Nostalgia IS a Strategy

A different take on the end of the liberal world order

by Tim Leberecht

Democracy. What a nostalgic concept. What a lofty ideal. That we, the people hold the power. That the government is us. That those in positions of authority represent us—temporarily. That we can end their reign through elections. That we can choose among competing visions of our future, individually and collectively. That we can curate. Pick and choose. Have agency.

It’s a beautiful idea.

Yet there is no agency without accountability, as psychologist Elaine Kasket pointed out at our Davos reception, where we explored the link between the state of the world, the state of our organizations, and the state of our minds.

This is particularly true of democracy. Without agency and accountability—without a willingness to invest in the process, not merely the outcomes; without dedication to the nitty-gritty of politics—democracy will rot from the inside. Democracy is a marathon, not a sprint, and the finish line is rarely as rewarding as advertised. In fact, reaching it is often when the whole process starts again.

It is precisely the absence of these qualities that brought us here: the sense of dwindling agency, the lack of accountability among those meant to represent us, and fatigue with the process—because it is hard, exhausting, and demands stamina and attention, both scarce resources in an age of systematic depletion and distraction. All of this has culminated in the profound democratic crisis we are now witnessing.

Now is the time of monsters, and the barbarians are here

The main culprit is not difficult to identify. Capitalism and democracy have always been uneasy bedfellows, yet they managed to coexist to mutual benefit. But when social and cognitive damage—what economists euphemistically call “externalities”—left too many behind; when wealth inequality, social isolation, and hopelessness became intolerable, populism found fertile ground. Extremism and nationalism are nothing more than the political manifestations of loneliness.

So here we are, in a moment of “rupture,” as Canadian Prime Minister and Davos darling Mark Carney observed, after years of calling it a “transition.” The consensus is growing that not only is the liberal world order as we knew it gone, but that the very foundations of our humanity are being renegotiated—through a Hobbesian, dog-eat-dog worldview, amplified by a return to raw military power and the rise of AI, which, in many ways, is the uber-dog.

We are in limbo.

The time of monsters is now. The barbarians, long lingering at the gates, have arrived in full force. In her poignant Davos reflections, Alina Nikolaou invokes C. P. Cavafy’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1904). In the poem, the barbarians never come. In Davos, they did. One in four attendees was American; Trump arrived with nearly his entire cabinet. Bruno Giussani aptly dubbed it “Mar-a-Davos.” The obscenity and brute stupidity on display were—even by Trump White House standards—unprecedented.

Something that had broken before broke again. And with it, the last hope for salvation.

Everyone felt it. Carney found the words.

An aching to return home

Yet one line of his—widely praised—troubled me. It took a week, and far too many AI-generated Davos recaps, to articulate why:

“Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

At first glance, it makes you nod. Who wants to be backward-looking, clinging to the past when excitement and readiness for the future supposedly determine today’s winners? Nostalgia, by definition, is for losers.

But let’s remember what nostalgia actually means.

Coined by seventeenth-century Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, who attributed soldiers’ mental and physical ailments to their longing to return home, “nostalgia” combines the Greek nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain). Nostalgia is the pain of an old wound—being cut off from something profoundly meaningful. It is not merely a longing for a bygone era in which the world felt coherent and imbued with meaning; it is a timeless, existential condition that persists regardless of circumstance.

No one captured this better than Don Draper in Mad Men—a show built entirely on nostalgia—in his legendary pitch to his Kodak clients for their carousel slide projector:

“It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship; it’s a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the Wheel; it’s called the Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels—around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.”

Nostalgia has long been an evergreen in cinema, too—perhaps most vividly in Casablanca, when Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman reassure one another of their most precious, exclusive possession: “We’ll always have Paris.”

So when Mark Carney dismissed nostalgia as a strategy, I couldn’t help but wonder: what is it that we will still have? And to return to Johannes Hofer’s soldiers longing for home—what is that home, exactly, for us?

Humanism is the antidote to nihilism

“We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it,” Carney proclaimed.

The liberal order may indeed be dead. We should acknowledge—honestly and without illusion—the erosion of the governance structures and systems we built. But let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater. The values upon which that order rested—mutual trust, reciprocity, the rule of law, international cooperation—are not outdated. They are foundational to human flourishing.

The infrastructure of our politics—our operating system—yes, that needs a rebuild.

This distinction matters. The intention was right. The form is now obsolete.

The values that shaped the best of human civilization—the miracle of coordinating billions of lives in hostile environments and allowing many of them to flourish; the capacity to create beauty, to feel awe and wonder; to love and be loved; to form friendships; to show solidarity and kinship; to insist on civility, dignity, or at least decency—these values still hold.

They are humanistic because they are deeply human.

It is tempting to resign to the belief that Western civilization—Europe as its supposed pinnacle—was merely a veneer over a brutal Hobbesian reality. In some ways, it is easier to admit we were wrong all along. It is far harder to insist that we are still right.

Trump marks the end of an era. He is what happens when a system vomits out its accumulated poison.

But this is our body. This is our home.

We should not abandon it simply because one narcissistic nihilist—with the cognitive depth of a toddler—wants to blow it up for the cheap thrill of exercising power for its own sake.

