The past is ever-present in American Culture. The Republic was founded as Roman fan fiction. The lost Republic was a grand age before the corruption of Kings. A bit further up the coast, they were more worried about the original lost golden age back in the garden. The key is that the past must be mythic and unreachable. As our time marched on, we gained new and different histories to worship. In the birth pangs of modern mass culture, they were romanticizing the freedom of Westward Expansion. Of course, this ignores the fact people already lived on the land, and most of the disputes started as colonizers found more resources worth exploiting and pushed indigenous populations farther west.

The boomers absorbed all that Code era Hollywood and early TV to create an imagined version of the 50s. It's no coincidence that these wash out everyone inconvenient to dominant cultural narratives. They were building an idea that what was lost was an America easy to digest because everyone knew their place in the hierarchy. Everyone that didn't fit the mold was simply erased from the conversation.

It's easy to dunk on Conservatives in the US. Their weirdly inconsistent obsessions with tradition, consumerism, obedience, and conquest make for a haze of beliefs. The left has its lost utopias. Every Democrat since Carter has been running on some permutation of FDR's New Deal. Others are trying to channel the original labor movement, though usually skipping over the Pinkerton's slaughtering strikers and Anarchists lobbing bombs.

The Boomers famously had their Back to the Land movements. Communes based on the joy of subsistence farming were supposed to free us from the prison of industrial society. We were just all freer when we were just getting by. This works as the other side to the cultural coin of the Western tropes. The "noble savage" idea that's just as racist, romanticizing unknown cultures into saints benevolently rejecting modern life, not victims of colonialism denied equality.

What all these have in common is the present is intolerable in some way. Values are corrupted, usually, through some aspect of modern life that can be blamed on an outgroup—their foreign influence corrupting pure values. And there's some idealized past that we need to get back to; the more unreal, the better.

It becomes even more corrosive when the culture lacks a shared vision for the future. As the future shock of the first part of the 21st-century sets in as the whiplash to the exponential growth of technology in the last century, people aren't sure that we'll survive the present. Global problems seem insolvable, and economic and political power is consolidating farther away from individuals.

Valid or not, when we face uncertainty, an imagined and "corrupted past" allows us, someone, to blame.

Free Stock photos by Vecteezy