SOUTHWARK, N.H. – DEKA 4, 126 PM
The air was stuffy in the cramped, pre-War auditorium on Port Williams’ east side when Dr. Oliver Proxmire took the stage on a chilly winter evening in 21 PM. Dr. Proxmire was a visiting historian, touring the country preaching his gospel about the events leading up to the Milito and the world that had been lost. His views were unorthodox – he openly mocked the accepted historical narrative that the War had been most acutely caused by a mis-identified radar report on the eastern frontier. He believed that it was an innate lack of restraint on the part of Ylrikians that ultimately led to catastrophe, and that it was indeed the eastern empire that had fired first.
Whereas common history had diagnosed the top-down military hierarchy and over-emphasis on offensive weapons versus defensive monitoring as the primary drivers of the Hegelio-Ferrian Empire’s jumpstarting of the apocalypse, Dr. Proxmire’s hypothesis meant that no such critical self-analysis was necessary. With the blood of billions cleansed from the Empire’s hands – after all, who wouldn’t retaliate such a barbarous action as a nuclear first strike? – one could focus on the good, or at the very least, a cheery facsimile of the good. People were better fed under the Empire, better clothed, and were not subjected to the moral scourges of so-called “redistributive justice,” “land reform,” and “workplace democracy.” The economy boomed, Proximire claimed, and men of merit were able to rise to the top in the old Empire.
Questions from the audience in the fiercely revolutionary, republican Port Williams were predictably hostile. What answer did Proxmire’s musings have to the higher childhood and maternal mortality rates under the Crown? What answer did he have regarding the hunger and poverty experienced by many in this supposed orderly, pre-apocalyptic utopia?
Towards the end of Dr. Proxmire’s remarks, a man yelled, “all you peddle is nostalgia, Doctor! You have no facts on your side, only nostalgia!”
“Well, my dear fellow,” Proxmire responded, shouting into the darkened auditorium. “If love of country, if love of Church, if love of order and certainty can be reduced to nostalgia, then you shall find that in all of us lives a hungry and wistful nostalgic.”
Proxmire’s “nostalgicism” became a critical component of the growing Conservative movement throughout the 20s and 30s. Men like Lionel Upchurch, an influential leader in the New Hegelion movement which sought to colonize the far north across the Great Inland Sea as a Hegelionic ethnostate, were early adopters of the nostalgicist creed. They decried what they called cosmopolitan intellectuals for consistently tarnishing the pre-War Empire as a morally bankrupt polity incapable of redemption.
For more on New Hegelion and the eventual Civil War, read my ongoing series on Phillip Gladstone, the president during the Uniguitan Civil War.
Others, like Enrico Carmelo, found a base in the socially conservative working class wards of places like the reindustrializing Western Seaboard and southern Golden Coast. Using War-era antipathies, memories of the nuclear inferno, and the threat of competition from immigrants from the East, Carmelo weaponized nostalgia to stoke racial tension and bring previously Communalist workingmen into the Conservative fold. When he eventually became president in 40 PM, Carmelo prioritized “Great Capital Projects” which included depictions of Uniguitan (and Hegelio-Ferrian) history in the form of monuments, murals, and sculptures. Walls in rural schools were painted to depict rural, pre-radiation agricultural bounty, and in urban schools to memorialize the grandeur of pre-War Imperial architecture. The National Milito Memorial, intended to be a politically secular monument to the War, was transformed into a memorial of Ylrikian violence.
When Carmelo fell in 47 PM after an ill-fated self-coup attempt, “nostalgicism” became something extremely distasteful. It was considered a vulgar relic of a different time. It persisted in a dramatically reduced form in the Security and Justice Party until it was banned in 92 PM, and in a powerful though minority ultraright faction within the Conservative Party. In 88 PM, the immensely charismatic right-winger Howard Sanck captured 47% of the vote in the Conservative Party presidential primary. Ultimately, the most hardline adherents of nostalgicism helped lead the nation into civil war in the 90s through their breakaway ethnically homogenous New Hegelion. As a result of the civil war, nostalgicism once again was confined to the ideological fringe.
At least, temporarily.
At a ballfield in Southwark, a tony suburb a few miles outside of Eaton, Conservative Councilor William Updyke riles up the assembled crowd. At the center of an arrangement of bleachers, the bespectacled 45-year-old archconservative leader of the party’s ‘Patriots’ faction tells a familiar story of woe.
“For decades now, the elites in Nova Espero have been building a Federation that works for other people, not for you,” he tells the crowd to hoots and cheers. “They’ve opened our borders so that people from other countries can come in and take your jobs, take your housing, and take your kids’ place in their school.”
“And in those schools,” he continues, “they tell your children that to be Western is to make war, enslave, and destroy. And I don’t know about you, but I know those to be lies, damned lies, and slander, in that order.”
In 116 PM, then-freshman Councilor Updyke helped found the Patriots faction alongside a dozen or so other conservative lawmakers. Their manifesto decried Conservative leadership at the national and commonwealth level for, “failing to protect our national customs and culture,” and “no longer being the vanguard of our national character.” In 117 PM, Updyke faced rebukes from co-partisans and even a censure from the Conservative Central Committee for saying that relations between Uniguita and New Hegelion should be normalized.
