The Conservative Golden Age Of… 2007?

Romanticists turned to the distant past for inspiration. Modern conservatives look to the 90s and 2000s

Nostalgia is a powerful conservative emotion. We love to imagine when times were simpler and apparently better. It can serve as a foundation for political ideology and even cultural creation. The Romantics took the Middle Ages for their inspiration, with medieval times serving as a more heroic and spiritual alternative than the mundanity of their own era.

Amid the Right’s never-ending cultural debate, a similar nostalgia has emerged. But it isn’t longing for the Middle Ages or Ancient Rome. No, conservatives see the “end of history” as their inspiration for cultural renewal.

The End of History refers to Francis Fukuyama’s idea of liberal democracy triumphing as the only serious model for political order. This seemed a fact of life throughout the 90s and even for most of the 2000s, despite 9/11 and the Global War on Terror. Belief we were living through the end of history only seemed to come to an end with the Great Recession, the emergence of China as a global power, and the political turmoil of the 2010s.

One can see the time from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession as the end of history period in American life. The economy was good, the demographics were whiter, the culture (at least in the eyes of millennials and Gen Xers) was great, and the future was bright for the country. This is the mythical past that many conservatives want to return to, even if they disparage Fukuyama’s thesis. It demonstrates the Right’s limited cultural imagination and confused priorities. If we’re trying to overcome “liberalism,” then why do we long for its glory days?

The 90s has replaced the 50s as the new decade of “Merry America.” Conservatives are now extending their nostalgia to include the 2000s. Brittany Hugoboom, the proprietor of Evie Magazine, recently argued that conservatives should restore “early 2000s Americana” to make culture great again. Conservatives this week fawned over a random clip of high schoolers from 2007, arguing it showed a much better time. Matt Walsh, likely in response to the video, declared that year “the peak of American culture.”

It makes sense to engage in this nostalgia as the millennials who dominate internet politics were teenagers during this era. Nostalgia is always connected to the time of your youth. The aughts, like the 90s, weren’t any conservative’s ideal of a golden age when they actually lived during them. Horrible music, George W. Bush, vulgar wave comedy, reality TV, the Hummer, jingoism in support of the Iraq War, and a rank materialism that helped cause the Great Recession all defined the decade. It’s unclear how right-wingers could watch Paris Hilton’s reality TV show and see this as the golden era.

But they have anyway, largely through imagining it as a different time than it was in reality. The Romantics did the same with the Middle Ages, purging all the nasty parts of the medieval era in their fantasies. But they at least didn’t experience it. The people pining for the 2000s usually don’t have that excuse.

The reaction to the 2007 high school video illustrates this. It’s a rather inoffensive video that shows kids having fun. One can find the very same thing at high schools right now. The way the kids are dressed doesn’t even look that different compared to today (at least relative to, say, the 1970s and the 2000s). The video is soundtracked by the annoying pop-rap hit “Party Like a Rockstar” and features plenty of diversity. There’s nothing to signal that this is a conservative golden age. It’s just kids being kids.

But in the eyes of right-wingers, these were apparently scenes reminiscent of King Arthur’s Round Table. One prominent RW account said the video made him profoundly sad for the world that was lost. “It was replaced by a soulless society of dopamine ravaged NPC’s that commodified every meaningful aspect of life,” the account claimed. This is about a video of high schoolers dancing around to rap music. Regardless, the take received over 7000 likes.

Others claimed that the video is proof that racism was about to go extinct before Obama brought it back. One can probably find more cases of white youth hanging out with non-whites today, but people need to imagine that this is the world stolen from us.

The 2007 high school video isn’t alone in turning the mundane aspects of adolescence into Middle-Earth. AI images of a typical teenager’s room and montages of trash culture from 2003 are treated as representations of what we lost thanks to “modernity.” The Alt Right’s “Retvrn” slogan longed for Ancient Sparta, the Roman Empire, and medieval knights. However silly that may have been, it’s less ridiculous than seeing a room filled with Linkin Park posters and unironically wanting to RETVRN to that.

The end of history wasn’t a complete cultural wasteland. But nostalgia for it would’ve struck most as silly a few years ago. We wanted something more than the Bush era.

The more “sophisticated” aspects of that period are also admired by conservatives, even if they were associated with liberals. In some cases, the Right claims these left-coded trends were actually right-wing. This animates the Right’s surprising romanticism surrounding the hipsters. As I wrote last year, anyone who experienced the hipster phenomenon (namely, nearly every millennial) did not see these folks as closet right-wingers. These were Obama’s biggest fans and they rejected the apparent conservatism of middle-class America. They were very libtard-coded at the time.

But conservatives persist in trying to paint the hipsters as crypto-rightists. First Things editor Matthew Schmitz argued in an essay earlier this month that the hipsters gave us Trump. “The phenomenon of millennial hipsterism anticipated Trumpism in its embrace of white and masculine cultural markers as signs of countercultural authenticity,” Schmitz wrote. He did note that the hipsters were typically liberal, but still claimed their style was right-wing.

Imagining the hipsters as purveyors of politically incorrect, white masculinity is a stretch. Hipsters rejected the masculinity of the white middle class as exhibited by jocks and preps. They were seen as more “sensitive” and feminine than ordinary white guys. They were white, but they were embarrassed by their whiteness and were eager to demonstrate their love for black culture. Their adoption of working-class styles was ironic rather than admiring.

Schmitz reached his conclusion by focusing on alleged progenitors of hipsterdom, such as Jim Goad, rather than actual hipsters. It’s another form of lionizing the culture of the end of history.

Conservatives constantly bemoan the apparent lack of right-wing culture and demand we focus on resolving this matter. But they can’t even agree on what kind of culture they want and their examples of ideal culture leaves much to be desired. The trash culture of the 2000s is not going to inspire great art, or really much of anything. It’s fine to reminisce about playing Xbox in your room without a care in the world, but this is not going to be a wellspring for powerful creation. This is just a plea for your childhood to return.

The end of history nostalgia indicates a limited conservative imagination and an inability to connect with a past beyond their own lifetimes. As I repeatedly argue in my articles and podcasts, Americans frequently envision the golden age as that of whenever they were young, which is why “merry America” changes with every generation.

Respect for the past is an inherent part of right-wing thinking. It provides the basis for the traditions and heritage conservatives want to preserve. Europeans look to an ancient past for the basis of their identity. American right-wingers, lacking that past, just look at a decade in living memory for inspiration. Hence, the silliness of RETVRN to the days of George W. Bush.

We don’t need to fantasize about knights and castles to accomplish our goals. And it’s good to point out how some things were better 20 or 30 years ago. But we do need a better ideal for our nation than the end of history. Those days aren’t coming back, nor should we want them back. We want something better to dream of than dancing in study hall to “Party Like a Rockstar.”

You can now preorder Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.