The Tangled Net #14: The Weaponization of Nostalgia
When longing for "home" became the most powerful political force of our age
By Brian Stefan, LCSW
California Grief Center | The Grief Wave
🌊 TL;DR
Globalization created a worldwide crisis of belonging that politicians exploit. Nostalgia-based politics like Brexit, Trump, and Modi taps into genuine grief over cultural disruption and economic devastation.
We now know:
Rapid cultural change creates psychological distress that shapes political behavior
These movements succeed by acknowledging real losses that liberal politics often dismisses
But the “solutions” offered—ethnic nationalism, authoritarianism, scapegoating—weaponize legitimate grief while solving nothing
The question: Can we address legitimate grief without enabling movements that transform loss into violence?

Facing the Longing Together
Margaret grew up in Sunderland, in the Northeast of England, where her grandfather worked at the shipyards and her father at the car plant. By 2016, the shipyards had been closed for decades and the car plant employed a fraction of its former workforce, mostly on temporary contracts.
Her neighborhood, once tightly knit through union halls, working men’s clubs, and shared employment, had fragmented. Young people left for London or Manchester. Polish immigrants moved into houses that used to belong to families she’d known her whole life. The high street where she’d shopped since childhood filled with pound stores and payday lenders.
When the Brexit referendum asked whether Britain should leave the European Union, Margaret voted Leave. Not primarily because of the economic arguments, though those mattered. Not even mainly because of immigration concerns, though those were part of it.
She voted Leave because the campaign promised something she desperately wanted: a return to a Britain she remembered, or thought she remembered. A place where she understood the rules, recognized her neighbors, and felt her community had control over its own destiny.
“I want my country back,” she told a researcher conducting post-referendum interviews. When pressed on what that meant, she described not specific policies but a feeling: of belonging, of stability, of cultural continuity that had been lost.
This represents one strand of Leave voting. Research shows motivations varied enormously, from genuine sovereignty concerns to economic calculations to immigration attitudes that ranged from cultural anxiety to explicit xenophobia. But this longing for lost community, replicated across millions of people in dozens of countries, has reshaped global politics more than any ideology or economic theory.
It’s a grief response to real losses, weaponized by movements that promise restoration but deliver something else entirely.
Part I: The Kernel of Truth
Before examining how nostalgia gets weaponized, we must acknowledge what it speaks to. These movements succeed because they address genuine losses that liberal cosmopolitanism often fails to recognize or remedy.
Real Economic Devastation
Deindustrialization in the American Rust Belt, British industrial towns, and French agricultural regions wasn’t a neutral market process. It was devastating community destruction that policy elites often dismissed as necessary creative destruction.
When economists celebrate trade deals that optimize global efficiency while entire regions lose their economic purpose, when politicians tell laid-off factory workers to retrain for jobs that don’t exist in their communities, when the benefits of globalization flow overwhelmingly to educated urban professionals while working-class communities collapse, the resentment isn’t irrational.
Research from MIT economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson documented how the “China shock” of rapid trade liberalization in the 2000s devastated American manufacturing communities. Workers displaced by trade didn’t easily find equivalent employment. Their communities experienced rising deaths of despair—suicide, drug overdoses, alcohol-related mortality.
Similar patterns appear globally. Communities built around particular industries face catastrophic disruption when global competition, automation, or policy changes eliminate their economic foundation.
Nostalgia politics succeeds partly because it acknowledges this loss and names villains, even if the actual causes are more complex and the proposed solutions won’t work.
Cultural Continuity Matters
People need both continuity and change for psychological wellbeing. Too much stability creates stagnation; too much change creates anomie and anxiety. Research from social psychologists confirms this repeatedly.
Globalization has accelerated change beyond many people’s capacity to adapt while providing no mechanisms to preserve valued elements of cultural continuity. When grandparents’ knowledge becomes irrelevant, when community institutions lose authority, when the cultural touchstones that organized meaning disappear, people experience grief.
This isn’t necessarily racism or xenophobia, though those are often present and exploited. It can be a human need for cultural comprehensibility. When your high street transforms unrecognizably in a decade, when your children speak a different cultural language than you do, when institutions you trusted seem to prioritize values you don’t share, that disorientation is real.
Cosmopolitan perspectives that celebrate cultural mixing as unambiguous progress can miss how this experience of rapid transformation creates genuine psychological distress for people whose identities are rooted in particular places, traditions, and communities.
Nostalgia politics offers, however falsely, to restore that continuity.
Democratic Legitimacy Questions
When major policy decisions—trade agreements, immigration levels, regulatory frameworks—get made by institutions distant from democratic accountability, people’s sense of powerlessness isn’t paranoia.
The EU’s “democratic deficit,” trade agreements negotiated in secret, immigration policy made without public consultation, corporate power unconstrained by democratic control—these represent genuine democratic legitimacy problems.
Nostalgia politics channels frustration with these democratic deficits into nationalist projects. “Take Back Control” resonated because people genuinely felt they’d lost control over decisions affecting their lives.
That Brexit hasn’t actually restored democratic control, that many decisions remain just as distant and unaccountable, doesn’t change the legitimacy of the original grievance about democratic accountability.
The Critique of This Narrative
However, we must confront a crucial counterargument: Does emphasizing “genuine grief” and “economic anxiety” inadvertently excuse straightforward bigotry?
Critics argue that the “economic anxiety” narrative has been weaponized to obscure racism, that many nostalgia politics supporters had stable economic situations but voted primarily on cultural resentment and racial anxiety. Research shows that racial attitudes and immigration opinions often predicted support for Trump or Brexit more strongly than economic factors.
