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 radicalright 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.…”

Do We All Long for the Past? Investigating Nostalgia as a Persuasive Political Rhetorical Strategy

“…At the same time, left-wing leaders, like Jean-Luc Mélenchon (La France Insoumise), also reminisce about the hope that lies in the past. Looking at rhetoric used by US presidential candidates in the campaign, Democrats do not use any less nostalgic rhetoric than Conservatives do (Bonikowski and Stuhler 2022). Moreover, in the EU referendum campaign, the Remain side argued that staying in the EU reflected a continuity of British history (Gaston and Hilhorst 2018).…”

The politics of ethnic nationalism, nostalgia and anti-immigrant framing: the trajectory of the Sweden Democrats 1989-2022

“…Ethnic nationalism, nostalgia for the imagined community that once was, alongside the framing of migration as a threat to the nation, are defining characteristics of the radical right party family in Europe and the United States (Elgenius & Rydgren, 2022;2019;. Its stance on migration is offered as the main explanation for growing electoral support (Akkerman, 2005;Bonikowski & Stuhler, 2022). Radical right parties in Scandinavia are no exception and are also defined by their ethnic nationalism, assimilationist and anti-immigration policies, and by their authoritarian position on sociocultural issues manifested in a rhetorical package emphasizing law and order and traditional family values.…”