How the Squad’s Culture War Became Nostalgia Politics: A Theory
In a piece called “The Left’s Culture War Rebranding,” the author Shant Mesrobian describes a concerning and unjustly under-theorized pivot in American left politics. He observes how the left has seen a remarkably swift junking of what might be called Bernie Sanders Thought — a kind of no-nonsense and antiestablishment populism — and simultaneously, the rapid adoption of an almost wholly different “Squad-ism,” espoused first and foremost by the group of junior lawmaker/celebrities bearing that name.
I accept Shant’s analysis but want to add something more to this picture. While we might be tempted to think of Squad-style politics as something new and innovative, because it is trending, I think it is long past time to question how finally new the Squad’s ascendant politics actually is.
The basic tenet of Squad-ism is “Democratic Party but more so.” Really, it is not much different from a grandiose exaggeration of the Democrats’ mainstream, publicized political positions. This point for me was underlined when Squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attended New York City’s extravagant Met Gala, wearing a dress emblazoned with “Tax the Rich.”
It wasn’t that taxing the rich was a subversive position to hold: some 70 percent of American voters support increased taxation of the country’s elite. Rather, what made the action uniquely Squad-ist is that the typical Democrat usually refrains from such an insistence on discourse itself. AOC informed us that her fashion sense was an upgraded form of political message, a new way to intrude the consciousness in the manner of an advert. What the Squad and other left Democrats support most of all is more talk but on the standard liberal issues: race and identity, climate, censorship, misinformation, Trumpian and Republican evil, and yes, taxing the rich.
Mesrobian argues convincingly that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests flaring up in the summer and fall of 2020 became a political site where “differences between the party’s establishment and activist wings suddenly seemed to disappear.” But in hindsight, his point actually seems to undersell the political convergence between the two Democratic factions. It is hard, at present, to see much daylight between a simple recommendation to tax the rich and Joe Biden’s incessant refrain that “corporations and the richest Americans” need to start “paying their fair share.” Months before the Met Gala, Biden sounded this line over and over to promote his proposals for domestic spending programs.
With all of that said, the strangest aspect of the Squad’s turn toward the Democratic mainstream has to be its utter lack of impact on the group’s progressive image. “Tax the rich” is less a progressive thing for Biden to say than it is a tactical retreat by the left flank away from the universal programs it once promoted — Medicare for All, for instance, would require a much bigger tax overhaul than an extra few percent from the one percent. But the Squad’s shift in emphasis, along with its embrace of the overwrought identity politics that Bernie Sanders once scorned, has elicited hardly a shrug from the progressive base. AOC and the Squad remain wildly popular. In fact, they are now de facto spokespeople for American leftism in general. Why has left enthusiasm for the Squad continued to grow as the group’s politics — only minimally consequential to begin with — has dwindled down to just the tiniest of alternatives to establishment orthodoxy?
Too little attention has been paid, I think, to the power of aesthetics and mythic narrative in attracting political allegiance for the left as well as the right. There’s a certain framing at work in a lot of Squad discourse that actually taps into both these elements at once; it generates myths that seem “anti-mythical,” and this — unsurprisingly — holds particular appeal for secular and science-loving progressives. What might be more surprising is that this framing relies heavily, even uniquely, on nostalgia. In fact, I’ve tended to call it the nostalgia mode. And Mesrobian’s research on the Squad can help explain exactly what I mean.
One passage in particular shows how the Squad reacted to Democrats’ disappointing down-ballot performance in the 2020 elections:
According to [the Squad], the lesson of 2020 is that the Democratic Party failed to address the forgotten and neglected issue of . . . racism?
In an interview published by Politico just after the election, Ocasio-Cortez declared that confronting racism was “an existential crisis for the Democratic Party” and lamented that “Democrats don’t want to talk about race.” She said in that same interview, “Anti-racism plays zero percent of a role in Democratic electoral strategy—zero, explicitly, implicitly. I’m not telling people to virtue signal, but there’s just like no plan for it.” (American Affairs)
There is a sense in which this assessment feels as close to being objectively wrong about the Democrats in 2020 as it is possible to be. But counterintuitively, it is this precise sense of detachment that makes AOC’s words feel fresh, honest, and accurate to many left-liberals. This is the power of the nostalgia mode — an aesthetic mode in which we act and speak without reference to the present, as though stuck within a timeless and free-floating past.
