Nostalgia as a symptom of late-stage capitalism.............
One of the primary symptoms of late stage capitalism that goes mostly unnoticed is found in bourgeois politics and the major political parties. Even though I'm going to reference the USA and the Republicans and Democrats, these grouping have their counterparts all over the world.
That mostly overlooked symptom is found in the nostalgia that both the Republicans and Democrats have for various failed models of the past. Both of the parties have two main groups that fall prey to this nostalgia for different bygone eras that failed. One Republican group is nostalgic for the neo-liberalism of Reagan. After 40 years or so, they STILL think that "trickle down" economics works for society as a whole. In spite of EVERY economic fact that contradicts this worldview, they still think it's a viable system. There's a huge group of Dems that also support neo-liberal economics, found especially in the leadership of the party. They just support it with a dash of "identity" politics like the Clinton 1990s. The "death of neo-liberalism" was self inflicted and came during the Great Recession of 2007/08.
Then you have the "anti-establishment" groupings in each of the bourgeois parties. In the Republican Party this group is represented by the Trumpers. They think they've got a handle on something totally new, but in reality, it's just a nostalgia for the authoritarian right-wing model tried and failed in the 1930s by Mussolini and Hitler. And to a lesser extent Franco in Spain. And if we know any history at all, we know how badly these authoritarian systems failed society as a whole.
But the Democratic Party's anti-establishmentarianism is just as useless as the rest of them. It yearns for the days of "social democracy" or at least social democratic policies. This model crashed and burned in the Stagflation of the 1970s when capitalism decided that it couldn't afford these programs for the rest of us any more and began the process of getting rid of them. Getting rid of social democracy was actually what Reagan's neo-liberalism was all about.
So ALL of the "serious" bourgeois political parties and the majority groupings inside of them are ALL longing for a failed era of the past. This should be a warning sign for EVERYBODY about how badly capitalism is failing society..