Less than a decade later, the Patriots now make up a little over a quarter of the Conservative delegation in Nova Espero, and have even gained control in a number of commonwealths such as Zoldhegyek. The Patriots’ growing influence has resulted in anywhere from a quarter to over half of the Conservatives’ electoral list in some commonwealths being composed of far-right candidates. At the Southwark rally, enthusiastic, smiling volunteers hand out sample ballots with Patriot endorsees helpfully marked, as Updyke quotes misleading statistics that Central Mountain immigrants to the Federation are ten times more likely to commit a crime than their non-immigrant counterparts. In fact, according to the 125 PM Year in Crime Survey from the Gendarmes, such immigrant Uniguitans were less likely to commit a crime than their native-born neighbors.
William Updyke’s version of nostalgia is one that is generally unfamiliar to the Uniguitan political scene. Whereas Carmelo’s aped the Empire, New Hegelion’s aped even earlier, more racialized constructions of ‘Hegelionism’, Updyke’s is more modern. Updyke still attempts to whitewash the history of the Empire and some of his lieutenants have caught flak for making private remarks supporting New Hegelion, but he views with particularly rose-tinted glasses the period between the War and the rise of the left-wing presidencies of Valdes and Kaplo in the late 10s and 20s. In a recent interview with the right-wing magazine News Source, Updyke spoke poetically of the, “small towns and villages that weathered the flames together and were forged into a stronger alloy than was ever possible in peacetime.”
This sort of romantic, immediate post-War narrative generally focuses on places like Nova Espero and Puerto Ostra, where liberal and left-wing radicals created democratic, republican settlements based on mutual cooperation and equality. President Viktoria Kaplo, a hero to the modern left, spoke in her inaugural address of, “ashen, war-bedraggled peoples emerging from the rubble of a dead Empire to rebuild not in that Empire’s image, but in the image of their dreams, their hopes, and their aspirations.”
But Updyke’s “stronger alloy” communities were of a different character than Nova Espero and Puerto Ostra, and to him, that is a crucial distinction. At a rally in Zoldhegyek to support then-candidate Laszlo Barcza’s bid for that commonwealth’s premiership last year, he sang the praises of the, “tiny villages and hamlets, united in their faith, in their families, and in their communities who used their traditions to navigate the apocalypse. It is to these brave and noble people we owe our survival. Without them, Western civilization would have no doubt collapsed.” He compared them positively to places like Nova Espero and Puerto Ostra, saying that, “communities that were the result of shared values, tradition, and heritage were stronger than those born out of artificial ideas and ideology.”
“Too much credit is given to the cities,” he continued. “While they were debating and philosophizing, we were rebuilding our country from the ground up.”
On first glance, the two stories of early post-War Uniguita might sound similar. Both are stories of community and perseverance through extraordinary adversity. But while Nova Espero and Puerto Ostra, and other similar republican settlements throughout the country were founded (or at least reconstituted) on the ideals of liberty and freedom, the places Updyke talks about overwhelmingly were not.
Most maintained the pre-War systems of borderline feudal agricultural practices with the local nobility and churchmen still at the top of the area hierarchy. Port Williams College historian Dr. Richard Carlsbad, who specializes in Collapse-era history, said that rural areas were oftentimes, “rump states of the Empire in miniature; they acted as though the War had not happened, aside from the disease outbreaks, supply shortages, refugees, and crop failures. They kept the same institutions, same social mores, and same structures.” These “pre-republican” areas had lower literacy rates, higher childhood and maternal mortality rates, and more stagnant economies than their republican counterparts.
Additionally, such places were more prone to a xenophobic outlook on the post-War world where the dreaded outside world lay not at the border with Ylrikia but within the viewing range of the village churchtower. Old ethnic hatreds, subdued but not eliminated under the watchful eye of the Emperor, boiled over into outright conflict. In the borderlands between Zoldhegyek and Pravo, for example, ethnic Zolds used the post-War chaos as a pretext to commit pogroms against Pravish neighbors. Similar circumstances befell small communities across the former Empire, with minorities – particularly the small community of ethnic Ylrikians – scapegoated and castigated for the War.
To read more about Pravo’s post-War and current experiences, read the following article on the Pravo Self Defense Forces.
Discussing the early years of the post-War period and citing the resilience of that “Survivor Generation” is a nostalgia all Uniguitans are vulnerable to. Updyke’s nostalgia for his particular context is novel and convenient, however. He can lionize the monocultural state of the great multitude of post-War villages that dotted the landscape and tap into that nostalgia to support his anti-immigrant rhetoric without resorting to naked, racial vulgarities that left members of the old SJP as ostracized dinosaurs.
Back in Unuo, I cited polls that found hard-right Conservatives like Premier Barcza and Councilor Updyke had the support of one in four members of their party. More recent polling conducted in the run-up to this year’s midterm elections shows that their support has risen to one in three within the party that is heavily favored to form the next Common Council majority.
Around a decade ago, Updyke and his acolytes were still a fringe faction within a right-leaning party that had been out of power for twenty years. Now, they are a force to be reckoned with. Nostalgia is returning to Uniguita. Unless we want its consequences to repeat themselves, we would do well to keep an eye on it.