The irony, of course, is that the past was often infused with progressive and Utopian ideals, indeed more so than today. The historian Alistair Bonnett has written of ‘Radical Nostalgia’ https://www.historytoday.com/archive/radical-nostalgia, which is arguably the category that nostalgia for the New Deal would fall into. Or in the British case, for the ‘Spirit of ‘45’, meaning the Labour Government elected in that year rather than the War: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c86Gwsb5LY .

The kind of weaponised nostalgia that Tim Wise is writing about has to skirt around such an inconvenient truth. It does so by adopting a specifically bucolic and anti-urban quality which Tim does briefly reference at one point. The kind of nostalgia that is the mother-lode of everthing reactionary is thus infused with a rural myth, which in an American context would involve violent myths of cowboys and frontier individualism (ignoring the fact that cowboys were often polite, their sheriffs into gun control, the community cooperative in raising barns and the townsfolk intent on respectability).

In the 1960s the political scientist Barrington Moore Jr dubbed the weaponised combination of nostalgia and rural myth ‘Catonism’ after the Roman curmudgeon Cato the Elder, who was fond of saying such things as that farmers’ sons made the best soldiers.

In the Old World the reactionary rural myth was infused with themes of blood-and-soil indigenousness and rural folk-community of the kind that led ultimately to Nazism, which pitted itself very much against the modern city and its cosmopolitan multiculturalism, the way that the city belonged to no nation really so much as to a network of other cities, and was full of people the Nazis deemed undesirable as well.

Of course, in the New World the majority consisted of settlers who weren’t indigenous, and so it took the form of (alleged) frontier individualism for the most part, in ways that lead ultimately to a feral, libertarian, business dictatorship.

Nazism and libertarianism are superficially opposite, but in reality they are merely puppies with different arrangements of spots born to the same mother: namely, Catonism. (The same bitch, to borrow a line from Bertold Brecht; when Hitler died Brecht said that the wolf had expired but the bitch that bore him was already on heat again.) For instance, the ‘liberty of the strong’ is an ideal common to both, if you can call it an ideal.

I think the Catonism idea adds a little more nuance to the argument concerning weaponised nostalgia, which is otherwise bang on and far too seldom appreciated even by Moore’s colleagues in the political science mainstream.