[ Return to the review of “Evil Genuises.” ]I also thought: Mea culpa. For those last two decades, I’d prospered and thrived in the new political economy. Apart from cellphones and computers, almost nothing anymore that was new or just a bit old looked or sounded either distinctly new or distinctly old. By the late 1960s, the 1950s looked so ’50s, and by the early 1980s, the 1960s looked so ’60s. The political right rode in on that floodtide of nostalgia, and then, ironically, the old-time every-man-for-himself political economy they reinstalled, less fair and less secure, drove people deeper into their various nostalgic havens for solace.

Source: New York Times August 11, 2020 18:20 UTC