The bizarre nostalgia of the 2016 presidential race

The youngest person still in the running to be our next president is Hillary Clinton, age 68. Bernie Sanders is 74, and Donald Trump is a month shy of 70. Whoever wins in November will be the oldest — or awfully close to the oldest — American president ever elected. For some perspective, when President Obama leaves office after eight years, he will be 55; George W. Bush was 62. When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, he was 46. His campaign song was "Don't Stop" by Fleetwood Mac. "Don't stop thinking about tomorrow," the chorus goes. "Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone."

This year's campaign song might as well be Tom Waits' "Yesterday Is Here." Indeed, each of the remaining candidates has some shade of nostalgia coloring her or his campaign, which is unusual, because most presidential campaigns are ostensibly about the future and what each candidate hopes to accomplish to push America forward.

This campaign's rose-colored gazing back toward "the good old days" is significant enough that it merits some bemused consideration.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Let's start with the 1980s tabloid fixture, Trump — whose campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again," is literally nostalgic. When, exactly, America was great and how we can get back there, Trump doesn't really say. But judging from his speeches, he's probably referring to the postwar years, the era all modern American hagiographers turn to for succor and sustenance.

For Trump, that probably means a period when America's economy was manufacturing-based, not service-based. America and Russia were undisputed global superpowers, with the rest of the world too weak and poor to put up much of a military or economic fight. Paternalism was in vogue. Latinos made up only 3.5 percent of the U.S. population, not today's 17.3 percent. Men were men, and hair spray contained ozone-killing aerosol. Trump's critics, of course, are wont to suggest his nostalgia veers more toward the European fascists of the 1920s and '30s.

When Clinton waxes nostalgic, it's usually for the era bookended by Nirvana and the Backstreet Boys — when, not coincidentally, her husband was president. "You know, at the end of the '90s, we had 23 million new jobs," she said in a Democratic debate in March. "Incomes went up for everybody ... Median family income went up 17 percent. For minorities, it went up even more."

Last summer, her campaign also indulged in a different kind of nostalgia, flooding Clinton's social media presence with old photos: Hillary as a young girl, a college student, a young mother, any era before she became a globally recognizable figure in 1992.

Sanders, the 1960s radical, actually talks a lot about the 1970s. His policy agenda largely involves bringing to America the European-style government-sponsored health care and education enacted after World War II, but in his speeches he sounds almost wistful for the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations.

"I want you to think about this one," he told a rally last week in Bloomington, Indiana. "Forty years ago, in this country, before the explosion of technology and cellphones, and space-age technology and all that stuff, before the explosion of the global economy, one person in a family — one person — could work 40 hours a week and earn enough money to take care of the whole family." Later, he recalled that "40 to 50 years ago, you had a high school degree, you were pretty well educated. You can go out and get a good, middle-class job. But the economy and technology have changed, and today people need more education."

In West Virginia a few days earlier, Sanders explained why his plan to provide tuition-free public college isn't radical. "You may not know this, but 50 years ago in the United States of America our major great public colleges and universities were virtually tuition-free," he said. "If we could have virtually free tuition 50 years ago, we damn well can do it today."

There's a "Grandpa, tell me about the good old days" quality to how Sanders talks about the era of fathers bringing home the bacon and no damn cellphones, but he and Trump and Clinton are tapping into a larger nostalgia about the halcyon days of the American middle class. Starting in the 1950s, "the aspirational idea of the middle class spoke to the notion that even if Americans were in various stages of prosperity, they were all understood to be heading in the same general direction," says Charles Homans in The New York Times Magazine.

"What we have been seeing in this country — again, not talked about terribly much in the media — is that for the last 30, 40 years, we have seen the middle class shrinking and shrinking," Sanders said in Bloomington.

But nostalgia is always a selective look backward, and there are a few problems with idealizing life 40 or 50 or 60 years ago. In the 1950s and early '60s, "the confluence of these two groups — a vision of insurance salesmen and machine operators, mowing the lawns of adjoining split-­level ranches and talking about Sunday's game — felt extraordinary even in its own time, seemingly incontrovertible proof that American capitalism worked," Homans writes. But "the new middle-­class utopia did, of course, exclude most nonwhite Americans." Also, women weren't that well off, and homosexuality was a crime in many states.

There is that justifiably famous line, attributed to George Santayana, about how those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. There should probably be a corollary about those who do remember the past being unable to re-create it.

The candidates are all absolutely correct that America has seen brighter days, in one way or another. And any role they played in making their favorite periods of the past rosier, they should brag about it on the campaign trail. But Donald Trump isn't going to untangle the global economy and Bernie Sanders isn't going to banish smartphones and Hillary Clinton isn't going to bring back the 1990s.

This is the world we live in, flawed and beautiful and dangerous and brimming with possibility. The American voters have chosen to hand the reins next year to somebody who will be in the neighborhood of 70 years old when he or she takes the oath of office, and in doing so, they tossed aside a dozen candidates in their 40s and 50s. Your years of life on this planet are a valuable asset, presidential finalists, but please don't stop thinking about tomorrow; yesterday's gone.