Written in 2010, it predicted the GOP extremist takeover of state legislatures, the courts, and segments of academia.
We’re in a bad place. The corporate coup is complete. Until a majority of Americans realize voting alone won’t save us now, we’ll continue to circle the drain.