Reclaiming the Past to Transcend the Present: Nostalgic Appeals in U.S. Presidential Elections

Abstract

Nostalgic appeals to an idealized past are a commonly associated with radical-right discourse. They bolster candidates’ critiques of the status quo and promises of a better future, all while mobilizing perceptions of collective status threat among supporters. In this paper, we ask whether nostalgia is a radical-right innovation or whether it has precedents in mainstream politics. We make use of recent advances in natural language processing---specifically transformer-based deep learning models---to identify nostalgic claims in U.S. presidential campaign speeches from 1952 to 2020. We then examine what form nostalgia takes, when it has been most salient, what aspects of the nation it has been used to glorify, and how it relates to populist and nationalist appeals. Our findings suggest that nostalgic rhetoric usually takes the form of brief and multivocal statements with a consistent lexical signature. It is frequently used by challenger candidates from both parties to generate a heightened sense of crisis and to morally indict incumbent opponents, particularly during times of widespread cultural contention. In so doing, nostalgia helps substantiate candidates' populist claims and expressions of low national pride. Given that these patterns are found throughout our time series, this points to important continuities between the discourse of mainstream and radical-right actors in U.S. politics. Where their respective messaging diverges, however, is in the use of nostalgia to frame exclusionary nationalist and authoritarian appeals, a practice limited to the radical-right (in our data, Donald Trump). Our findings suggest that radical-right actors did not invent their rhetorical strategies de novo, but rather, have adopted frames already widespread in mainstream politics, adapting and creatively recombining them for their own ends.

Politics as Usual? Measuring Populism, Nationalism, and Authoritarianism in U.S. Presidential Campaigns (1952–2020) with Neural Language Models

“…Conversely, however, these framing strategies are unlikely to be fully encapsulated in single sentences. It often takes a few separate utterances to fully express the opposition between the elites and the people, to evoke particular conceptions of the nation's symbolic boundaries, or to articulate a negative evaluation of the nation, particularly when juxtaposed with an idealized bygone era or imagined future (Bonikowski and Stuhler 2022). Consequently, we settled on paragraphs as the relevant units of analysis for the hand-coding and machine classification of our corpus.…”

Nationalism and the Politics of Nostalgia1

“…Bonikowski and Stuhler (2022) identified nostalgic frames used in U.S. presidential campaign speeches over the period 1952–2020. These frames do not involve rich descriptions of bygone historical periods.…”

“…The working class in Britain undoubtedly suffered economic hardship, regardless of skin color, but the resentful content of this discourse pitted insiders against outsiders and framed the nation as an ethnically homogeneous community betrayed by metropolitan elites (Bhambra 2017a(Bhambra , 2017b. In this way, nostalgia played a key role in connecting central frames of ethnic nationalism, populism, and resentment (Bonikowski and Stuhler 2022).…”

“…Donald Trump's slogan invokes a bygone golden age and a traditional order, with racial and sexist undertones, where women and non-whites should know their place (Mudde 2016). Bonikowski and Stuhler (2022) argue that the slogan itself helped mobilize Trump voters and united disaffected right-wing supporters across the United States. It served as a lasting marker between the Trump camp and the rest of the American public.…”

“…It served as a lasting marker between the Trump camp and the rest of the American public. Moreover, nostalgia is of importance as it often binds together populist, nationalist, and authoritarian frames into a coherent fabric: "The elites are corrupt, according to the narrative, but they were not always so; they have lost their way over time because they lack a moral compass, but also because they have been co-opted by minority-serving special interest groups" (Bonikowski and Stuhler 2022).…”