The re-election of Donald Trump has stirred a remarkable level of interest in my circle. A friend working in finance was ecstatic about Bitcoin’s surge, while another friend in law school was eagerly anticipating the implications for Congress and the Supreme Court. Trump returning to office is undoubtedly a monumental event, yet it doesn’t feel entirely surprising. It reflects a broader cultural trend—an increasing nostalgia for a perceived better past—that has been simmering for years and is now bubbling to the surface.
It’s like, yep Trump’s economic policy agenda might suck. But people aren’t voting merely for money—perhaps psychological and cultural consequences also counts.
I found the Freakonomic’s new episode Fareed Zakaria on What Just Happened, and What Comes Next quite neatly summarized the cause of this:
“When people feel deeply insecure, they don’t move left economically. They move right culturally.”
Because your instinct is not to say, “Oh my goodness I feel like my world is being upended, I need this government program.” No, their impulse is to say, “I need a return to the world I knew.”
That’s why the politics of nostalgia are so powerful. It’s a return to something comfortable. That feeling trumps economics.
If you think about gender issues, you’re seeing on the one side a lot of women feeling like they need to have their rights protected. But you’re also seeing a lot of men who feel like politics has gotten too feminized, that they are being forgotten and that in a post-industrial world, women do better than men. There is a kind of male backlash. “Just take me back to before all this was happening. Take me back to that world where a man was able to be a man and was the dominant player in the family and in society.”
While I’m not a fan of overused clichés, it’s undeniable that upper-level infrastructure—whether political, cultural, or economic—shapes broader societal dynamics. This especially holds true for those who engage in what Robert Reich famously termed “symbolic analysis.”
ZAKARIA: I think it’s broadly correct. Now, how you solve it is the bigger problem. The post-industrial nature of modern economies, the move from, first of all, a manufacturing sector to a service sector, which is happening in every advanced industrial country, and the further effect of the information revolution, has been to privilege knowledge workers, to privilege people whom Robert Reich once described as “symbolic analysts.” Meaning, if you manipulate symbols, code, images, language for a living — and then think of every profession we get — you know, lawyers, accountants, software programmers —
DUBNER: You’ve just described our entire audience, by the way.
ZAKARIA: Right. You’re going to be doing well in that economy, you’re going to be rewarded, and you have pricing power over your labor. If you manipulate physical things for a living, you do not have pricing power. And that reality has become more and more intense. And it’s been an easy sort, basically people who are college-educated versus people who are non-college-educated, people who live in urban city centers versus people who don’t. And so, these divides stack upon each other so you end up really with two countries. One, urban, educated, secular, multicultural, and the other one rural, less educated, more white, more religious. And that creates a much greater chasm than we have ever had.
Even as a Gen-Z I feels overwhelmed, not to mention people who born around the 80s and 90s. Perhaps, the nostalgia that fuels much of today’s political energy isn’t just about reclaiming economic stability; it’s about recovering a sense of identity and belonging in a rapidly changing world. It reveals about the collective anxieties and aspirations of a confused world.