The Good Ol' Days

On the Media

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4.6 • 8.7K Ratings

🗓️ 16 December 2022

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This year, right-wing groups at home and abroad were animated by wistful recollections of the past. On this week's On the Media, hear how nostalgia is weaponized in politics. Plus, a deep dive into newspaper archives reveals that we’ve been having the same debates for over a century.

1. Sophia Gaston [@sophgaston], social researcher and the Head of Foreign Policy & UK Resilience at UK think tank Policy Exchange, on the use of nostalgia as a cultural and political force in Europe. Listen.

2. Adam Serwer [@AdamSerwer], staff writer at The Atlantic, and the author of “The Cruelty Is the Point," on weaponized nostalgia in American discourse. Listen.

3. OTM correspondent Micah Loewinger [@MicahLoewinger] speaks with political scientist Paul Fairie [@paulisci] about at some of the big media narratives that felt representative of 2022 and how little has changed in our political discourse. Listen.

Music:

Berceuse in D Flat Major by Ivan Moravec

Transcript

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0:00.0	You would be hard pressed to find an election in Europe over the past decade that has not
0:06.8	invoked nostalgic narratives.
0:09.5	From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.
0:12.4	I'm for Gladstone.
0:13.7	Nostalgia is an effective political tool, but what happens when that powerful longing
0:19.7	is for a past that never ever existed?
0:22.7	You are manipulating people's sense of the past in order to catastrophize about the future
0:27.2	so that they will justify anything you want to do in the name of protecting them from
0:32.1	that.
0:33.1	Plus, how seemingly modern moral panics have been retooled and repeated in our media every
0:39.4	decade for over a century.
0:41.7	A nightclub operator has made the most significant forecast for the 1970s.
0:45.9	Nobody laughs anymore, he said seriously.
0:48.7	Humor is dead.
0:49.7	The hazards are longing for yesterday years.
0:52.2	It's all coming up after this.
1:00.6	From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.
1:04.7	I'm Micah Lowentger.
1:06.3	That's O.T.M.'s Intrepid Reporter.
1:08.5	I'm for Gladstone.
1:10.7	This hour we're looking at nostalgia, cultural and political as a driving force, because
1:16.6	nostalgia derives from memories of the past.
	...

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