A Reply to Matt McManus: The Last Man

“There appear then to be two kinds of people: those who presume history has ended and those who do not presume history has ended.”

In a recent Merion West article entitled “It’s Nostalgia that’s Driving Modern Politics” author Matt McManus claims the “post-modern conservative” to be “the political nostalgiac par excellence.” No doubt our postmodern reality to some degree informs and animates most political movements, even those which claim to reject postmodern ideas and arguments. Many conservatives, for example, frequently champion the U.S. Constitution and the wisdom of the “Founding Fathers,” yet they often fail to account for the radical peculiarity of our times and the Constitution’s seeming inadequacy in many areas. Failing to address certain current realities does indeed leave such conservatives open to the charge of nostalgia.

More broadly, nostalgia signifies an incapacity to see and accept what Friedrich Nietzsche called “reality as it is.” In this regard any nostalgic political movement is merely one species of the much broader genus of political movements, which are animated by various levels of wishful or delusional thinking. These kinds of political movements are particularly characteristic of the modern world and are often motivated by some abstract ideal. And as Hannah Arendt and others document, an incapacity to see reality and a fixation on some abstract ideal are what characterize all totalitarian thinking.

I also think it is relevant to note that totalitarian movements themselves are almost always informed by a kind of nostalgia. Nazism is clearly an atavistic fantasy, and I wouldn’t be the first to observe that Marxist Communism is essentially a secular apocalyptic Christian myth. Moreover, I would characterize contemporary progressive visions of an egalitarian non-hierarchal society as nothing less than Christian Nihilism. Progressive visions of a truly just society resemble St. Augustine’s “City of God,” both visions are ideal egalitarian worlds free of suffering and conflict: one recognizing God, one not.