Unlike longing for a fairer economy of the kind we used to have, which would require a collective decision to bring back, the itch of cultural and social nostalgia is easy for individuals to scratch and keep scratching. So for many Americans, who spent several decades losing their taste for the culturally new and/or getting screwed by a new political economy based on new technology, fantasies about restoring the past have turned pathological. Thus the angriest organized resistance to the new, the nostalgias driving the upsurge of racism and sexism and nativism—which gave us a president who
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