Nostalgia is one hell of a drug. For some people, the present is an exercise, not in what is good, but what detracts therefrom. The future is forever descending doom. No wonder, then, why so many want to look back as older movies and ads and hope for a world where that fantasy could be real… to the point of believing that it is not only real, but we can will it into existence. Again, nostalgia is one hell of a drug.
The truth is that the halcyon past wasn’t perfect. Even is somethings feel worse now, the past wasn’t the utopia that some people seem to fancy it as, and in many ways it sucked compared to what we have now.
Here are the lies that progressives use to sell socialism: pic.twitter.com/gqkH9OqcGX
— John Stossel (@JohnStossel) September 30, 2025
Some of this nostalgia just comes from the last half-century before some terrible event (Bretton-Woods in 1971 or 9/11 in 2001, for example), but much of it centers on the idyllic 1950s when everyone looked and acted like they were the cast of Ozzie & Harriet. What many people don’t realize is just how much of a freakish abhorration that period in time was. The U.S. benefitted from being the only major industrial country in the world that hadn’t been devastated by the 2nd World War, combined with a massive influx of men into college due to the G.I. Bill of Rights. Before WWII, the college demographics were fairly close to being 50:50 and the birth rate was much as it was after the Baby Boom dropped. For the overly-obsessive natalists out there, it was called the Baby Boom because there was a high rise in the fertility rate caused by the short term economic de facto monopoly American industry had. The rate fell because other countries recovered and became competitive globally.
That halycon mid-century America in reality was not some positive sounding ad or a TV program or movie that was required to present only a positive picture of America. Even the actual positive elements economically only existed because of that transient economic fluke and post-war snogging going on. It did not end because the country was “inflicted” with non-White replacements, nor because of some other nefarious scheme by shadowy elites against “the people”.
Some, though, would to back even further and rejects the great American pageant by embracing the “Norman yoke” of feudalism. They have fantasies of people being in perfect health due to being free from modern medicine, and society being good, ordered, and moral due to benevolent Christian feudal lords and practically arcadian peasants living a life of healthy outdoor work and plenty of free time.
But so mentally ravished are some people by modernity, that they’d throw that away for anything that is different, and that RETVRN to some modern-day invented fantasy past will naturally occur. This is less some feudal utopia than a Rousseau-esque “state of nature” for fanciers of a Dark Enlightenment to replace with a Romanticist (and continental Unamerican romanticism) the old Enlightenment (particularly the Scottish Enlightenment, which was a distillation of a heritage which ironically began during the Middle Ages). What is further ironic is that the appelation of “The Dark Ages” was used during the Rennaisance as a call to RETVRN to a pre-Medieval world of the Roman Empire and Classical world!
Stop obsessing over the past. Learn from the past and preserve that which is good and beneficial, but apply it to the present and future, not to recreating a past which never really existed.
