🔒 The Party of Emotion

Of all the slogans that were thrown about during the 2024 US election I think the one that frightened the Republicans the most was Kamala Harris’ threat that “we’re not going back.” What the right wants more than anything is to go back. That’s what it is, at heart, to be right-wing. A fanatic, desperate, nostalgia. “This is what they took from you,” is the rallying cry, captioning a beach or a cheerleader or a Borders.

For all their braying about facts and logic, they are hopelessly captured by the tyranny of their feelings. A feeling of perpetual loss driving everything they think and believe, chasing a past glory that, in many cases, they never personally experienced. Their slogans are never about improvement or development or progress, always about “going back.” Make America Great Again. Put things back the way they used to be, and keep them that way.

 According to the US Department of Homeland Security, via Twitter, this is what America is going to look like when all the foreigners are gone:

In short, it’s going to be the 1970s.

 Specifically, it’s going to be a mythical version of the 70s that was almost completely white, but for a few black people here and there who were allowed to assimilate. It’s always worth mentioning that the people running these social media accounts are recruited from the groyper movement and are vicious, sincere white supremacists. One of the snippets of multimedia they cut into their slideshow was a very obscure short-lived McDonald’s mascot who is much better known as Moon Man after he was co-opted by online neo-Nazis. They are explicitly aware of this.

Modern technology has so greatly enabled the manufacture, distribution, and weaponization of nostalgia that it has enabled this feeling of loss to reach a critical mass. In the past it was television ads that sought to remind voters of the “good old days.” Now we can generate the 80s with AI and have fictional characters from the past literally tell you this is what we lost, and what we can have again:

There’s no logic whatsoever to this grief and desperation that we can wind time back entire generations. How would that even work? Would we bring back Blockbuster and have it somehow coexist in the same time and space as Netflix? There’s no talk of a Butlerian Jihad here, nobody is saying we’ll get rid of technologies that already exist, just that we’re going to keep all that stuff but also, somehow, bring back an aesthetic.

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