WCP: Working-Class Nostalgia

Posted in Visiting Scholars  |  Tagged John Russo, Nostalgia, Sherry Linkon, Tim Strangleman, WCP, Working-Class Perspectives, Working-Class Voters

Many commentators in the US and the UK have attributed support for Donald Trump and Brexit to yearning for a return to an idealized past. In this week’s Working Class Perspective, Tim Strangleman defends nostalgia, arguing that it can be both a rational and progressive force in society.

“Here then is the point about nostalgia. It seems to me that we need to listen carefully when people talk about their pasts. Dismissing a desire for positive aspects of a remembered past as romantic, conservative, and anti-progressive is wrong-headed, and it also misses a real opportunity. Surely, we want working-class people to remember what collective action and union shops achieved.  We want people to be ambitious for themselves and their kids.

But above all we need to harness the more radical and progressive aspects of a nostalgia that leads people to ask why. Why is it that industrial working-class jobs paid more in the past than they do now? Why were terms and conditions better in the thirty years of the long boom after World War Two? And why did working-class people in that period enjoy rising standards of living year after year, while today similar groups know only precarity? Once we ask these questions, we can start to argue for a more positive, open, and progressive future. We cannot just leave the past to more reactionary voices who want to capture the negative aspects of nostalgia for their own ends.”

Read the post in its entirety  and check out other Working-Class Perspectives posts on our website.