Nostalgia is a powerful drug and outside of a lobotomy there’s no option to kick it completely, but it is possible to maintain a safe nostalgia habit. As someone who has trucked heavily in nostalgia over the years, I try to ground my own appreciation of the past by visualizing nostalgia as a rapid that is 100 miles wide and one foot deep: powerful currents easy to get swept up in, but without much depth. Once the remembering is done, you’re left with little more than the interview questions from The Chris Farley Show. (“Remember when you…used to watch Nickelodeon?”)
Of course, it’s fun to play “remember when…” and sometimes the practice can be restorative—for instance, when I share some obscure thing I half-remember and discover that other people half-remember it too, which assures me, if for only one brief moment, that I am not insane. The danger of a trip down memory lane comes when the remembering fools you into thinking everything was much better Way Back When. Yes, most things are terrible at the current moment, but a cursory flip through the pages of history will inform you that most things have always been terrible.
Nostalgia tends to pool around times when we were young and carefree—most typically childhood—and so what we often interpret as a “simpler time” was one in which the adults in our lives were dealing with the heavy stuff while we were too young to realize just how complicated and painful the world really was. (At least this is how I imagine many people see their pasts; my own childhood was fraught with all sorts of complication, but that’s a tale for another time.)
All this being said, there’s nothing inherently wrong with celebrating the relics of your youth, or even arguing that these things are superior to what culture offers us today, provided you don’t take such a debate too seriously. Some people do take that debate seriously, however. Very seriously. Like, trying to say “I heart the 90s” with 14 words seriously.
Given enough time anything can become a pined-for glorious golden past, and it seems that the internet reactionaries of the moment have decided this label now applies to the early years of the first Clinton administration. Many examples of this have crossed my transom in the last year or so, but the latest came via Twitter earlier this week. The post shared a hyper-realistic rendering of an imaginary child’s bedroom of 1990s vintage, festooned with an impossibly large collection of media from that era.
The tone and vocabulary of the picture’s caption should be familiar to anyone who has ever seen a post from that nearly extinct species of reactionary internet brain: the RETVRN guy. If you never ran across these types in their heyday, all you need to know (other than the fact that they hated the letter U for some reason) is that they would argue for neo-fascist values by earnestly sharing pics of Greek statues and temples, believing that this demonstrated how far Western civilization had fallen since the days of Plato. This Twitter post hinges on a similar premise, only it intends to show us how far we’ve fallen since the days of PS1.
The post was roundly mocked, for fairly obvious reasons. The cartoonishly overserious RETVRN crowd was risible enough when posting pictures of ancient architecture (it always made you long for a locker to stuff these nerds into), but it’s doubly hilarious to read that someone has grimly typed “we have to go back” about a Thomas Kinkade-level painting that incorporates a photorealistic movie poster for The Last Action Hero.
So yes, it’s easy to dismiss this as yet another politically incoherent post in a world full of them, but I believe it warrants further examination. Regardless of how ridiculous the tweet might look to someone whose mindset isn’t already inclined in this direction, it uses nostalgia (“remember Tamagotchis, guys?”) as a gateway drug for a specific and virulent sort of reactionary appeal: the fascist reclamation project. It’s instructive to examine how this genre of nostalgia baiting both resembles and differs from classical fascist propaganda, what this tells us about the appeal of these posts to the younger reactionary of today, and what its ultimate aims are.
Classical fascist propaganda—that used in the initial explosion of fascism as an ideology in the 1920s and 1930s—animated its adherents by invoking a vanished ideal world that had been lost and which must be reclaimed. The lost worlds could be an actual “world” that no longer existed such as a vanished empire, recent or otherwise—for Franco it was the late global Spanish rule that finally withered away at the close of the 19th century, and for Mussolini it was the ancient glory of Rome that Italy claimed to inherit. The lost world could also be an imagined idyllic pre-industrial experience, as in the cherubic lederhosen-sporting families of Nazi iconography. Regardless of the individual substance of these ideals, they stood in as Edens that had been dissipated by the slow eroding of values under ever-changing modern morays and the nefarious influence of sinister “internationalist elites”.
The Twitter post cited above aims at similar evocations. It informs us the world it depicts arouses both “the ache of nostalgia” (because the world once existed but has been taken from us) and a longing to restore that world (“the call home”). All of this perfectly rhymes with Goebbels and company.
These fellow travelers begin to part ways, however, when we recall the lost worlds of classical fascist imagery were exclusively ones of adulthood—or more specifically manhood, the fascist appeal being almost exclusively espoused by and to disgruntled males. The old fascist’s solution to the “problem” of a confusing modern age was reclamation of the pined-for lost worlds via Manly Action. That could translate as wars of conquest, or in being fruitful and multiplying over the territory of a Greater Name-of-Country-Here whose borders expanded due to those wars. In any case, the reclamation would depend on a traditionally masculine sense of patriotic “duty” and “sacrifice.”
In the Twitter post, we are treated to the exact opposite of the above: a childlike vision of perfection. The impossible array of video game systems, movie posters, electronics, and just plain stuff in the painting evokes no actual child’s room from 30-odd years ago (no non-millionaire child, anyway), but such a child’s Christmas Dream Book fantasy of the ideal room; a proto Man Cave, if you will. Unlike the fascist propaganda of old, there is no nationalistic evocation of “the land,” or any outside world at all. The painting shows us no windows, and suggests if there is a window in this playroom its curtains are shut tight. The only light bathing the kids comes from their television.
