Thread by @JYSexton

It’s not a coincidence that our culture is just reboots and reimaginings, nostalgia acts and retreads, that all these entertainments are just recycling as fascism and the Gilded Age replay and we’ve lost the ability to imagine a different future.

There are plenty of malevolent people with visions of a future and designs for technocratic dystopias, neo-fascist states, illiberal sham democracies hiding corporate control, theocracies.

They can’t chart the course. We have to come up with something new and better.

There’s a sinister quality to nostalgia, and in an America that is struggling the act of harvesting it can both be comforting but also damaging. It can inspire fondness for “easier” times where oppression was hidden or focused, and it can be weaponized.

MAGA is, of course, weaponized nostalgia, a shoddy facsimile of Reaganism that sells the “Good Old Days,” which means when bipoc, women, and lgbtq Americans were intentionally and relentlessly marginalized, creating a fake, damaging “consensus.”

The worse things get the more this nostalgia will grow and foment, stagnating culture and leading to a violent attempt to “resurrect” the past. This is how fascism works. A rewinding of the clock, a rejection of progress to resuscitate the past.

There’s an alternative. We can shrug off these old ways, kick the nostalgia habit, and chart a new course. Life would be better and we’d avoid the looming catastrophes of climate change and malignant fascism. We can and should and need to do it.