Trump’s regime is fascist (it still puzzles me that this remains a point of debate), yet it differs from historical predecessors in one crucial respect: Trumpism has no ideology beyond business. In this values-free universe of economic reductionism, everything is transactional. Everything is a deal. Budget bills are “big” and “beautiful.”

This matters, because we must not stoop to his level by accepting transactionalism as the final language of politics. When Ursula von der Leyen announces “EU Inc.” and Mark Carney dismisses nostalgia as strategy, they are speaking Trump’s language rather than resisting it. Lost in this business framing is the need for something more refined—humanism, the most enduring form of resistance against any attempt to strip us of our humanity.

Davos reminds us of this. The village is home to the “Magic Mountain,” the setting of Thomas Mann’s novel of the same name. As Alex Ross notes, the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles symbolizes another dark chapter in American history. Mann fled Nazi Germany in 1938, settled in L.A., became a U.S. citizen, and embraced American values. Yet in 1952, alarmed by McCarthyism, he emigrated again, warning:

“Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, all in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency’… That is how it started in Germany.”

The house narrowly escaped demolition before being acquired by the German government to become a cultural center. Then, in January last year—coinciding with Trump 2.0’s inauguration—it magically survived the L.A. wildfires.

Mann was not alone. The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno had already diagnosed America in the 1940s as a kind of reality show:

“Men are reduced to walk-on parts in a monster documentary film which has no spectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on the screen.”

“Where is your fucking decency?”

Today, politics is spectacle. The money grab is shameless. The opportunism of business leaders unfolds in broad daylight. The aberration has become the norm; distortion has become reality. Apple CEO Tim Cook dined at the White House the day Alex Pretti was killed. This is not merely bad optics or poor judgment. It is a symptom of a culture rotten at the core.

It brought to mind Julianne Moore’s legendary eruption in Magnolia. Her character is caring for her dying husband, asking a pharmacist for pain medication, only to be met with suspicion. Her rage is incandescent:

“I have sickness all around me and you fucking ask me about my life? Have you seen death in your bed? Where’s your fucking decency?”

That was my reaction to Davos. Where is your fucking decency? Or, in the language of Trump troll No. 1, Gavin Newsom: Have some balls.

It may surprise no one that the World Economic Forum kissed Trump’s ring, designing a program seemingly tailored to his ideological appetite. But witnessing the sheer, coordinated opportunism of world and business leaders—lining up for a front-row seat at the “greatest showman of all time”—was profoundly appalling.

Why did no one walk out when he insulted them? When he attacked the very principles the WEF claims to stand for: dialogue, stakeholder capitalism, inclusion, care?

I am exhausted by the wavering and ethical relativism. By caution masquerading as prudence. By experts and analysts contorting their moral frameworks to rationalize Trump as a necessary catalyst of a new order—warning us to “get on board or be left behind.” Their stance is no stance at all. Their supposed realism is often just fear of ending up on the wrong side of history. They call themselves future-oriented, yet focus solely on extracting Trump dividends in the present. By betraying the past, they betray the future.

A more-than-human world must not become a less-than-human one

I am equally irritated by those celebrating a post-human or transhuman era, with AI as its prophet. It is not only a patriarchal fantasy—transhuman is just code for post-feminine—it is also a cop-out.

Yes, AI and interspecies awareness remind us that humans are part of a more-than-human world, and that our dominance may be waning. But a more-than-human world must not become a less-than-human one, as Greek artist Yolanda Markopoulou told me last week. That line has stayed with me.

We still matter. Trump—of all people—proves it.

I am no devotee of the Great Man Theory of history. I prefer complexity, systems, interdependence. Yet in Trump’s case, it is impossible to deny the damage a single, profoundly flawed individual has inflicted. We invest hundreds of billions in AI to surpass human intelligence while passively watching one defective human intelligence wage war on human civilization itself. The irony is deafening.

None of this denies the need for military strength. Liberal societies must defend themselves against authoritarian tyranny. But raw power is not the only power.

The American Century was built as much on soft power as on force—on persuasion, trust, and spirit. Soft power evaporates the moment we stop being soft.

This is worth remembering as we resist—not only the autocrat, but the temptation to abandon what we once held sacred.

As David Brooks wrote in his farewell column for The New York Times:

“Every healthy society rests on some shared conception of the sacred… and when that goes away, anxiety, atomization, and a slow descent toward barbarism are the natural results.”

Humanism, for Brooks, is the antidote to nihilism—the belief that “whatever is lower is more real.” Humanism is the defense of dignity. He refers to Antigone burying her brother, Lincoln rebinding a nation, Martin Luther King Jr. writing from a Birmingham jail, Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs singing Fast Car at the Grammys.

Humanism is the Great Conversation—stretching across millennia, across disciplines, across cultures—forever negotiating the tensions of the human condition without definitive conclusion.

This conversation is nostalgia: an ache for a place we all came from. If we want a future, we must remember it.

Carney is right. Nostalgia is not a strategy.
It is the human condition.

As we shape a post-rupture future, nostalgia is not denial or retreat. It is a compass. A shared faith. A starting point we can always return to: our economy, our common household, our home.

The adage goes: All the light we see comes from the past.

May it guide us forward.

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