A plate of spaghetti is placed in the foreground. We assume this dish was cooked and delivered by an unseen mother thoughtful enough to provide the meal but permissive enough to refrain from helicoptering around her children to make sure the food gets eaten—or, god forbid, insisting the kids stop their fun and eat at the dinner table. As in old fascist propaganda, women of this world serve the state primarily as homemakers. The key difference is that there is no “wifely” role depicted here, only that of mother. Her job is to cater to the whims of literal children: feed them, clothe them, clean their room to make sure they aren’t crushed in a Collyer Brothers-style avalanche of all their possessions, but never once make any demands of their time or attention.
At this point it may seem to strain the definition of fascist to label the Twitter post as such, as we don’t see these sorts of consumerist appeals in fascist propaganda from other cultures, past or present. It represents not a call for blood-and-soil nationalism, but infantile hedonism. However, for many Americans, infantile hedonism is an expression of nationalism, in a way that has been impossible for other cultures overrun by fascist movements. The people of post-World War I Europe, to whom the first fascist appeals were made, found American-style consumerism baffling if not suspicious; when the dictatorships of Hitler and Mussolini spoke of the “degenerate” modern culture of their time, American-brand consumerism was often included in that definition. Even most of the current neo-fascist regimes (eg, Putin’s Russia, Orban’s Hungary) were spirited from planned economy privation to the ravages of mass poverty under free-for-all post-Soviet kleptocracies, with no stops in between. If they envy or aspire to consumerism, it’s not something they’ve experienced on any appreciable scale, and certainly not something that could evoke wistful childhood memories.
Contrast this with the USA, which has always been animated by the idea of Plenty. This has meant different things during different eras—plenty of land for early settlers, plenty of jobs following the Industrial Revolution—but our current American notion of Plenty dates back to the Eisenhower era (another epoch to which cryptofascists long to RETVRN). In post-war America, Plenty comprised gigantic cars, new highways to drive them on, new suburbs to drive them to and from, and new supermarkets and shopping centers to buy all the stuff in, far away from the crumbling, sooty cities. The veterans of World War II (the white ones, anyway) were encouraged to avail themselves of this plenty, because consumption powered the economy, but also because they had fought for Democracy and were told they had thus earned these comforts.
Subsequent generations inherited the stuff and the plenty and the expectation that life should be like this, believing they too had “earned” this—not because they had done anything to earn it, but by simple virtue of being Americans. Even as Plenty took hits with the gas crisis and stagflation and the slow dismantling of New Deal/Great Society social safety nets, it was assumed that life in America, if nothing else, afforded Americans unlimited and unrepentant access to scads of stuff.
Flash forward to the 21st century, when life has grown increasingly precarious for more and more Americans, and Plenty grows ever more unattainable for many people who have been raised to expect it. And yet, it is within the living memory of most Americans that this was attainable. And here is where the idea of nationalism (the American’s ingrained belief in his/her right to unlimited stuff) becomes wedded to the reclamation of a nostalgic notion of the past (so gimme my Pokemon cards).
There is a wrinkle to this interpretation: Very few of the objects depicted in the painting are unattainable. Nearly all of the posters it shows us are for movies that can be streamed or purchased as physical media. Current generation consoles and a plethora of internet resources offer access to more old video games than you could possibly play in a lifetime. (Also, last I checked, spaghetti and meatballs remain both plentiful and cheap.) Not to mention that the culture of the moment is completely dedicated to rehashing the media of the era shown. We’re absolutely drowning in reboots and sequels and prequels of everything from the 80s and 90s. If reactionaries fear “the great replacement” above all, the millennials among them need not fear it from a cultural standpoint—nothing from their youth has yet been replaced.
In short, a dedicated person could quite easily recreate the world shown in this room with a relatively minimal outlay of time and cash. So how can this Twitter post be said to evoke a longing for a “lost world” when the world is not yet lost? Will people be incensed to fight to reclaim a world that, in many ways, remains intact?
The above questions are worth asking, but they assume an adherence to logic and reason that fascism has never possessed. (Consult here Sartre’s assessment of the folly of arguing with fascists.) Among many other things, fascism requires a striving for a goal that cannot actually be achieved. This allows its adherents to shift the goalposts as needed, and to blame the failure to regain their lost world on whichever people or groups they believe need to be moved out of the way. That’s what makes the nostalgic appeal of the post so powerful, from a motivational standpoint: nothing is more impossible to regain than something you already have.
It’s also worth considering that the OP’s true intent is not to make anyone “fight” for anything. The ideal world of the painting is one free of adult cares and responsibilities. Each childish desire is satisfied by another purchase, or a mother who flits in to provide nourishment and disappears as quickly as possible so as to not disturb the fun. No demands are entertained and none made.
What the OP actually wants is for you, reactionary millennial who longs for the simplicity of childhood, is to be satisfied with wallowing in the maintenance of this nostalgia while those who represent modern “confusion” are swept from the public landscape. Draw the curtains. Enjoy The Sandlot and your meatballs. Let the unseen adults proceed with the great cleansing that will make it all possible.
Who will be cleansed? A quick look at the OP’s Twitter feed reveals that, when not sharing appeals like this, it is rife with Libs of Tik Tok-style screaming about trans people and other perceived “enemies of the family.” This makes it clear who they believe is in the way of reclaiming this world, and who will be first on the chopping block when they begin their work toward restoration of the Nintendo Imperium.