If you have ever watched "The Office," you probably remember Andy Bernard's line: "I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them." Warm and deeply human, right? Yet its political incarnation is profoundly dangerous.
Nostalgia is having a moment. Or rather, right now, nostalgia is the moment. There is a collective longing for a simpler, more legible past, endlessly amplified by algorithms. In Türkiye, this manifests as a peculiar idealization of the 1990s, a decade now remembered as a golden age of freedom, cultural vibrancy and middle-class comfort.
To be clear, I don't take issue with longing for the past. Having grown up in the 1990s, though, I clearly remember that it was not all fun and games. And a trained mind must practice a kind of metacognition when it comes to memory, asking why one feels what one feels.
In "The Future of Nostalgia," Svetlana Boym draws a distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia stresses the return home and attempts a reconstruction of the lost homeland. Reflective nostalgia, in contrast, dwells in the longing itself. Whereas the former builds monuments, the latter lingers on ruins. What we are witnessing today is restorative nostalgia on an industrial scale.
Here is what the 1990s actually looked like in Türkiye. The decade opened with a state of emergency in the southeast that would last until 2002. Disappearances, extrajudicial killings and a low-intensity conflict displaced hundreds of thousands. In Istanbul, bomb attacks were a periodic urban reality. The 1996 Susurluk scandal illuminated the murky nexus between the state, organized crime and paramilitary networks. Economically, the decade was defined by the 1994 currency collapse, the 1999 earthquake shock and the 2001 banking meltdown. In other words, to remember the 1990s as an era of stability and prosperity is amnesia, not nostalgia.
So why the longing? Because the longing is not really about the 1990s. People are mourning a past that existed, but a set of conditions that have since been lost. Most importantly, the post-pandemic era has severed the link between labor and accumulation. Finance capitalism, turbocharged by zero-interest-rate policies, cryptocurrency speculation and asset inflation, made it increasingly easy to become wealthy without producing anything, and devastatingly difficult to build security by producing everything, thus dealing a heavy blow to the middle-class compact of “study hard, work hard, live well.” To make matters worse, the social solidarity networks that once cushioned these shocks have frayed under urbanization and atomization.
The nostalgia is partly for a world in which people exerted some level of control. Restorative nostalgia, as Boym warned, knows two main narrative plots: the restoration of origins and the conspiracy theory. Both are present here. Both flatten a complicated history into a simple story of loss and blame.
"Make America Great Again" is Boym's concept rendered as a campaign slogan, but the logic is not uniquely American. Wherever the middle class finds itself disempowered, this restorative narrative offers the same seductive package: “your loss is real, the past was better, and someone is to blame.”
The danger is what restorative nostalgia does with that grievance: it invents a past adequate to the pain of the present, then demands we return to it. The 1990s that live in collective memory, prosperous, free, culturally self-confident, are a construction assembled from selective fragments and wishful retrospection. It has grown so potent that it threatens Turkish society as a whole. Pointing this out is not to dismiss the pain, but to insist that the pain deserves better than a phantom cure.
Andy Bernard got one thing right: We rarely recognize the good days while we are in them. But metacognition demands we go further. The days we are convinced were good, very often, were not. And the sooner we reckon with that, the sooner we can address what is actually broken in the present.
