In “We’re Not Going Back!” Dems Find an Antidote to the Politics of Nostalgia

The Republican Festival of Nostalgia

The Republican convention in Milwaukee functioned as what the source describes as a "veritable festival of nostalgia"—a curated longing for an era when American global hegemony coincided with domestic racial and gender hierarchies. This backward glance is not merely aesthetic; it serves a political purpose. By invoking a mythologised past, the Trump-Vance ticket offers psychological comfort to voters unsettled by demographic change, economic dislocation, and cultural transformation.

The selection of JD Vance as running mate adds a layer of complexity to this nostalgic project. Vance's memoir "Hillbilly Elegy" trades in a wistful yearning for the "simpler virtues" of Appalachian communities, yet his own mixed-race family contradicts the blood-and-soil nationalism his public rhetoric often flirts with. This tension—between the personal and the political, between lived reality and ideological performance—exemplifies the contradictions at the heart of reactionary nostalgia.

Democratic Nostalgia and the Obama Shadow

The source notes reveal that Democrats are not immune to nostalgia's pull. For many progressives, the "greatest generation" is not the World War II cohort but the civil rights and anti-war activists of the 1960s and 1970s. More immediately, the Harris-Walz launch evoked powerful memories of 2008 and 2012, when Barack Obama's candidacy seemed to promise national redemption. The author explicitly identifies this as nostalgia: "Specifically, nostalgia for 2008 and 2012, when the campaign of Barack Obama seemed to offer the hope that, at long last, America would redeem its promises."

This recognition is crucial. Hope, as the piece observes, "is a powerful drug. But so is hope abandoned, hope denied, dreams endlessly deferred." The reference to Langston Hughes—"Hold fast to dreams / For when dreams go / Life is a barren field / Frozen with snow"—underscores the emotional stakes. The danger is not hope itself, but the cycle of raised expectations followed by disappointment that can fuel cynicism or, in Hughes's warning, explosion.

Dos Passos and the Two Nations

The article anchors its analysis in John Dos Passos's 1930s critique of American oligarchy. The failed defence of Sacco and Vanzetti—the Italian anarchists executed in 1927—prompted Dos Passos to recognise that "we are not all in this together." His formulation of "two nations" anticipated the class divide that persists today: "where the economy's winners make the rules and the losers, enraged and desperate, fight over the crumbs."

This framework remains diagnostically useful. The Palmer Raids, the Immigration Act of 1924, Harding's "return to normalcy"—each represented a reactionary consolidation of power against immigrants, radicals, and racial minorities. The parallel to contemporary politics is deliberate. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's blueprint for a second Trump term, represents a similar attempt to institutionalise minority rule through administrative capture.

The Structural Trap: Oligarchy vs. Democracy

The core argument is that neither party's nostalgic impulses—Republican or Democratic—address the fundamental problem Dos Passos identified. Until the United States "cease[s] to be the oligarchy Dos Passos described," genuine national unity remains impossible. The Harris-Walz ticket's energy and demographic novelty (youth, gender, geographic diversity) cannot alone overcome structural barriers: the Senate's malapportionment, the Electoral College, the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority, and the influence of concentrated wealth on policy outcomes.

The source's closing observation—"Can we ever become one nation? There's only one way to find out"—acknowledges this uncertainty. It suggests that democratic renewal requires not just electoral victory but sustained confrontation with the oligarchic structures that Dos Passos named nearly a century ago.

Implications for the 2024 Election and Beyond

The Harris-Walz strategy of "We're not going back" operates on multiple levels. It reframes the election as a choice between future and past, progress and reaction. It mobilises the fear of democratic backsliding—Project 2025, abortion restrictions, authoritarian governance—into positive energy. And it attempts to forge a multiracial, cross-class coalition around a forward-looking vision.

Yet the historical record counsels humility. The Obama coalition's inability to translate electoral victory into structural reform—filibuster reform, voting rights protection, court restructuring—left the democratic architecture vulnerable. The same forces that constrained Obama have only strengthened: a radicalised Supreme Court, state-level voter suppression, and a Republican Party increasingly explicit in its rejection of democratic norms.

The article's mention of the Nation's Fall Books issue—covering economic growth, equality politics, hip-hop history, abortion rights, labour organising—signals the breadth of intellectual work still required. Democratic renewal demands not just better messaging but deeper analysis of power, inequality, and the specific mechanisms of oligarchic capture.

What this means

The Harris-Walz campaign has successfully crystallised anti-reactionary energy into a potent slogan and a visually compelling ticket. But the source's honest reckoning with Democratic nostalgia—and its invocation of Dos Passos and Hughes—suggests that the deeper challenge is not winning an election but confronting the oligarchic structures that have persisted across generations. "We're not going back" is a necessary defence; it is not a sufficient programme. The question "Can we ever become one nation?" remains open, and the answer depends less on November's outcome than on whether the democratic majority can translate electoral power into structural transformation. The bumper crop of books and essays the Nation assembles—on equality, labour, abortion, economic growth—maps the intellectual terrain that such transformation would require. It is a terrain as vast as the two nations Dos Passos named, and the work of bridging them has only begun.