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One of the oddities of the Obama administration was that it seemed as if they were working from a list of wrongs they were determined to right. Those wrongs were what the Left counted as their failures over the decades. A part of Obama being viewed as Black Jesus was his ability to heal the past. This was necessary as those old harms were what tied us to the present. It was only by righting those past wrongs that we could break free and enter the glorious future.

The most obvious example was the health care stuff. This proved to be a disaster for the Clinton administration, but that is not how the Left saw it. They viewed it as a betrayal and a defeat that had to be addressed. This is why the eventual policy was nothing like they promised or anything anyone would call reform. That was never the point of the exercise. The point was to have a redo of that old defeat and this time the good guys would win and erase that loss from memory.

This active revisionism turned up in all sorts of places. They had Hillary Clinton pose with Sergey Lavrov holding a red button. This was part of the Russian reset initiative designed to restart relations with Russia. In reality it was about soothing the wounds from the Reagan years when the Left lost the Cold War debate. The same vibe permeated their Iran initiative. Like the Russian reset, the Iran reproachment had no utility in the present. It was all about the past.

This backward-looking politics is plain now. The retreat into the past has jumped from the establishment Left to the establishment Right. This is not surprising, given the conservative habit of following the Left from one fad to the next. Here you have a collection of flunkies from Conservative Inc. doing cosplay. Instead of dressing up as characters from Japanese cartoons, they are pretending to be their favorite characters from the conservative movement.

Someone on Twitter referred to these people as Reagan Van Winkles. They went to sleep in the 1980’s and just awoke in the present, unaware of all that has happened over the last forty years. It is a clever line and there is certainly some truth to it, but these people are aware of the present. What they want is to go back to sleep and wake up in the 1980’s, as if the present is a terrible nightmare. They are live action role playing in order to take a timeout from the present.

Note the flavorless language. Sixty years ago, when the founders of the Buckley cult were getting started, they used language designed to inflame the passions of the great white middle-class, which they sensed was quietly seething at the cultural changes that had been unleashed by the Left. The language in that statement is so devoid of human passion that is could have been written by software. The point is not to excite the reader, but to put him asleep so he can dream of better times.

What makes this stuff weirder is that most of the people doing it are not old people trying to relive their youth. Nostalgia is understandable for old people, especially those nearing the end of their career. These people are experiencing anemoia, a nostalgic sense of longing for a past they have never lived. None of the “signatories” of that goofy list of principles were alive when Buckley started his cult. Many of them were barely aware of the world during the Reagan years.

On the other side of the old political consensus is hauntolgy, a sense that unfinished business from the past is haunting the present. Like Banquo’s ghost, the old failures in the old causes torment the neoliberal. It is not as if they learned from the old failures, but that they must find some way to make it right. The backwardness of left-wing politics is akin to the people in a horror movie putting an ancient cemetery back in its original state so the dead can finally rest.

In fairness, it is not just conventional politics that is backward looking. Most of the race realists want to go back to the past. They imagine a world similar to the 1950’s, except everyone knows the failures of trying to integrate blacks and whites. The harder core imagine they can go back to the interwar years and be their favorite uncle. Young Nick Fuentes is one click away from wearing a George Lincoln Rockwell costume while locking arms with the hip-hop community.

What all of this points to is the sense of dread than hangs over the American empire as it staggers through its end phase. Everything that it is, everything that defines the American identity is in the past. The only conception of the future is one that is somehow a repeat of the past, real, or imaginary. For a culture that has no future, the present represents the terrifying final step into the abyss, so the only option is to turn to the past and find comfort in reliving it.

Perhaps this weird backwardness is an essential step, and it will burn itself out as the present struggles become too much to ignore. On the other hand, maybe this is just the price of victory in the Cold War. The losers had to get on with the business of creating a new future, while the winners wanted to savor the victory. Our backward politics is the result of a victory party gone on for too long. Regardless, what comes next is not the past, but the future, and it will not include any of these people.

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