Nationalism and Nostalgia: Civic Identities in the Age of Trump

• In Event: Nationalism, Liberation, and Revolution

Abstract

Make American Great Again” is, by definition, a call of nostalgic longing for a previously great past. The events, words, and symbols not only of the Trump Movement, but also of the January 6th Insurrection elucidate this constant nostalgia that has long dominated American culture. The images, costumes, words, and symbols of January 6 all wove together a nostalgia with a radical, violent, disjunctive political event. This paper examines how the constancy of nostalgia has often complicated political rhetoric and political imagination in the United States—and how the particular political and rhetorical path that led to 1/6 moved along an avenue of both nationalism and nostalgic yearning, combined with a narrative about what the United States is and how it is supposed to be, and who is an American. The “again” –in making America great again, is the complicated understanding of a nation that has remade itself on a number of occasions—both in a romantic attachment to a mystical past and the constantly promising horizon. Sabine Sielke explains that “couched between the discursive reaffirmation and attempted ‘recreation’ of a historical past and a longing for a future that fulfills the promise of American ideals, America’s self-conception can be conceived of as an effect of nostalgia that is future-oriented.”
This narrative construction is, in many ways, the narrative history of the country and is also the narrative we see regularly in cultural artifacts from literature to television shows to comic books and movies. It is an historical approach to an affective sense, a conjuring of history and longing that is as dependent on actual facts as it is dependent on the visual artifacts that cement the feelings and senses of those heroic past periods. The simmering debates about pulling down sculptures of Confederate memorials fits into this swirling tension—between actual facts and visual artifacts that prompt differing affective responses.
Trump, in defining his campaigns and his approach to the presidency with these clarion calls of making America great again and taking the country back, fit these narratives squarely into a comfortable and, actually, quite acceptable space for many Americans. The events leading up to January 6th, the insurrection on that day, and the dialogue that has followed as we digest the differing interpretations of 1/6 are tied directly to this mythical notion of the United States, which connects to nostalgic yearnings, nationalism, and future orientation. To make America great again, to take America back, of course, means to determine what made it great initially.
Thus, when we think about the history and the myths that define the United States, there are braided ideas of the creation myths of foundings and refoundings of the United States, punctuated, in most cases, by acts of violence. The 1776 revolution, the civil war, the demonstrations and riots of the 1960s, and by this act of violence on January 6, 2021, which predicated itself on purifying the nation once again, taking it back, with strength, as President Trump said on the Ellipse that morning, from those who were seen as imposters, corrupt, and weak, noting to the crowd that “you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.”
Nostalgia is multifaceted in its political uses, coming through overt electoral politics and referenda, as well as cultural narratives and popular portrayals. The current climate in the United States reflects another wave of this kind of connection and, as in previous periods, the use of anger and fear has been directly connected to a nostalgic reinterpretation of a non-existent past. Arguments for a better future rest on somehow grasping a national past that may smooth out the shocks of globalization, technological innovation, a worldwide pandemic, and shifting racial, ethnic, and religious demographics.
This connection between the individual biography and the biography of the nation, the personal and the collective memory bear directly on these competing narratives. This is not only about the embedded nostalgia that swirls around us, but also in the narrative that has grown up around the events themselves and in our collective and divergent understandings of those events.

Author

• Lilly J. Goren, Carroll University