Recently, a Nintendo Game Boy clone called the Modretro Chromatic hit the market. Its designer’s name is Palmer Luckey, a retro enthusiast whose day job is making weapons of war. This raised questions on Bluesky about why a conservative would long for nostalgia, and why a conservative’s longing for nostalgia is the story. It’s not something you can just write off as an eccentric self contradiction. There are good reasons why conservatives like retro too. Separate from the reasons everyone else likes retro.
It reminded me of something I wrote back when I was 21, very conservative, and even more naive. I visited retro night at a club called the Blue Note, and had mixed feelings about the experience, which I related in 600 words in my weekly column in the student newspaper.
Background
I grew up largely in southeastern Missouri, attending a radically conservative Lutheran church, at the height of the satanic panic. I was raised conservative. It wasn’t just where I lived, it was in my blood. My family helped establish the Ohio Republican Party in the 1850s. My family have been Republicans ever since, with only a few rebellious exceptions here and there. I became one of those rebellious exceptions in my 30s, so I still remember how conservatives think. If you want to know what made me liberal, it was two books: Margin of Safety by Seth Klarman, and the Christian Bible.
Klarman’s assertion that free markets make mistakes was blasphemy to my conservative ears. That’s exactly the same as saying God makes mistakes. (I realize now that’s blasphemy.) But then he proceeded to spend 249 pages telling exactly how he exploited capitalism’s mistakes to become a billionaire. If capitalism didn’t make mistakes, his tricks wouldn’t work.
As for the Bible, I was raised being taught that what we call the Old Testament is mostly fire and brimstone, God bringing wrath down on wicked people. When I read the whole thing for the first time in my 20s, I struggled with my observation that the Old Testament spends a lot more time talking about how we should treat poor people than it does about fire and brimstone. When I read it again in my 30s, it stood out even more. Particularly the verses that say the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was their failure to take care of people living in poverty. Which is not what I was taught in theology class.
And that leads me neatly into what I wrote when I was 21.
It was called Retro-inactive
I arrived for retro night not quite knowing what to expect. After I paid the cover charge, I and walked inside. I didn’t bring a date, so I was mostly there to wallflower and listen to music. Of course I hoped I’d meet someone. But I didn’t expect to.
I didn’t meet anyone but ghosts from my own past that night.
Electric Blue by Icehouse
The experience of being there without a date and the music they were playing–Electric Blue by Icehouse, if memory serves–transported me back to 1988, when I attended my first school dance. Dancing was verboten in my small town I grew up in, except for square dancing. They taught square dancing in school, and I was lousy at it. But in 1988, we moved to the city, where things are a bit more relaxed. Even if I was having a hard time relaxing. Here I was, in a Lutheran school, listening to forbidden music, and watching, if not participating in, a forbidden act. At 14, I felt like I was in the middle of Gomorrah. And at 21, I felt it again.
Sometimes nostalgia is negative. In this case, nostalgia triggered an unpleasant memory I thought I’d forgotten. And I wrote at the time that the song “Help Me I am in Hell” by Nine Inch Nails would have been more appropriate, even if the song was way too new to be retro at the time.
I didn’t have room in my 600-word budget to talk at length about how I handled that memory. In spite of my initial reaction, it didn’t stay unpleasant. Yes, I was at a middle school dance with no date. I know now that one or two of the girls there probably would have danced with me for a song or two if I hadn’t been too shy to ask. But even though I was wallflowering, that dance solidified that I had escaped the repressive life in that stifling small town. I had no idea what to do with my freedom yet, but at least I had it.
Songs that brought back other memories
And some of the songs they played had positive memories associated with them. Shake it Up by The Cars is the first song I remember hearing on the radio when someone other than an adult chose the radio station.
Another song I heard that night was 99 Red Balloons by Nena, a 1983 song about nuclear war. We thought a lot about nuclear war when I was a kid. The school I attended in first grade still had fallout shelter signs posted. Nuclear war was a theme sometimes used in 1980s video games too.
Why I liked retro when I was 21
And that led me to my closing thought. My racist closing thought, for which I apologize now. I don’t have a copy of the original handy but I more or less remember what I wrote before I had to edit it for length.
The people we were afraid of in the 80s didn’t actually want to destroy us. The Soviets threatened us with nukes but we could tell from their reaction to the Challenger disaster that they didn’t actually hate us and didn’t necessarily want to use them any more than we did. As opposed to our enemies in the 90s, who actually did hate us and wanted to destroy us. The 80s were a simpler time, and can be a source of comfort.
How retro nostalgia comforts us
Some of nostalgia’s appeal crosses political boundaries. We all have pleasant memories we like to revisit and/or relive. Any of the five senses can bring back old memories in a powerful way, including the sound of an old song, or the pixelated graphics of an old video game. And no matter our political persuasion, we can enjoy revisiting those.
Many retro Youtubers are politically liberal, and aren’t necessarily cisgender in traditional heterosexual relationships. For many of them, technology provided a career where they could be out and not have to worry about it putting their job in danger. Technology was an enabler, and revisiting its roots is enjoyable and in some cases contributes to their understanding of current technology. They like retro, but see it as a place to visit, not a place to live.
