On nostalgia

I was reading this beautiful post by Mark Clavier and this passage reminded of a quote that Steven Pinker often says:

Nostalgia has long been progressivism’s favourite straw man. To dismiss something as “just nostalgic” is to pass sentence without hearing the case. Architects do it when they wave away Neoclassical or Gothic revivals as unserious. Politicians do it when they cast anyone who remembers “the good old days” as fearful, backward, or selfish. And to be fair, there is a shallow kind of nostalgia abroad on the Right—a yearning for 1950s America, for Britain’s imperial splendour, or for some hazy cultural coherence that likely never existed outside of memory’s wishful retouching.

The quote:

The best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory (Franklin Pierce Adams).

For the origins of the quote, see quote investigator.