Our Own Worst Enemy by Tom Nichols

Author:Tom Nichols
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The age of nostalgia has begun. It is an age of false myths, unparalleled political miscalculations, and rising tensions between nations—a time of regression and pessimism.48

Some of this is the product of an aging population, but the idealization of the past is also, they point out, now mobilized by “jingoistic leaders” as “an emotional weapon in the political debate.” The young, meanwhile, howl against the injustices of the past while wishing they could go back and live in it—or, at least, in the parts they think they’d like.

Nostalgia is an insidious challenge for almost any form of government, or at least for those that have not perfected time travel. Authoritarian systems handle such emotions by squashing expressions of dissatisfaction while also pandering to the public with triumphal stories of the past and identification of the betrayers and scapegoats who must be punished for any misery in the present. Democratic regimes have no such alternatives. They can only defend the state of the present, admit its shortcomings, and promise to do better. If the demand from the public, however, is to return to an imagined past in 1970 or 1980 or 1990, any government, no matter how responsive, will find itself on a treadmill that will produce exhaustion and eventual collapse.

A serious people know the difference between righteous anger and resentful rage, between material deprivation and unmet wants, and between reality and nostalgia. But when an entire population slides after years of peace and plenty into narcissism and resentment and entertains itself with comforting lies about the past in order to avoid the responsibilities of the present, the political environment sinks into a corrosive slurry that eats away at the foundations of democracy. Most dangerous of all, in such conditions even a great people will be unable to handle the trials that inevitably befall every nation, including (as we now see) a pandemic. Such challenges require sacrifice, stoicism, and civic commitment; instead, many Americans want a full apology for a twenty-first century that has somehow not measured up to their expectations. This inability to deal with adversity has crippled the ability of many of the democracies, the United States among them, to respond to real problems.

We turn to those issues in the next chapter.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.