Remember local newspapers? Remember when there was a job called "local music critic" or "local movie critic?" Remember when you could follow what was happening at city hall via a 5-paragraph summary rather than having to watch the entire meeting yourself or hearing someone rant about it on Nextdoor?
You’d expect the rate at which newspapers eliminated jobs would taper off to exponential decay at some point, but no. They just keep firing people like they expect to go to 0 humans employed by 2030
The right has been really good at weaponizing nostalgia for their political ends, but nostalgia is not necessarily only a reactionary emotion. The neoliberal evisceration of institutions like higher ed, public schools, and journalism is destroying things that have value, that we SHOULD miss.
IMO, progressives need to get better at tapping into the nostalgic longings of voters in order to make their case. Remember when kids could go to school and not have to worry about being randomly shot? Remember when you didn't have to worry if today's children would inherit an uninhabitable planet?
Remember some cities had public transportation systems that were efficient and inexpensive? Remember when someone could make a good living as a public school teacher? Remember when tuition at excellent public universities was only a couple hundred bucks a semester?
Obviously, the specific conditions that made those things possible (and not possible for all Americans, it is crucial to remember) are not going to return in exactly the same form. But those things were valuable, and can be rebuilt in a better, more inclusive, and more democratic form.
Many people long for walkable cities. Farmers markets are way more popular than they were in the 1990s. The kids these days are embracing "obsolete" technology like bikes and are taking up "old-fashioned" hobbies like canning and knitting. "The kids" are also listening to 90s hip-hop and Sinatra.
Nostalgia is bad when it manifests as a humorless and unironic desire to return to some imagined past of hard working white Christian nuclear families living happily in crime free neighborhoods behind white picket fences.
But it's not inherently bad for someone to look at (for example) the trolley car system that tied much of my town of Salem, Oregon together till the late 1920s. It's not going to come back in the same form, but better public transport would be a good thing.
www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/sal...
This is of a piece with positive patriotism - love of country as a reason to drive it to be what it claims to be, rather than settle for its grosser tendencies. Something like "I love this country, and my ancestors died for that flag, and I'll be goddamned if I let it get taken over by bigots!"
That's the case for me too. But also, most of my teachers from the 70s now own their homes, take multi-month vacations in the winter to Florida, were able to put their kids through college, and have quite comfortable retirements. I don't think that would be the case today.
One of my high school teachers had a job at a convenience store so he could afford to send his kids to a private school. Was quite the thing to wrap my head around at 15 in 82
I delivered pizzas when I taught middle-school. It was a small town, so sometimes to students that were doing homework I'd assigned them earlier that day.
Those of us in blue states who started pre-2000 knew we'd be trading good pay for the promise of a healthy pension. I'll retire in a few years and be able to live well in perpetuity bc I forwent good pay for most of my career -- a worthwhile deal. Not true for younger and red-state teachers.
The ONLY thing that is good financially for retired teachers here in Missouri is our retirement system. Has been highly rated for years. So naturally, almost every legislative session there are multiple bills proposed that would weaken it. Our retired teachers assn. is quite active and vocal.
Here in the UK, the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has been mocked for recently claiming that Labour would take the country "back to square one" as that's widely regarded as a positive thing.
Biden loves to talk about "autocracy vs democracy" + that's fine but even more salient is voters' wish for freedoms including but not limited to abortion rights
an updated presentation of FDR's 2nd bill of rights + 4 freedoms would serve him well; 17th-cent "customary liberties" too (keep the fens)
There’s a lot of “freedom to” in the discourse, but not much “freedom from.” I don’t understand that! They seem like they could be pretty persuasive to lots of people.
