By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Nostalgia is a killer. The term, originally coined in the late seventeenth century, described an illness that came in response to change and dislocation. Symptoms included fever, loss, and heart palpitations. The prognosis, if left untreated, was death.

Today, society no longer sees nostalgia as a disease. Instead, it is thought of as a fuzzy, seemingly benign feeling about an idealized past. But the profound economic disruptions of the last few months might push analysts to revisit the idea that nostalgia is a grave, even life-threatening condition. American policies based on the premise of restoring past greatness - the mythical and opaque “again” of Make America Great Again - have worsened lives both within and outside of the United States.

The most notable example came on April 2, 2025, when U.S. President Donald Trump rolled out a suite of massive, ostensibly reciprocal tariffs designed to restore the glory days of American manufacturing, resulting in a market crash. “We’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned,” Trump triumphantly told voters, as bonds and stocks tanked. “We’re going to put the miners back to work,” he said. “You could give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and a different kind of a job, and they’d be unhappy. They want to mine coal; that’s what they love to do.”

Trump’s announcement prompted a great deal of intellectual, as well as economic, shock. But he is not the first world leader to try cutting off his country in the hope of winding the clock back. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, China sealed up its empire out of fear of outside influence. Japan did the same for much of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, during its shogunate era. And various European states have embraced the politics of nostalgia. Though these governments were motivated by different economic contexts and global pictures, they were united by the belief that closing off the nation to preserve traditions would bring about economic and even spiritual health.

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Each of these cases ended poorly; history has demonstrated the danger of weaponizing nostalgic sentiments. Countries that embraced nostalgic policies either abandoned them or fell into ruin. China, for instance, was so weakened by its cutoffs that in the nineteenth century it became more and more subject to the diktat of Western imperialists. Japan’s isolation also made it increasingly vulnerable to incursion from increasingly powerful Western countries. Europe’s post–World War I yearning for an agrarian past helped lead to fascism. Washington, then, would be wise not to follow these courses. Otherwise, it, too, might discover that nostalgia can quickly turn malignant.

 

Stop the Clock

In 1688, a young Swiss physician named Johannes Hofer wrote a dissertation on a “state of mind” that was gripping his country—the “grief for the lost charm of the Native Land.” The Swiss already had a word for this kind of longing in everyday use: Heimweh, meaning homesickness. But Hofer gave it a medical name, combining the ancient Greek word for “returning home” with the one for “pain”: nostalgia. Hofer accompanied this new scientific term with a clinical account of nostalgia’s origins and progression. It mostly afflicted young people who left their rural communities to make a living either in more urbanized parts of the country or abroad as mercenaries. It was thus seen as a condition of dislocation and inadaptation. Caused by “continuous vibration of animal spirits” in the brain, the nostalgic pathology admitted, as Hofer wrote, “no remedy other than a return to the homeland.” Hofer’s newfound diagnosis was soon applied to the entire nation, with deadly nostalgia being branded as “Schweizer Heimweh,” or “Swiss homesickness.” In the two centuries following Hofer’s dissertation, analysts also diagnosed societies across the rest of Europe (and in the Americas) with “Swiss nostalgia”—the causes being globalization, migration (often forced), and industrialization.

At the other end of the Eurasian landmass, however, nostalgic flare-ups were plaguing politics centuries before Hofer dreamt up the concept. The trend began in China. In 1433, Chinese admiral Zheng He returned home after his spectacular treasure fleet voyages. His impressive dragon ships had reached shores as far as the East African coast, where they dispersed sophisticated and elegant gifts in return for wild animals—cheetahs, giraffes, lions, oryxes—as well as spices and some cotton cloth. But the emperor concluded that this effort to globalize had been nothing more than an indulgence in exoticism, bringing no real benefits. Instead, he decided that any attempt to create tributaries would simply be costly, dragging Zhang and his subordinates into innumerable faraway conflicts as indigenous rulers tried to draw on the massive power of China in clashes with their rivals. It would involve entanglements that risked compromising China’s core values and historic mission. Globalization, in other words, simply meant that other countries would take advantage of China’s prosperity.

