Longing for the “Good Old Days” or longing for a racist and sexist past?

Abstract

Nostalgia plays an increasingly central and polarizing role in American politics, as the Republican Party has become the primary proprietor of nostalgic rhetoric. This paper explores how feelings of collective nostalgia in a country with an unjust past are inextricably tied to racism and hostile sexism. We expect that nostalgia is strongly related to racist and sexist attitudes. We test these expectations using data from the 2022 Cooperative Election Study. Our findings reveal a standard deviation increase in nostalgia is associated with a 7–13 percentage point increase in the probability of expressing racist attitudes, and a 6–9 percentage point increase in the probability of expressing sexist attitudes, even after controlling for partisan affiliation and ideology. These results suggest that nostalgic sentiments can exacerbate prejudice and discrimination by perpetuating the belief that things were better when America was more unjust.

Keywords

Race nostalgia racial resentment

America’s past has been dominated by white men, but, as the United States rapidly diversifies demographically and economically, both whites and men feel they have lost status in the social hierarchy (Mutz 2018). The economic disparities between white and black Americans persist, and, in some cases, have worsened (Daly et al., 2017). Yet, white Americans perceive that they are now the disadvantaged group. An NPR poll in 2017 found 55% of white Americans believe white people are discriminated against in America (Gonyea 2017). Fueling the perception of declining status are the changing demographics—the 2020 Census was the first in United States history to show the white population declining (Bahrampour and Mellnik 2021).

A similar trend is occurring with men. Since the 1980s, a majority of college students have been women (Leukhina and Smaldone 2022), and the gender gap in college enrollment and graduation is only increasing.¹ Relatedly, men’s median real wages fell three percent while women’s median real wages grew 28.8% from 1979 to 2019 (Donovan and Bradley 2019). Despite women’s gains, men continue to earn more. However, the relative decline in status has not gone unnoticed—two-thirds of men in 2016 felt that they are at least a little discriminated against because of their gender (Cassino 2016). Therefore, recalling the past, for members of the dominant groups (whites and men), makes their loss of status much more salient. We suspect Trump and the Republican Party’s embrace of nostalgic rhetoric activates racist and sexist attitudes by harking back to a less pluralistic and equitable time.

Donald Trump’s meteoric rise within the Republican Party coincided with a marked increase in the explicit expression of hate and prejudice (Ruisch and Ferguson 2023). For example, Feinberg et al. (2022) find that counties that recently hosted a Trump rally are more likely to experience hate-motivated events than counties that did not host a Trump rally. Why do Trump’s campaign and rhetoric inspire these behaviors? Embedded in Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan is the promise to return America to its less pluralistic past (Goldstein and Hall 2017). Concomitantly, racist and sexist voters overwhelmingly supported Trump in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections (Hooghe and Dassonneville 2018; Piazza and Van Doren 2023; Schaffner et al. 2018).

While we cannot test whether nostalgia fosters racist and sexist beliefs or whether nostalgia is simply a more politically correct expression of these beliefs, we can use our module in the 2022 Cooperative Election Study to investigate the connection between nostalgia, racism, and sexism. Previous research shows that nostalgia predicts prejudice towards racial minorities and immigrants (Behler et al., 2021; Smeekes et al. 2015). Our findings contribute to the existing literature by showing that nostalgia is consistently and significantly associated with the expression of racist and sexist attitudes.

Expectations

In recent years, scholars and social observers have recognized the powerful impact of nostalgia on shaping societal values (Stefaniak et al., 2021; Stefaniak and Wohl 2022) and political preferences (Elci 2021; Gest et al. 2018; Steenvoorden and Harteveld 2018). Consequently, understanding the potential repercussions of nostalgic sentiments is crucial to comprehending the complex dynamics of American political behavior. This research paper delves into the intricate interplay between nostalgia and the perpetuation of racist and sexist attitudes, and aims to provide empirical evidence that illuminates the extent to which those who embrace nostalgia are more likely to endorse these regressive and discriminatory ideologies.

The resurgence of nationalist movements, cultural conservatism, and reactionary political ideologies in recent times has witnessed the strategic deployment of nostalgic appeals (Betz and Johnson 2004; Kenny 2018; Mols and Jetten 2014; Smeekes et al. 2021). Politicians and social leaders, aiming to galvanize support or promote a particular agenda, often utilize evocative rhetoric that romanticizes the past. One of the key aspects of nostalgia that merits further exploration is its inherent backward-looking nature. Nostalgia involves yearning for a bygone era, a desire to return to a perceived golden age. But, these historical eras that evoke nostalgic sentiments are often fraught with racial and gender-based injustices. Periods that are romanticized as idyllic often coincided with oppressive political and economic systems that marginalized certain groups based on race or gender.

The nostalgia-inducing elements of the past, such as cultural artifacts, societal norms, or political movements, may inadvertently revive and legitimize racist and sexist ideologies. We hypothesize that respondents who exhibit higher levels of nostalgia will be more inclined to hold and express racist and sexist attitudes.

Hypothesis 1:

Respondents with more nostalgia will express more racist attitudes.

