The conservative right recognized but fundamentally rejected the liberal use of history. Conservatives made a concerted effort to lay claim to the Founding and American political tradition in the latter half of the twentieth century—a claim that continues today. By re-reading and re-emphasizing the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, conservatives made dominant a political reading of the American past as ironclad and timeless.
This version of the American past is reverent—in important ways accurate—but also inescapably nostalgist. When it veers into hagiography, it delimits our political imaginations and makes political theorizing impossible. As Christopher Lasch wrote about the modern age’s sense of nostalgia in his critical history of progress, “Idealization of the past had come to rest not on respect for ancestral wisdom but on the assimilation of the past to images of childlike innocence.” The worst forms of this history are utterly flattening. In this respect, per Lasch, “Nostalgia evokes the past only to bury it alive. It shares with the belief in progress, to which it is only superficially opposed, an eagerness to proclaim the death of the past and to deny history’s hold over the present.”
They at once assert the authority of an idealized past, while downplaying the long-term impacts of historic social relations and their justifying ideas. Criticism, including the honest engagement with the ways slavery and white supremacy and normative patriarchy shaped the—again, binding—founding order too often treated as illegitimate questions on the right. It’s calcifying. It risks treating the United States less as a democracy of the dead than a dictatorship.
The articulators of this nostalgist vision rejected the New Deal out of hand as an illegitimate rupture in America’s great tradition. Over time, versions of this conservative interpretation, particularly but not exclusively out of the Claremont school, extend the critique to Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive era. In sum, there is a prevailing conservative worldview, based on a certain reverent, nostalgic, and flattening history, that has not come to terms with the modern liberal democratic state.
The impulses of MAGA—literally Make America Great Again—are inescapably nostalgist, down to a hazy abdication about when, exactly, America was great. We see in MAGA the dangerous proximity between political nostalgia and populism—if not authoritarianism. MAGA filters the conservative rupture thesis through the predilections of one man. The restoration Trump offers is not “it’s morning in America,” but “I was saved by God to make America great again.”
I would suggest, though, that in the face of this conservative effort to claim the totality of the American political tradition, liberals and progressives have conceded too much. Rightly critical of the real and deep inequalities and hierarchies embedded in the American past and present, liberals too often give the impression—intentional or not— that America is uniquely flawed and irredeemable. In doing so, this approach likewise flattens history, missing the remarkable, the serendipitous, the heroic, the ironic, and the good in the past too. Crucially it cedes to the right the still potent symbols of our past and civil religion. It lets the right paint calls for equality, for rights, for progress as alien when they are, in their own way, authentically American.