I have over time noticed a particular form of “mourning” among people of my generation. It occurs across political divides, and centers on the notion that America once bore a superior, coherent civic identity.
Interestingly enough, this nostalgia for the past is one which isn’t rooted in even the slightest of personal experiences.
In America after World War II, we know we enjoyed what’s referred to as a golden age of growth. There is some real truth to this: between 1945 and the 1970s, the USA experienced significant, if not unprecedented economic growth, rising real wages, and a discernible decline in measures of inequality. Entry-level jobs here regularly paid enough to support a comfortable life. You could actually get an apartment with such a job!
Public trust in the government was at a relative high too, naturally. What was there to be all angry about? A typical 1950s apartment in NYC had a rent of about a tenth of the average worker’s monthly income. Meanwhile, today, the average young person in virtually any non-rural populated area may be spending half or more of their paychecks on housing. If they can afford living on their own at all. We see all these youngsters living with their parents nowadays even into their 20s for a reason, after all.
Nonetheless, historians emphasize that this idealized image of America in those days is rather partial. This “golden age” was rooted in widespread exclusion, inequality, and very infamously, segregation. Segregation was still legal and brutally enforced. Women’s roles in society remained restricted. The LGBT community were completely out of the picture, facing immense persecution as routine. And, given the relative homogeneity of the country’s demographics, religious and cultural norms were uniform and bore unequal power dynamics.
Thus, what some or many people, of any generation for that matter, recall as community and “stability” in this country, the so-called golden age, was for many others an era of marginalization.
I then raise the question: was this cohesive “true America” a reality? Or is it just construed today, by a selective, comforting mythical status to fulfill some emotional void we Americans experience in contemporary civics?
Let me broaden this a bit. Consider the United Kingdom after Brexit. Many younger people have expressed profound cultural mourning, feeling disconnected from a national identity they grew up with. An identity rooted in European integration rather than the, interpretably, glorious imperial past that older Brexit supporters nostalgically invoked.
So maybe this sense of civic mourning isn’t inherently American. Maybe it’s an understandable type of safeguard, an innate response we as human beings give to shield ourselves from rapid societal change, and worse yet, political fragmentation. Not to mention, for younger people like myself especially, the increasing difficulty — quite unprecedented in modern times — for us to achieve economic security.
But what are we mourning even, and what can we learn from these memories, even if mythologized?
I am also curious how this may resonate elsewhere, in other countries or cultures. Does your nation have its own “lost era” mourned by certain generations? And how does one grapple with the abyss between the myths of nostalgia and the reality of history?