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Although nostalgia is often associated with conservatives — like those who wear MAGA hats, proclaiming their desire to return the nation to a fictive past of lost glory — hagiographic recollections of bygone eras can also manifest on the left, especially in the way we remember “our side’s” supposed glory years.
I recall falling prey to this mentality when I was in college, feeling as though I had missed out by being born too late to have joined the civil rights movement or to protest the immoral war we were waging in Southeast Asia. I truly idolized activists from those days and saw them as otherworldly heroes who had brought down apartheid in the South and ended the slaughter in Vietnam.
But although it was understandable that a young progressive might hold those activists in high regard — and although that regard was certainly often well-deserved — I have come to appreciate the dangers of liberal and left nostalgia, and to see it as a stumbling block to modern social justice movements.
First of all, the recollections of liberal/left nostalgists are often as inaccurate, or at least as incomplete, as those of conservatives.