Mesrobian recalls acutely that the 2020 Democratic campaigns took place in the wake of earthshaking BLM protesting. And truthfully, everyone should recall that the Democratic Party convention and platform, Joe Biden’s Soul of America campaign, VP candidate Amy Klobuchar stepping down, and eventual VP Kamala Harris stepping up all fell into place shortly before AOC made her remarks to Politico.
Democrats supposedly reluctant to talk about race had just enshrined the “Black Lives Matter” slogan, condemnation of “structural and systemic racism,” and even specific policy demands culled from BLM writings within their official party platform. Amy Klobuchar withdrew her name from VP consideration under pressure from BLM and made the dispositive recommendation that the eventual vice president be a “woman of color.” AOC cannot pretend to be ignorant of these events; it is simply that she was speaking in an aesthetic register without any connection to them.
In fact, AOC herself spoke at the Democratic convention, held by people whom she has alleged don’t want to talk about race, that The Washington Post described as follows:
The Democratic Party fully embraced the imagery and themes of the Black Lives Matter movement on its convention’s first night Monday, highlighting family members of Black men who have been killed by police and showing footage of marches through American cities.
…
Overall, the night’s program reflected a remarkable development in American politics, as a major party sought to associate itself fully with an emerging protest movement.
Washington Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, speaking from a downtown balcony overlooking a blocks-long “Black Lives Matter” message painted on a city street in front of the White House, recalled the dramatic days in early June when President Trump allowed forceful tactics to be used against peaceful protesters outside the White House.
“If he did this to D.C., he would do it to your city or your town,” Bowser said. “And that’s when I said, ‘Enough’. I said, ‘Enough for every Black and Brown American who has experienced injustice …’ ” (The Washington Post)
Hopefully, it’s become clear by now that trying to disprove AOC’s claims about race-shy Democrats would be to miss the point entirely. The lawmaker argued from a position which, consciously, was not enmeshed at all in the history of the Democratic campaigns. Her remarks came instead from some ahistorical and timeless before, the temporality proper to the nostalgia mode. Disputing her claims through factual means — be they historical or statistical — would require her claims, on the contrary, to stay historically embedded.
On the other hand, this act of historical disembedding, or excision, turns AOC’s discourse into something else entirely — into myth — a word I mean much less in the banal sense of something like “fake news,” and much more in a politicizing sense that I’ve stolen from John Ganz (who borrows from Georges Sorel).
“‘Myths,” Ganz writes,
are not descriptions of things but expressions of a determination to act.’ Myths cannot be refuted through factual disputation, they are not subject to scientific testing, etc.: they mobilize the passions and imagination … the function of myths is to inspire action, not to describe the world.
A statement like “It’s 2021, and Democrats (or the media, etc.) still don’t want to talk about race” amounts to precisely such a myth. It inspires action and allegiance, defines what counts as elite pressure and encourages it. But the statement exempts itself from dispute precisely because it is not descriptive.
And so it is myth — but it has to be one of the most fascinating kinds of myth there is. Very few kinds of myth feel convincing and inspiring to Democrats, the same voting bloc that clings like a baby in its Björn to notions of truth, science, and realism. (A popular sign reads, “In this house we believe: … science is real.”)
In fact, even Ganz himself did not cite myths positively in his work. He ascribed mythmaking instead to a part of the left with which he firmly disidentifies.
To be fair to him, though, the myths he describes as “Sorelian” tend to reference some sort of future event or cataclysm, like a “general strike.” It’s understandable that he might have missed mythic elements elsewhere. But the obvious counterpart to what AOC referenced in Politico — institutional neglect of racism that, still, runs so deep as to poison even the Democratic Party — is in fact some future event the neglect staves off: some fateful day whereon the Party and country will finally and truly “reckon” with racism itself (even with the Biblical overtones).