The imperial court thus opted for isolationism. It stopped funding such missions. It decided largely to stop buying foreign goods. It still lets foreigners come from time to time to admire China, perhaps bringing along the odd gift. The Portuguese Jesuits, for example, made themselves popular at court by bringing ornate clocks. But China knew that it was wealthier than anywhere else in the world, and that it could thus afford to turn inward. Its belief that it would be better off by doing so was borne both out of a sense of cultural superiority and from the historical logic of varying philosophies. The Daoist, Wuxing, Buddhist, Confucian, and neo-Confucian traditions were all unique and at times contradictory. But they all stressed that history regularly required a reversion or restoration.

China’s attitude persisted even as it lost its economic position. The Manchu Qing dynasty’s expansion efforts were focused eastward, in nearby Central Asia, not overseas. The country thus remained isolated as the Industrial Revolution allowed the economies in Europe and the United States to grow at a dramatic rate, until they far surpassed China’s empire in both GDP and military power. The imperial court was aware that the West was innovating; a 1793 expedition by George Macartney brought a British planetarium and a steam engine to China. But the gift of the planetarium was regarded as an interesting curiosity, and the transformative power of carbon energy, embodied in the steam engine, was unappreciated. The steam engine remained untouched, left in its packaging crate. “Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders,” the Qianlong emperor famously told Macartney. “There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our produce.”

China was not the only Asian country that tried to freeze itself in time. Japan remained connected to the world for longer than its neighbor. But in 1603, it was consumed by its version of globalization anxiety. The shogunate enacted its Sakoku - or “chained country” - provisions, barring Japanese people from going abroad. If Japanese people left anyway, they were prohibited from coming back. The government also cut off almost all diplomatic relations with other countries. Japan still maintained some trade with China through the port of Nagasaki and permitted some foreign books, mostly from the Protestant Netherlands. But by and large, it sequestered itself.

Some Japanese officials acknowledged that Sakoku might deprive their country of innovations. Yet they decided it was worth it because the corrupting influence of the wider world was too great. The country’s new isolation was partially motivated by a desire to check the power of commercial magnates, the daimyo lords who had profited from commercial links at the expense of the central government. Officials also wanted to stop the drainage of silver, which had lowered prices and thus increased the cost of taxes and tribute payments. But there was, above all, a cultural component: an assertion of the values of a traditional society threatened by change. Japan, in particular, was afraid of Christian missionaries, who the ruling class believed were promoting the development of autonomous communities that would undermine the power of the central shogunate.

Both China and Japan thought that isolation would protect their civilizations. But in each case, their nostalgic policies greatly endangered them. The two societies fell behind as their economies grew feebler and their polities more vulnerable. They missed out on the dramatic surges in innovation and productivity brought by the Industrial Revolution. The United Kingdom’s advanced military technology, for instance, meant the defeat of China during the First Opium War (1839–42)—shocking China’s leadership. The country was forced to hand over Hong Kong to the United Kingdom and give the British highly favorable access to Chinese markets. During the ensuing “century of humiliation,” as the Chinese later called it, other European powers were also able to extract wealth from the defeated empire. The eventual results were dramatic new ideological movements within China designed to restore the country’s power, including the Communists, who seized power in the 1940s.

Japan defended itself much more effectively than did China. But after the country was opened up by U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry, whose fleet of warships forced their way into the country in 1853, it took dramatic measures to modernize its economy. The country abolished feudalism and the shogunate during the Meiji Restoration  27aug2016.html .  Soon, it adopted its new ideology - one that called for imperialist expansion.

 

Blood and Soil

Europe, unlike China and Japan, did not try to avoid economic development. Rather than shutter out the rest of the world, European countries embraced new technologies that allowed them to build up powerful governments and militaries, with the purpose of building vast colonial empires.

But although Europe never cut itself off, nostalgia still crept into its politics. As the continent urbanized, many began to fret about the dwindling numbers of farmers and peasants, particularly during the Great Depression, which began in 1929. The widespread misery of that era made the old image of rural life appear more attractive than ever, resulting in specifically peasant political movements, such as the French Agrarian and Peasant Party, that promised a return to an idyllic, agrarian past.

In Western Europe, these parties never developed substantial enough support to win outright power. But the rural ideal was strong enough that it formed a key component in building new coalitions of a populist right. Farmers constituted such a large part of the electorate that these movements even acquired power within the center and the left. The left-wing French Radical leader Edouard Herriot, for example, declared that the peasants were “our silent master” and the “greatest of French philosophers.” To keep them happy, his government embraced price stabilization, subsidies, and market support to grow and protect agriculture.