Hypothesis 2:

Respondents with more nostalgia will express more sexist attitudes.

It stands to reason that nostalgic individuals would desire to reclaim a past where hierarchies and discriminatory norms benefited (or are perceived to have benefited) their in-group.

Data

We use survey data from our module in the 2022 Cooperative Election Study (CES). Overall, the module contains 1,000 respondents from YouGov’s online panel, but, since we are interested in the effect of nostalgia on racist and sexist attitudes—measured in the post-election wave of the survey—our sample is limited to 856 respondents. The six racism and sexism variables used as dependent variables in our analyses are ordinal, so we estimate ordered logistic regression models. Survey weights provided by the CES are used in each analysis. In all six of our models, we control for party identification, ideology, family income, education, age, gender, Hispanic identity, and race.²

Denial of racism and racial resentment

In our first set of analyses, we look at the effect of nostalgia on racist attitudes. We measure racist attitudes using four prompts included in the CES Common Content. Prompts 1 and 2 are from DeSante and Candis, 2020 Fear, Institutionalized Racism, and Empathy (FIRE) battery. These two prompts from the FIRE battery capture a “denial of racism” (Schaffner 2022). Prompts 3 and 4 are two prompts included in Kinder and Sanders’s (1996) racial resentment scale. The exact wording of the four prompts follows.

1. “White people in the U.S. have certain advantages because of the color of their skin.”

2. “Racial problems in the U.S. are rare, isolated situations.”

3. “Irish, Italians, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.”

4. “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.”

Responses to these questions include, “strongly agree,” “agree,” “neither agree nor dis-agree,” “disagree,” and “strongly disagree.” The variables are recoded so five indicates the most racist response, and 1 indicates the least racist response.

Figure 1 shows the distribution of responses to these prompts within our sample. Across all four prompts, respondents are found across the range of racism prompts. While a majority of respondents take the neutral or non-racist positions (1, 2, and 3) in response to the prompts, approximately nine to 25% of respondents express the most racist attitude. Additionally, there’s variation across the four measures. Respondents are nearly twice as likely (43% vs 22%) to agree or strongly agree that blacks should work their way up like other minorities have, than they are to agree or strongly agree that racial problems are rare. This indicates that most respondents are willing to admit a certain amount of racism exists, but a substantial proportion is unwilling to admit race or racism prevents people from succeeding in America. Figure A1 of the Appendix shows that racist attitudes are especially prevalent among white respondents. Because of this, we replicate our analyses on the subsample of respondents that are white and present these results in Table A3 of the Appendix. Subsetting the sample does not substantively alter the results presented in the paper.

Figure 1.

Distribution of racist attitudes within sample. Notes. The variables Denial of white privilege and Denial of systemic racism have been reverse coded, so five indicates that the respondent gave the most racist response, and one indicates the respondent gave the least racist response.

Hostile sexism

For our measures of sexist attitudes, we use two prompts from the CES Common Content. The prompts in the Common Content are taken from Glick and Fiske’s (1996) Amibivalent Sexism Inventory, and their analyses find these two prompts capture hostile sexism. The exacting wording for the two prompts follows.

1. “Women seek to gain power by getting control over men.”

2. “Women are too easily offended.”

As with the racism prompts, responses to the hostile sexism prompts range from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” where higher values indicate the more sexist response.

Figure 2 shows the distribution of sexist attitudes. As with the racism prompts, a majority of respondents are found in the neutral or non-sexist positions (1, 2, and 3), and, for the most part, the distributions for the two prompts appear similar. However, there are three to nine percent more respondents that agree and strongly agree with the statement that “women are too easily offended,” than agree and strongly agree with the statement that “women seek to gain power by getting control over men.” Unlike the dissimilar distributions of white and black respondents across the racism prompts, the distributions of men and women respondents across the sexism prompts (presented in Figure A2 of the Appendix) are not vastly different. Regardless, we replicate the following analyses on a subsample of men respondents. These results are presented in Table A4 of the Appendix, and they show that subsetting the sample to men does not alter our findings.

Figure 2.

Distribution of sexist attitudes within sample.

Collective, restorative nostalgia

Our nostalgia measure captures collective, restorative nostalgia (Boym 2007).³ The questions specifically ask about America of the past and whether America and the world used to be better. We believe that collective, restorative nostalgia is what Donald Trump and his brand of the Republican Party seeks to activate when they promise to “make America great again,” and that this type of nostalgia is most relevant to any exploration of American political behavior.

So far we have discussed how we expect nostalgia to be related to racist and sexist attitudes, but we have yet to discuss how we operationalize nostalgia. We estimate a principal component analysis on the six close-ended nostalgia prompts included in our CES module. The question wording and rotated factor loadings are presented in Table 1.

Table 1.

Nostalgic prompts and rotated factor loadings.