Is waiting for this not what keeps many progressives feeling like antiestablishment outsiders?
In any case, AOC demonstrates this principle in the video above. During a Juneteenth interview on Hot 97 radio, one host asks the lawmaker if she believes the U.S. is capable of reaching the point where “Nazi symbolism” and “Confederate flags” could be “outlawed in law.” AOC, who seemed to endorse this aspiration, replied with the following:
What it’s really going to take for us … to get to that point politically is for our country and our culture to actually educate ourselves on the atrocities of slavery, the way Germany has with the Holocaust.
Exactly what will define this Day of Actual Education, much like the Day of Reckoning (on Race), remains unclear. After all, even liberal institutions do not take seriously the notion that slavery is ignored in U.S. curricula. Even Germany still has its AfD. And perhaps it is ironic, but our own “uneducated” country had just made Juneteenth a federal holiday two days prior to AOC’s interview.
History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. — introductory epigraph for an SPLC education report
Slavery isn’t in the past. — Part One of the same report
Myths I’ve described rely on the nostalgia mode to inject an all-important dose of “realism,” the necessary prerequisite for acceptance among leftists and liberals. Importantly, this process requires a cultural mileu in which progressives are habituated by routine into seeing the nostalgia mode, with its ontology of timeless “pastness,” not as an aesthetic register but as simply the way things are. Mark Fisher explains, “an ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact.”
Evidence of such habituation is all around us. In an article titled “Teaching America’s Truth,” Maureen Costello of the Southern Poverty Law Center tells The Washington Post, “Teaching about slavery is a loaded subject, and it’s loaded because everyone knows that it’s not really about the past.”
Precisely this matter-of-fact quality about what “everyone knows” marks truly performant ideology.
Vast areas of left-liberal discourse now inhabit the nostalgia mode, this same unconscious or even blatant assumption that things now remain essentially unchanged from some past period. Recently, The San Francisco Chronicle published an editorial with the headline “California’s recall system feels like Jim Crow-era voter suppression. It can be fixed.”
We know that the California system had just been mobilized by a major party to run a black-identifying gubernatorial candidate. But rather than being a salient fact, this is actually just the sort of recent event that gets screened out in the nostalgia mode.
The op-ed’s author makes no mention of Larry Elder using the recall system. He admits, moreover, that “as a Black man who grew up in the South” he had actually never experienced “Jim Crow-era voter suppression.” He was nonetheless certain, and shocked, that he had found “another form of it waiting for [him] in California.”
A cover story in The Atlantic, a preeminent liberal magazine, took the nostalgia mode further still.
Coming out in October 2020, the autumn of The Year of Black Lives Matter, this story featured a proposal that the BLM movement was ushering in a “New Reconstruction.”
Author Adam Serwer didn’t make this claim in ignorance of the vast historical distance between now and the late 1860s. He embraced and foregrounded that fact to make the story’s titular argument. He observed that as the BLM demonstrations unfolded, “Commentators reached for historical analogies, circling in on 1968 and the twilight of the civil-rights era, when riots and rebellion engulfed one American city after another.”
The problem for Serwer was that this anachronic move needed replacement with another:
The conditions in America today do not much resemble those of 1968. In fact, the best analogue to the current moment is the first and most consequential such awakening—in 1868. … In the 1860s, the rise of a racist demagogue to the presidency, the valor of Black soldiers and workers, and the stories of outrages against the emancipated in the South stunned white northerners into writing the equality of man into the Constitution.
Following this thesis came a lengthy and graphic historical excursus, full of blood and torture, a sort of conjuration of the past as horror movie. According to Serwer and the staff at one of the most famous news outlets in the country, this imagery of the past offers the best way for us to decode and understand the present. Donald Trump was the Johnsonian racist demagogue who needed course correction with a New Reconstruction. For The Atlantic, rendering the present in narrative required a sort of confabulation of that present, a seamless suturing in of lurid images that had long since passed.
