Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson.

And I'm David Pena Guzman.

Welcome to Overthink.

The podcast, we're two friends who are also professors, put philosophy and dialogue with the everyday.

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. In the wake of the 2020 elections, a lot of Trump supporters, the infamous F-your-fe-your-feeling crowd, appears to be having a lot of feelings.

And one of the main feelings that I'm seeing on social media and also on the news is nostalgia.

Nostalgia for something that they feel they've lost, that they want to recuperate,

and that they feel they will no longer get to recuperate,

now that Trump has not been elected.

And they're wallowing in this feeling and trying to mobilize it politically.

And I'm also hearing a lot of nostalgia from liberals.

So for instance, I've been seeing these memes, like,

do we have a backup of the U.S. from 2016 that we can restore this desire to pretend like the last four years hasn't happened

and go back to a past where we were focused on brunch, on hanging out, on having fun,

and didn't have to worry about the political seeping into our everyday lives.

And then I'm seeing a leftist contingent that is rejecting nostalgia altogether and saying

there is no way we can afford to forget the past four years. We instead have to take up what

the past four years have been and what they have put on display in American culture, and let go of our nostalgia for the past.

Nostalgia is a complicated emotion.

It's hard to define and it's hard to talk about.

I think it really is a double-edged sword.

There are some wonderful things about nostalgia.

...