Question	Question wording	Factor 1	Factor 2
Long for	“How often do you long for the good old days in this country?”	0.92	0.08
Feel nostalgic	“Nostalgia means a sentimental longing for the past; how often do you feel nostalgic when thinking about America in the past?”	0.89	0.06
U.S. culture	“Since the 1950s, do you think the American culture and way of life has mostly changed for the worse or has it mostly changed for the better?”	0.45	0.69
U.S. political system	“Since the 1950s, do you think the American political system has mostly changed for the worse or has it mostly changed for the better?”	0.12	0.85
U.S. economic system	“Since the 1950s, do you think America’s economic system has mostly changed for the worse or has it mostly changed for the better?”	−0.03	0.83
Better place	“Please indicate whether you agree or disagree with the following statements… The world used to be a better place.”	0.72	0.27

These two factors capture distinctive dimensions measured by the six questions. Factor 1 reflects the rose-tinted nostalgia for an America that was, while Factor 2 appears to measure a general pessimism towards the present day United States. We use Factor 1, rescaled from 0 to 1, as our measure of nostalgia used throughout this paper.⁴ The average level of nostalgia in our sample is 0.58 (S.D. = 0.01). Nostalgia is substantially correlated with the racism and sexism measures—between ρ = 0.34 and ρ = 0.54—but nowhere near multicollinear.⁵

We also asked respondents this open-ended question: “When you hear the phrase ‘good old days’, what is the first thing that comes to mind?” While we don’t use the open-ended responses in any of our analyses here,⁶ the answers reveal how respondents nostalgically remember the past as a time when their dominant group was not challenged by subordinate groups. For example, one respondent says “the first thing that comes to mind” is

“When people had more respect for each other, were proud of their country, had less government interference in their lives and how children were raised. Leftist liberals like BLM, Antifa and others weren’t allowed to loot, burn cities, assault police and citizens, with no accountability!”

Another common response to the open-ended question is referencing a specific decade in the 20th century. There are 86 respondents that gave such responses. Of those, the most respondents, 45, specifically mention the 1950s.⁷ Only three of the respondents referencing a decade in the 20th century are black, and none of the respondents mentioning the 1950s are black. When asked about the “good old days,” a substantial portion of white respondents think about a time when black people were marginalized.

Findings

Figure 3 shows the relationship between nostalgia and racist attitudes (full regression results for the racist attitudes models are included in Table A1 of the Appendix). The results strongly support our expectations. Nostalgia is positively and significantly related to racist attitudes in all four models. Looking at the model where the coefficient on nostalgia is largest, Blacks should work their way up, we find respondents in the 75th percentile of nostalgia (0.77) are 23% more likely (p < .01) to agree with the racist prompt than respondents in the 25th percentile of nostalgia (0.41). Across all four models, a standard deviation increase in nostalgia is associated with, on average, between a seven and 13 percentage point increase in the likelihood of expressing racist attitudes (to agree with Prompts 2 and 3 and to disagree with Prompts 1 and 4). Nostalgia is one of four variables in our models to have a consistently significant and positive relationship with racist attitudes—the others are party identification, ideology, and race. We find that more Republican and conservative respondents are significantly more likely to express racist attitudes, while black respondents are significantly less likely to.

Figure 3.

The effect of nostalgia on racist attitudes.

Next, we look at the relationship between nostalgia and sexist attitudes or hostile sexism (full regression results for the hostile sexism models are included in Table A2 of the Appendix). The coefficients from these models are plotted in Figure 4. Nostalgia is positively and significantly related to hostile sexism in both models. A standard deviation increase in nostalgia is associated with a six percentage point increase (p < .01) in the likelihood of agreeing that “women seek to gain power by getting control over men,” and nine percentage point increase (p < .01) in the likelihood of agreeing that “women are too easily offended.” Similarly, party identification, ideology, and gender—instead of race—are statistically significant in both models. This means that Republicans and conservatives are significantly more likely to express sexist attitudes, while women are significantly less likely to.

Figure 4.

The effect of nostalgia on hostile sexism.

Conclusion

Our paper provides empirical evidence that those who embrace nostalgia are more likely to endorse regressive and discriminatory ideologies. Specifically, we find that higher levels of nostalgia are associated with racist and sexist attitudes. These results emphasize the importance of understanding the potential repercussions of nostalgic sentiments in shaping societal values and political behavior, but they do not establish a causal connection between nostalgia, racism, and sexism. Does nostalgia serve as a more socially desirable way of expressing underlying racist and sexist attitudes? Or does nostalgia foster and reinforce these attitudes? We are necessarily limited in our ability to make causal claims using cross-sectional data. We suspect, however, that nostalgic appeals activate racial and sexist attitudes in individuals who fondly remember the past and who would like to return to what they perceive as a simpler time. This romanticized past was less diverse and less equitable, but, at least for dominant social groups, those times are remembered as simpler, safer, and more economically secure. Future research should experimentally explore whether and how nostalgia and nostalgic appeals affect racist and sexist beliefs.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Longing for the “good old days” or longing for a racist and sexist past?

Supplemental Material for Longing for the “good old days” or longing for a racist and sexist past? by Spencer goidel kirby goidel, and bradley madsen in Research & Politics.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Spencer Goidel

Kirby Goidel

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

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