Confabulation of the present, one version of the nostalgia mode, is now the main aesthetic register of much liberal thought. Ta-Nehisi Coates (also of The Atlantic, incidentally) is a master of this work. Rendering the past in sensuous detail, Coates made his oft-cited “Case for Reparations” primarily with historical anecdote. “Clyde Ross was born in 1953 …” his essay begins.
But the vividness and seeming acuity with which the past is articulated provide no guarantee of accuracy, which would also require a recognition of the conceptual distance (or difference) between past and present. This is precisely what goes missing in the nostalgia mode.
With an iron consistency, works such as “The 1619 Project” have been accused, successfully, of misrepresenting the past to launch the argument that the present is in most meaningful ways unchanged from it. Ta-Nehisi Coates ostentatiously proposed that Donald Trump was “The First White President,” arguing that Trump had somehow benefited more obviously from being white than presidents who literally owned and profited from black slaves. Confabulation of the present earns its name because it often paints with a broad and creative brush over both present and past. Both the former and the latter tend to be retold as straightforward, even lurid pulp fiction. (Think of how liberal critics of Trump reached just as comfortably for Voldemort comparisons as they did for Adolf Hitler and Andrew Johnson ones.)
The trickiest part is this: nostalgia works come from the largest and best funded media and arts institutions in the world, they garner countless awards, and they prove immensely profitable for their authors and creators. This massive conferral of authority has hammered in the nostalgia mode as something like a distinct ontology for contemporary progressives. The use of past spectacle to describe the present has grown omnipresent, entirely unworthy of comment in left-liberal circles. Overtly appealing to and decontextualizing the past is now something like the currency of intellectual authority itself.
For many leftists and liberals, this milieu has made it simply obvious (to quote Fisher again) that things haven’t really changed since whatever past temporality happens to sound fitting at the moment of argument. It’s become simply obvious (to paraphrase Maureen Costello) that the chattel-slave period of U.S. history is somehow simply the present, or at least barely distinct from it. Afro-Pessimism starts to make a lot more sense here . . .
And so do statements from the Squad. AOC’s feeling that “Democrats don’t want to talk about race” has all the earmarks of confabulation of the present, of the nostalgia mode: some past understanding of Democrats or The Establishment™ jammed in to describe the party’s present shortcomings. As we’ve noted, this quality has the paradoxical effect of prompting Squad “stans” to accept the remarks as fresh, authoritative, and even brutally honest.
The paradox makes sense, actually. According to Healthline, confabulation is often described as “honestly lying” because the confabulator “lacks any doubt about the things they are saying, even if those around them know the story is untrue.” What we have here is a kind of confabulation that has become so potent — and ubiquitous — as to rob memory of any feeling of reality whatsoever.
If clicking links is a bother, I’ll point out here that confabulation is a symptom of memory disorder — but the issue here is confabulation of the present. It is the present, our recent memories, which are being lost. Our recent social memories are those that seem the dimmest, the least relevant, the least realistic, as though they were captured with a joke Polaroid that develops in reverse. (The movie Memento is an excellent allegory full of such metaphors.)
The cultural critic and theorist Fredric Jameson linked the aesthetic nostalgia mode to a vanishing of means “of fashioning representations of our current experience.” He also called the cultural incubator of this aesthetic, the postmodern, “an attempt to think historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.”
To me, Squad discourse and much other trendy, woke, and left-liberal discourse feel deeply symptomatic of these very predicaments. In the historical context of now, the idea that Democrats shun or fear talk of race seems historically discordant, strange and retro — like something meant for the halcyon, “colorblind” days of the “aughts” or even earlier. But there are now aesthetic and even epistemic imperatives from the progressive base that forbid talking or thinking through our present historical context. This itself is a cultural context, and a media context in which it metastasizes; a vacuum of nostalgia, a zone of eternal pastness, and a habitual glossing over of much of history, of the recent events of which BLM forms a part.
Myth flourishes here, but recent stories seem to vanish; allegorical, perhaps, of enormous protest movements that convince hardly anyone of their impact.
To support this work, please share or subscribe to The AfterParty using the buttons below.