Chasing Lost Edens

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, August 20, 2026

 

Political types are often tempted to ascribe their opponents’ undesirable ideological positions to their being paid, evil, stupid, or in thrall in one way or another to a dastardly enemy lurking somewhere behind the scenes. This temptation is understandable but misguided. There are, indeed, a few among us whose commitments are the product of perfidy, ignorance, or greed, but mostly we remain infantry within what Thomas Sowell famously termed our “conflict of visions.” Why is it the case that, as Sowell put it, “the same familiar faces can be found glaring at each other from opposite sides of the political fence, again and again”? Because, he proposed, each side is animated by an opposite “sense of how the world works.” In consequence, Sowell concluded, the bulk of our contemporary political disagreements are the result not of varying exposure to the facts but of differing moral intuitions and value judgments.

 

Sowell was writing in the 1980s, and he focused on the divide between the left, which exhibits what he terms the “unconstrained vision,” and the right, which exhibits the “constrained vision.” To my mind, his work is as persuasive today as it was then, and it continues to explain many of the fault lines within our politics. Nevertheless, I might offer an addendum to his theory that I believe is of growing importance in our era: that, in addition to one’s view of human nature, the most potent predictor of one’s current political disposition is whether one is comfortable living in America as it actually exists in the year 2026 or one so resents the present for its many perceived failings that one wishes one had lived in an earlier time.

 

Consider how common it is at the moment to hear people on both the left and the right talk of a given period within the recent past as if it represented Eden before the Fall. On the left, the period in question might be the New Deal, or any time “before Reagan,” or perhaps any day up to and including the one before Donald Trump became president. On the right, the period might be the 1920s, or the 1950s, or the week before Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard. Pick an epoch; the details don’t especially matter. What matters is that, for whatever reason — be it the latest cost of housing or health care or burritos; the existence of billionaires; a sense that there are insufficient opportunities for the young; the decline of religious belief — millions of people have decided that the past was preferable to the present, and those millions of people do not sort into neat left/right groups.

 

That alone sets this predictor apart from the others. One would expect self-described conservatives to be more prone to nostalgia, and yet polling shows that, in 2026, self-described Democrats are more likely to take a backward glance than self-described Republicans. Asked earlier this year by Pew whether America’s best days were “ahead of us” or “behind us,” only 34 percent of Democrats answered “ahead of us,” compared with 46 percent of Republicans. Historical polling suggests that this gap is a by-product of the incumbent president’s being a Republican and that it will be reversed when a Democrat is next voted into the White House. But this underscores rather than diminishes the point — which is that within both parties, a majority of voters are of the view that modern life is inferior to what preceded it.

 

This matters, for just as a man who has been given two weeks to live will make profoundly different choices from those of a man who expects to live for another 60 years, so an American who is comfortable with contemporary life — and who expects to remain so — will behave differently than one who is not. Among other things, those two individuals will adopt differing opinions about the integrity of their civic institutions, about the virtue of their regnant culture, about the wisdom of their fellow citizens, and more. One will become habitually pessimistic, the other habitually optimistic. One will be open to change; the other will feel perpetually in danger of losing his national inheritance. One will be more likely than the other to have children, build a business, and otherwise engage with what Edmund Burke described as the “little platoon we belong to in society.”

 

***

 

Once one acknowledges this divide, one sees it everywhere. Take, for example, the recent intramural fight over Christopher Nolan’s production of The Odyssey. Ostensibly, the fight was over a movie. In reality, though, it was a proxy argument about how comfortable right-wingers ought to be with modern American life. On one side of this argument were a bunch of people who are so appalled by the state of things that, having learned that the cast would include a black woman as Helen of Troy and a trans actor as Sinon, they considered even seeing the movie as an act of cultural treason. On the other side were a bunch of people who, while they may criticize the state of things, are fundamentally happy in the world. I am a conservative, and I suspected I might agree with some of the criticisms that the movie’s antagonists had offered up. But I went to see it anyway — and I enjoyed it anyway — because I regarded its flaws less as an indication of the ongoing collapse of Western civilization and more as nicks on the hull of a generally admirable and satisfying work. Which, of course, is pretty much how I see America in 2026. Yes, I have a series of strong political opinions, which I share enthusiastically — sometimes caustically — in this very magazine. But I would not want to live anywhere else. I would not want to live in another time. And, if I tally up the good and bad, I find myself filled with optimism, gratitude, and the conviction that the future is bright.

 

One might suppose this means that I do not take my strong political opinions seriously — or at least that I am willing to ignore them in favor of thinking happy thoughts. But that is untrue. I am, for example, sincerely pro-life, which in practice means that I consider the vast majority of American states to be sanctioning murder. I am a constitutional originalist, which in practice means that I consider an enormous amount of what the federal government does every day to be flatly illegal. I dislike the president, as I have disliked every president we have had since I moved to this country in 2011. I think that the media is a national disgrace, that academia has fatally beclowned itself, and that the entertainment industry has lost its way. If you were to invite me to gripe, you would, after the end of the second hour, wish to throw me out of an airplane.

 

It’s just that I also think that we live in the midst of an unparalleled miracle, and that, while every age features terrible problems, not every age has the upsides that ours enjoys. I could rehearse, as I often have, the intellectual case in defense of this view. But here’s the thing: While making that case is important, doing so will not be sufficient to overcome the great divide I am describing, because the great divide I am describing is not the result of disagreement about the facts. Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley Jr. had access to the same facts, and yet one of them experienced life as tragedy and was perpetually uncomfortable in the world, while the other offered his critiques with sprezzatura and remained at ease even among his adversaries. Could either man have argued the other into altering his disposition? I think not.

 

I do not mean to suggest that debate is futile, that political conversions are impossible, or that the attitudes displayed by our public figures are irrelevant to the fate of the nation. If I believed that the future of this country were foreordained, I would never write another word. I merely mean to propose that, as our politics becomes more muddled, it is worth looking outside of the traditional ideological axes to determine what is going on. If one does, one will find some strange bedfellows. In theory, the so-called post-liberal conservatives and the democratic socialists are sworn enemies, and yet if one listens to the descriptions of American life that both promulgate, one discovers that they actually have a great deal in common. Both groups believe that American life has been hollowed out by shadowy forces, both believe that this hollowing out was made inevitable by the design of the American system, and both believe that the solutions to America’s problems come from thinkers from other places and times. So similar are these two groups in disposition, in fact, that they routinely reserve their fiercest anger for those who are nominally on their side. The democratic socialists hate the moderate Democrats more than anyone else on earth, while the post-liberals are so incandescently angry with the Reaganites that they respond to any suggestion that life in the United States is tolerable by insisting triumphantly that such sentiments will turn people into socialists.

 

And perhaps they will. But by rights, they ought not to, because life in the United States is, indeed, tolerable — and usually a great deal better than that. Negativity may well be a character trait, but it is one that, like sloth or self-indulgence or impatience, ought to be treated as a flaw and worked on. Nostalgia may well be an inevitable hankering, but when it causes one to undervalue one’s actual life, it ought to be suppressed as an impediment to flourishing. (There is a good reason that nostalgia was originally classed as a disease.) A traditional conservative concern was that the arrival of mass affluence would lead people to forget by what mechanism they were liberated from want and thereby to kill the golden goose. To this, conservatives might want to add a related worry: that, having been freed from the need to fret about their subsistence, Americans would come to consider their own time frivolous and fall in love with the phantoms of a golden era that did not exist — and never will.