The present always sucks, the future is always scary, and the past is always awesome
How nostalgia works
The 2020s aren't even half over, but a contributor to the /r/decadeology subreddit has seen enough and deemed it an historically awful ten-year stretch:
My initial reaction to this post was, “didn't they set A Christmas Story in the thirties? And instead of bread lines and dust bowls and Nazi rallies at Madison Square garden, the film showed the joys of Red Rider BB guns and decoder rings and Chinese food on Christmas after the neighborhood dogs steal the turkey?
Don't get me wrong: there were also sadistic Santa Clauses and soap-related punishments and Ovaltine product placement that made the Skittles in Shazam: Fury of the Gods look subtle. But the movie was clearly made and enjoyed by people who lived through the Great Depression decade and actually look back on it fondly.
It reminded me of something my son said when we were recently stuck inside during a massive snowstorm. He said it reminded him of the months we were stuck in quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The thing is, he didn't mean this as reliving a traumatic experience, but that it reminded him of good memories involving movie nights and ordering in food and playing video games.
Some other redditors responded to the above post by saying that this decade reminds them more of the 1970s, a period marked by social divisions, high energy prices, and an overall feeling of malaise, not to mention some of the most horrifying fashion of all time.
And yet, seventies nostalgia has been going pretty much non-stop since the early nineties, when the Y-M-C-A dance and even freaking bell bottoms made a comeback.
(Note: I will never, ever not find an excuse to post this video when the opportunity presents itself.)
Ditto for the eighties and nineties - when, as someone who lived through both, I can assure you people thought everything thoroughly sucked - and now, as shown by the recent Super Bowl halftime show, 2000s nostalgia is a thing.
Yes, the decade of 9/11, the Iraq War and the Great Recession. But also “Yeah!” by Usher featuring Lil John and Ludacris. So it all evens out, I guess.
After the Berlin Wall came down, a curious phenomenon called Ostalgie took hold in the former German Democratic Republic, where the same people who flocked Westward in their Trabants started looking back fondly on their days in the FDJ and drinking Vita Cola.
Not that they wanted to bring Communism back - if anything, it's the far right which has surged in the former East Germany, not the post-Communist Die Linke - but there was a feeling that their more prosperous cousins in the West were kind of looking down on them and that, for all of its faults, this lost society was still theirs. (The celebrated 2003 movie Good Bye, Lenin portrays this mindset well.)
They haven’t forgotten the political repression, but it’s been sort of pushed aside by childhood memories of everyday life. Not unlike how I think of the 2000s as my decade living in Western Newfoundland, skiing and exploring Gros Morne National Park and owning my first house and becoming a moderately popular blogger, more than a period of tumultuous unrest and conflict.
When you spend way too much time online, as I do, it’s easy to forget that those of us who obsessively follow the news are a tiny minority. Whatever is happening in the world, life goes on.
If I can play armchair psychologist for a moment, I wonder if there might be some kind of evolutionary reason for why we celebrate the past, grumble about the present and fear the future.
Whatever bad stuff happened to others in the thirties or the seventies or the Donald Trump Presidency, we made it out alive and well. By contrast, we don’t know for sure what’s going to happen five minutes from now, never mind five years or five decades. In that way, nostalgia is a kind of survivorship bias in action.
It might even go some way toward explaining why Trump’s polling numbers remain stubbornly high. Because he hasn’t been the lead story on every newscast since 2021, his shocking corruption, ignorance and authoritarian tendencies have faded from the popular memory.
The challenge for Biden in 2024 will be jogging people’s memories about what they went through from January, 2017 to January, 2021. The best way to to that might be to just let Trump talk and let everyone else draw their own conclusions.
Fortunately, the people running the Biden-Harris campaign Xwitter account apparently know this:
In 2024, instead of trying to shut up Donald Trump, we should be encouraging him to talk and talk some more and keep talking. No one makes the case for Trump’s unsuitability for office like Trump.
According to the writer, A Christmas Story takes place in the 1940s. Otherwise, I completely agree with your post.