In her piece for Harvard Business Review, CCF Director of Research and Public Education, Stephanie Coontz, writes about a pernicious form of nostalgia – a collective nostalgia that involves people identifying more closely with their own group and judging members of other groups more negatively.
Coontz writes, “When such nostalgia gets politicized, it can lead to delusions about a mythical, magical Golden Age of the homeland, supposedly ruined by interlopers. Collective nostalgia invariably involves a denial of the racial, ethnic, and family diversity of the past, as well as its social injustices, creating romanticized myths that are easily refuted by anyone willing to confront historical realities.”
