The Age of Nostalgia Liberals shouldn't leave emotion to the right-wing populists. (FP)
BY EDOARDO CAMPANELLA, MARTA DASSÙ | MAY 14, 2019, 4:39 PM
Foreign Policy
...Far from innocuous, the infatuation with a mythicized past is shaping politics in risky ways. Nostalgia induces citizens to find comfort in a time when the world was less flat and governments (apparently) had the power to protect their citizens from external threats. Jingoistic leaders, from Donald Trump in the United States to Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey to Vladimir Putin in Russia to the Brexiteers in the United Kingdom are nourishing these longings with fear, anger, and resentment. In many ways, nostalgic nationalism is the political malaise of our time...
...The resurgence of nostalgic politics and the nation-state as the locus of identity and sovereignty points to an important trend: renationalization that might end up triggering the disintegration of the West. Unless nationalist and protectionist pressures are kept in check, the Atlantic world and the West in its 20th-century configuration may turn out to be short-lived accidents of history.
To succeed in the game of today’s emotional politics, mainstream parties need to play by its rules. In such an emotionally loaded political environment, leveraging emotions should not be left to the populists alone. The rhetoric adopted by the Remain camp in the Brexit debate, for instance, failed because it was too rational at a time when the electorate was highly emotional, partly because of the financial crisis and partly because of globalization more broadly. After all, voters, even the most informed and politically aware, often think and act with their hearts.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/05/14/the-age-of-nostalgia/
Worth reading the entire excerpt of the book
Excerpted from the forthcoming book Anglo Nostalgia: The Politics of Emotion in a Fractured West by Edoardo Campanella and Marta Dassù, from Hurst Publishers and Oxford University Press.
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