But it was in Germany that the most striking - and devastating - use of agrarian romanticism occurred. The National Socialist Party rose to power in large part by capitalizing on agricultural depression, with the Nazis relying heavily on rural propaganda to win the votes of German farmers. “We must recognize that without our land, without our peasantry, there can be no economic prosperity in Germany, that all notions of export and import and the global economy are nothing to us but concepts that may be useful but can never replace our own living space and our peasantry,” Adolf Hitler declared in one typical 1932 election speech. “These are the foundation of every healthy economy.” When Hitler wooed rural audiences in the south of Germany, he even wore antiquated peasant dress, with traditional rural jackets and, sometimes, lederhosen.

Outside the now-closed Bethlehem Steel mill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, October 2020

The principal architect of the Nazis’ rural political program was Walther Darré. The author of the tract “New Aristocracy of Blood and Soil,” Darré had a reputation for being both a student of technical farm matters and a feverish proponent of German expansion, which he believed was necessary for the Germans’ well-being. In his view, pure-blooded Germans should abandon the poisonous big industrial cities for a healthy life in the countryside.

The combination of racism and nostalgia was hardly uncommon. Historically, the two are frequently enmeshed. In an interwar update to his famous tome The Decline of the West, the German writer Oswald Spengler argued that “the center of gravity of production” had been shifting away from Europe since “the respect of the colored races for the white has been ended by the World War.” This, he concluded, “is the real and final basis of the unemployment that prevails in the white countries.” Similar sentiments are echoed by the fictional character Tom Buchanan, a former sportsman and white supremacist, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

But Darré’s agrarian policies ultimately had little effect on the material power of Germany. After being appointed minister for agriculture, Darré pushed for Germany to conquer territory so that the country’s city dwellers would have fields to plow and settle, but he was hardly the driving force behind Germany’s efforts to expand its borders. His efforts focused on creating a compulsory corporatist guild-style organization of farmers and pushed through a law prohibiting farms from being split up or sold by German peasants. He also continued his propaganda work, commissioning photographers to portray the glamor of handsome farmers working in the fields, glistening with sweat. But in reality, farmers continued to feel overburdened, abandoned by a government that wanted to industrialize quickly, largely for military reasons. The number of agrarian workers in Germany continued to drop.

It wasn’t long before Adolf Hitler sidelined Darré. The lederhosen portraits were banned as unbecoming after Hitler became chancellor in 1933. The Nazi leader lost patience with rural utopianism, and with Darré, once he no longer needed peasant voters. By 1937, Hitler openly expressed his contempt for “peasant philosophy stuff” and refused to receive Darré or entertain his requests. After 1939, his only response to farmers demands was to send forced laborers to work in their fields. The rural dream at the heart of German nostalgia ultimately ran counter to the Nazis’ drive to assert a racial hierarchy rooted in technology and industrialization.

 

Living in the Past

After World War II, Europeans began to understand how critical nostalgia had been in the rise of fascism and the destruction of democracy. They therefore embarked on an alternative: encouraging a move out of the countryside while paying the remaining farmers substantial subsidies. In a certain sense, the latter move was a kind of polite nostalgia, like that of Herriot. But it was ultimately more an effort to keep the dwindling losers of globalization on side while still moving the economy forward. In the 1980s, the Common Agricultural Policy (as it is called) accounted for over 70 percent of the European Community budget. Today, however, it consumes just over 25 percent of the EU’s budget. The continent’s economies were able to rapidly recover from the devastation of both the Great Depression and World War II, while its people accepted that peasant life was firmly in the past, rather than something that one could resuscitate at full capacity.

Yet nostalgia never fully left the picture, and now it has come roaring back into mainstream politics. It is, for example, again fueling European populism. This time, however, the nostalgic sentiment surrounds the loss of manufacturing. Italy, whose household appliances, textiles, and clothing trade were most vulnerable to the China shock, fell first, bringing about Western Europe’s first postwar populist government by making Silvio Berlusconi prime minister in 1994. Since then, this nostalgic infection has spread. Now, even Europe’s industrial motor, Germany, is tottering as the populist Alternative for Germany grows in popularity, particularly in the eastern parts of the country most conspicuously left behind.

