Radical nostalgia

By David Simmons

The French language has a lot of very cool expressions. Most of them have direct equivalents in English, but we use them anyway because they sound cooler. The first Fawlty Towers episode, “A Touch of Class”, points to this phenomenon in one scene where Basil says about the charlatan Lord Melbury after he accepts a complimentary dry sherry, “Such ... such ... I don’t know what,” and the Major says helpfully, “Je ne sais quoi!”

But some we use because there is no way to express their meaning so accurately, or so succinctly, in English. Examples are déjà vu, passé and cliché.

I stumbled across another of these recently: dépaysement, defined as “the feeling that comes from not being in one’s home country – of being a foreigner, or an immigrant, of being somewhat displaced from your origin”. It’s a useful description of how I feel sometimes, having been away from my homeland for sixteen years. It’s not powerful; I have a good life in Thailand, and no yearning to return to Canada. But once in a while, in a circumstance that would never occur “back home” – strolling in shorts and a T-shirt among palm trees in January, beinghonoured in a religious ceremony by people who know I’m not a believer but don’t care, being flirted with by a beautiful working girl a third my age in a bar – there is a touch of dépaysement.

It’s a useful word because it allows for the feeling’s lack of intensity, and its brevity. Other forms of nostalgia are more intense. This is often true in the political realm, where we strongly yearn for the “good old days”, whether or not they actually ever existed, at least in the form our minds have evolved them into.

Leftists like to think we are immune from this, that it’s only conservatives who want to turn back the clock. In fact, we don’t even call ourselves leftists any more – we are “progressives”. And some among us, such as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, are “radical progressives”.

What escapes our notice is that the term “radical progressive” is an oxymoron. The word “radical” is derived from the Latin radix, “root”. What Corbyn and Sanders argue for – and they say so, in so many words – is a return to the root values of pro-worker philosophy, which they lament the Labour and Democratic parties respectively have strayed from.

There is historical evidence for their arguments. Not only were the values they yearn for once practised – and legislated – by such leaders as Franklin Roosevelt, but the deliberate attacks on those values, especially (and increasingly after the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of the early 1980s) by corporate power, are well documented. So too is the core deterioration of former pro-worker political parties such as the Democrats in the US, Labour in the UK, and the New Democrats in Canada under such people as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Tom Mulcair in the quest for power and funding.

Similar forces are at work among conservatives. Many of them are just as angry as leftists at what they perceive as theft of what they once had, or thought they had, and in fact no longer want to “conserve” anything. They want to go back home, to a world where women and people with dark skin knew their place, where a good day’s work earned a good day’s pay, where children respected their elders, homosexuals had no rights to exist, and environmentalists weren’t destroying jobs. They mythologize people like Ronald Reagan, forgetting that he recognized the US needed immigrants to sustain and bolster the economy. They forget that Dwight Eisenhower campaigned for re-election on his record of increasing union membership in his first term in office. And they rally instead to the call of frauds like Donald Trump.

Perhaps even more ominous than the spectre of a man like Trump with a potentially planet-destroying nuclear arsenal at his stubby fingertips is the “radicalization” of religious people, but it’s the same force at work. Reactionary Christians and Muslims cherry-pick the Bible and Koran, often to the point of disrespecting the founders of their religions, to justify sometimes violent efforts to go back to a “purer” age of intolerance and extremism.

Yearning for our roots is natural, and can even be a positive force. But sometimes we find that the roots have gone rotten.