Throughout the advanced capitalist world and beyond, a xenophobic, nostalgic nationalism is taking shape. A flock of old and new leaders are rising up, declaring that our best days are behind us and that they are the most qualified to build a better yesterday. Forget about the future, they say, the past is now the place to be — but not everyone is invited. [...]
Around the world — from Britain to Turkey to the Philippines — we see variants of the same theme: a nostalgic fervor for a proud past, coupled with a hostility toward “outsiders.” Imaginations of this past differ depending on the nation but, ultimately, they amount to the same thing: a phantom homeland with a strong sense of belonging. [...]
Only through the marginalization of others — foreigners, immigrants, LGBTQ people, all those who “don’t belong” — can the reactionary nostalgists turn their remembered past into a site of empowerment. To turn back the clock, others must be turned out. With little else to latch on to, excluding others makes their past feel all the more precious, a thing that can truly be claimed as their own.
This is the dark irony beneath the nativist’s angry refrain to the immigrant “Go back to where you came from”: it is the xenophobe who, more than anyone, wants to go back to where they came from — to an imagined, pure point of origin, a moment in history where their country was a homogenous mass. The racist, like all great nostalgists, is homesick for a home they never had.
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