But no country appears more afflicted by nostalgia than the United States. Anger about globalization and the country’s growing diversity is, after all, part of what propelled Trump to the White House. And especially since winning his second term, Trump has worked to make good on his atavistic promises. The president explicitly sold his sweeping tariffs as restorative: April 2, he told Americans, would mark “the day American industry was reborn” and “the day America’s destiny was reclaimed.” His commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, likewise depicted the tariffs as Washington seizing back its glorified past. China, Lutnick said, had created an “army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones” - jobs that would once have belonged to Americans. Now, he said, “that kind of activity” would return.

Trump replaced most of his tariffs with a flat ten percent levy after the stock market tumbled. But no matter how high the rate, tariffs are unlikely to restore lost jobs, especially as the automation revolution looms. Furthermore, AI now threatens office workers in a way analogous to robots in factories during the first wave of industrialization during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Political nostalgia, however, can make people overlook the negative consequences that follow revanchist economic policies. As the world changes around voters, the familiar image of men working in the mines while their wives prepare meals at home is so comforting to many Americans that they are willing to make radical sacrifices to get it back. It is why U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent can argue that any tariff-induced pain is really a “detox period,” and why Trump can talk of tariffs as an “operation” and as “medicine.”

That medicine, however, is quackery. The economics of nostalgia never work, and its inevitable failure only breeds a cultural nostalgia that may be even more dangerous than the cutoffs. As Japan slipped behind western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, it became more and more insistent on its unique cultural identity, helping lead it down the path of imperialism. When the United States doesn’t get its jobs back - and in fact loses more as a result of the disruption caused by tariffs - Washington, too, might double down on assertions of American superiority. The government might wage more culture wars, rather than agreeing to any kind of retreat. After all, someone must be to blame for the failure of economic policies that so many Americans endorse. Nostalgia, then, becomes both the cause of problems and a cover-up for them.

It is not surprising that people are worried about the radically transformative technology of today. The twin forces of globalization and technology are upending jobs, communities, families, and social relations. The idea of going back to an airbrushed, idealized version of the world is thus highly attractive. But history suggests policymakers cannot afford to be stricken by the malady of nostalgia. As an individual feeling, it may be comforting. But as a policy prescription, it poisons discourse and breaks apart the body politic. Recovery takes a painfully long time, and returning to an imaginary lost homeland is not an option.

The principal architect of the Nazis’ rural political program was Walther Darré. The author of the tract “New Aristocracy of Blood and Soil,” Darré, had a reputation for being both a student of technical farm matters and a feverish proponent of German expansion, which he believed was necessary for the Germans’ well-being. In his view, pure-blooded Germans should abandon the poisonous big industrial cities for a healthy life in the land.

The combination of racism and nostalgia was hardly uncommon. Historically, the two are frequently enmeshed. In an interwar update to his famous tome The Decline of the West, the German writer Oswald Spengler argued that “the center of gravity of production” had been shifting away from Europe since “the respect of the colored races for the white has been ended by the World War.” This, he concluded, “is the real and final basis of the unemployment that prevails in the white countries.” Similar sentiments are echoed by the fictional character Tom Buchanan, a former sportsman and white supremacist, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

But Darré’s agrarian policies ultimately had little effect on the material power of Germany. After being appointed minister for agriculture, Darré pushed for Germany to conquer territory so that the country’s city dwellers would have fields to plow and settle, but he was hardly the driving force behind Germany’s efforts to expand its borders. His efforts focused on creating a compulsory corporatist guild-style organization of farmers and pushed through a law prohibiting farms from being split up or sold by German peasants. He also continued his propaganda work, commissioning photographers to portray the glamor of handsome farmers working in the fields, glistening with sweat. But in reality, farmers continued to feel overburdened, abandoned by a government that wanted to industrialize quickly, largely for military reasons. The number of agrarian workers in Germany continued to drop.

It wasn’t long before Adolf Hitler sidelined Darré. The lederhosen portraits were banned as unbecoming after Hitler became chancellor in 1933. The Nazi leader lost patience with rural policies—and with Darré—once he no longer needed peasant voters. By 1937, Hitler openly expressed his contempt for “peasant philosophy stuff” and refused to receive Darré or entertain his requests. After 1939, his only response to farmer demands was to send forced laborers to work in their fields. The rural dream at the heart of German nostalgia ultimately ran counter to the Nazis’ drive to assert a racial hierarchy rooted in technology and industrialization.

 

 

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