Why conservatives like retro: Fear
But when you’re afraid of something, or someone, nostalgia can bring you another kind of comfort. And that’s key for conservatives, who run on a platform of fear every election cycle. All that talk of being tough is just cover for that deep-seated fear. Every cycle, there’s a new group of people they and voters have to be afraid of. And they run on a platform of returning to a time in the past when that group of people didn’t have the power and influence they have today. If they can convince the right combination of voters to agree, they win elections. If they fail, they lose.
Bob Dole ran for president on a nostalgic tagline. He literally called himself a bridge to the past. It left Bill Clinton no choice but to run as a bridge to the future, and hope that’s what voters would choose. In 1996, voters chose the future.
In 2024, voters chose the past.
The 2024 version has plans to deal with the people they are afraid of, in more explicit and questionably legal terms than usual this time. But there will always be someone else they don’t like. Someone new to fear. And they have to believe it themselves before they can sell the idea to the electorate. That means they will always be looking for a time in the past when that next group was more marginalized than they are today. When your political and economic survival relies on selling fear, and you believe it yourself, you need something to soothe that fear. Retro is an ideal antidote.
In the 1960s, the idea that you could be conservative and still be optimistic for the future started going out of fashion. So the prevailing view of conservatism for a good 60 years has been that you can’t be conservative and optimistic for the future. When you’re not optimistic for the future, the past is all you have. And that’s why conservatives like retro. They need it.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
Like you, I wrote some “conservative” student newspaper columns back in the day that didn’t age well. I’m thinking of that op-ed praising the reelection of Rudy Giuliani as mayor of New York City. Fortunately this was the mid-1990s and our newspaper–and its barebones HTML website–quickly disappeared before it got scooped up by the Wayback Machine, so there’s no surviving copies of the original text. 🙂
As for 1980s nostalgia, I just finished a piece today about a 1988 political firestorm involving Toshiba, which got caught funneling restricted computers to the Soviet Union for use in top-secret submarine design. This was at the tail-end of the anti-Japan hysteria over the tech industry. Members of Congress actually staged a photo-op smashing Toshiba electronics with sledgehammers as part of their push to ban the company from the U.S. outright for “endangering America’s security.”
I remember that Toshiba controversy! In the early 90s, I was recommending Toshiba CD-ROM drives because they were almost as good as NEC drives but a fair bit cheaper. Someone with a longer memory than me took me to task for that, bringing up the submarine incident.
That sounds straightforward enough. Now that we have that answer, let’s ask the complementary question… why do *liberals/progressives* like retro (‘too’)?
See, I’m more or less classically liberal (certainly not on the progressive/far left though, insofar as it has inverted many of the classically liberal values). Despite that, I never saw my “retro” interests as having anything much to do with politics. I simply have deep misgivings about what computing and technology have become – I suppose you could blame a lot of that on capitalism, yes, but it’s the meaning behind them that’s changed for the worse in several ways.
The thing is, if I try to look at it through a political lens, the “conservative” angle is more immediately obvious – as you put it, it’s “the past” and all it represents. One wants to “conserve”, which implies as its subject something that has existed before. Seems like a natural fit for a conservative to be suspicious of the new, and to develop a nostalgia for the old.
So I’m curious: you wrote that eyebrows were raised about the idea of a conservative being into retro stuff. If people were surprised, that implies they instinctively expected this sort of thing to appeal only to liberals/progressives… so, how is that explained? That seems a bit more baffling to me.
I mean, the very notion of progressivism implies seeing the arc of history as proceeding from the negative to the positive. The old is always suspect in some way; the values of our parents and grandparents were always tainted by forms of bigotry, privilege and exclusion, even when they meant well; books and films older than a generation or two have to come with disclaimers regarding the sensibility of the modern reader/viewer, and their creators always end up being considered ‘problematic’ in some fashion.
I’ve seen it argued (by progressives) that nostalgia itself is an *immoral* act – because it assigns a positive value, and yearns for, periods in history when the less privileged were excluded. I even recall watching an advertisement for some computer or other from the 1980s or early 1990s – there was one commenter all up in arms, calling it awful and disgusting and demanding for it to be taken down, because “only white men” were present in the ad.
So I’ll genuinely ask… what is “the progressive/liberal case” for being into retro computing? I mean, what’s the political angle which (supposedly) makes it more natural for liberals, so much so that they’re surprised to see conservatives in the hobby? I’m truly interested in this perspective.
I added a link to this post to an earlier post titled “Why We Like Retro” that I think applies to everyone else. I don’t know that it’s specifically a political thing with non-conservatives. A large number of retro people give off a progressive or at least neutral vibe. So when an extreme right-winger shows up, it’s a bit shocking. The maker of this console, and a certain retro Youtuber with an affinity for rotary tools (not gonna name names but that should be a pretty big hint) come to mind.
Not sure why I didn’t originally have that link in there, sorry about that. I added a link in the first paragraph.
I didn’t ever think of nostalgia as a left or right wing act. It is interesting for someone to make such a bold assertion that any one group would not be nostalgic for the parts of their past that brought them joy. I suppose those that make such assertions live in a kind of bubble or echo chamber. Also since it was on BlueSky… I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.