The truth likely contains both elements: genuine economic and cultural losses create conditions where scapegoating appeals become more potent. The grief is real. But the response to that grief—ethnic nationalism, authoritarianism, violence against minorities—represents choices, not inevitable outcomes.
We can acknowledge loss without excusing harm. The challenge is holding both truths: people’s grief deserves recognition, and their choice to transform that grief into weapons against vulnerable populations deserves condemnation.
Part II: The Nostalgia Mechanism
Understanding how legitimate grief becomes political weapon requires examining the psychological processes that nostalgia politics exploits.
The Psychology of Cultural Displacement
Dr. Arlie Hochschild’s research in Louisiana’s Tea Party communities revealed patterns that help explain nostalgia politics’ appeal. She describes what she calls the “deep story”—an emotional narrative about one’s place in society.
For many working-class white Americans, that deep story went something like this: You’ve been working hard, playing by the rules, waiting patiently in line for the American Dream. Then you notice people cutting in line ahead of you—immigrants, minorities receiving what you perceive as preferential treatment, coastal elites who seem to look down on your values. Meanwhile, the future you were promised—steady employment, comfortable retirement, your children doing better than you did—recedes further from reach.
This isn’t primarily about factual accuracy. It’s about how rapid social change feels when you’re experiencing it from a position of declining cultural and economic power. The emotional truth of displacement can be real even when the specific narrative is distorted.
Similar patterns appear globally. Working-class communities in England’s former industrial heartlands, rural voters in France facing agricultural restructuring, traditional communities in India navigating rapid modernization all experience versions of this displacement narrative.
When Everything Familiar Becomes Strange
Globalization accelerates what sociologists call “social acceleration”—the speed at which cultural norms, economic structures, and community life change. For most of human history, people lived in communities where grandparents’ knowledge remained relevant, where cultural practices changed incrementally across generations.
Now, a single lifetime can witness complete transformation of employment structures, family arrangements, gender roles, religious authority, and community organization. This creates what researcher Zygmunt Bauman called “liquid modernity”—a world where all solid structures seem to melt into air.
For people with resources—education, capital, cultural flexibility—this liquidity offers opportunity. For those without such resources, it creates profound insecurity. Not just economic insecurity, though that matters enormously, but ontological insecurity—uncertainty about the basic categories and structures that organize life.
Research from the University of Cambridge found that support for Brexit correlated strongly with measures of what they termed “cultural threat perception”—the belief that British culture and way of life were under threat—even after controlling for economic factors, education, and age.
This cultural threat perception reflects genuine experience of change happening faster than people can adapt. The disorientation is real, even when the proposed solutions are dangerous.
The Simplicity of Backward-Looking Solutions
Nostalgia politics succeeds because it offers emotionally satisfying explanations for complex problems. Rather than grappling with how automation, financialization, and global supply chains have transformed employment, it’s simpler to blame immigrants or foreign trade deals. Rather than confronting how cultural authority has fragmented across diverse sources, it’s easier to promise restoration of traditional hierarchies.
This isn’t stupidity. It’s human psychology confronting overwhelming complexity. When faced with problems that have no clear solution and multiple intersecting causes, people gravitate toward narratives that identify both clear villains and achievable remedies.
The promise of return—Make America Great Again, Take Back Control, restore Hindu rashtra—offers psychological relief from the anxiety of permanent uncertainty. It suggests that the disorientation is temporary, that there’s a path back to stability and belonging.
That this return is impossible, that the industrial economy isn’t coming back, that cultural homogeneity is permanently fractured, that global integration can’t be reversed without catastrophic disruption, doesn’t diminish the emotional appeal. The promise itself provides comfort.
Part III: Global Manifestations
While each country’s nostalgia politics reflects local history and culture, remarkably similar patterns appear worldwide, suggesting common underlying dynamics in how globalization creates the conditions for these movements.
India: Hindu Rashtra and Systematic Violence
Narendra Modi’s rise to power in India illustrates how nostalgia politics adapts to different cultural contexts while maintaining similar emotional architecture.
The BJP’s vision of Hindu rashtra, or Hindu nation, promises to restore what supporters believe was lost during Mughal rule, British colonization, and the secular independent India established by Nehru. This narrative resonates particularly strongly among urban middle-class Hindus who feel culturally displaced by India’s rapid modernization.
These aren’t the desperately poor or uneducated. Many are professionals who’ve benefited economically from globalization but feel their cultural identity under threat from both Western influence and internal religious minorities, particularly Muslims.
Modi’s political strategy combines simultaneous promises: economic modernization through business-friendly policies, and cultural restoration through Hindu nationalism. You can have the prosperity of globalization and the cultural security of an imagined pre-modern Hindu golden age.
But this restoration project requires identifying threats to Hindu identity. Muslims, Christians, secular intellectuals, Western cultural influence all become obstacles to reclaiming authentic Hindu civilization.
The violence this enables isn’t an unfortunate side effect—it’s central to the project. Mob lynchings over beef consumption, the 2002 Gujarat pogrom that killed between 790 and over 2,000 Muslims (estimates vary) while Modi was chief minister, the revocation of Kashmir’s special status, the Citizenship Amendment Act designed to exclude Muslims—these represent systematic deployment of state and mob violence to enforce Hindu dominance.
This is nostalgia politics at its most dangerous: genuine modernization anxiety transformed into organized communal violence with state sanction.
Brexit: The Impossible Return
Britain’s Brexit vote represents perhaps the purest expression of nostalgia politics in a developed democracy—a direct referendum on whether to pursue a backward-looking vision despite enormous economic and political costs.
Leave campaign messaging deliberately evoked imperial nostalgia (”Empire 2.0”), wartime resilience (”Blitz spirit”), and pre-EU sovereignty. The slogan “Take Back Control” worked precisely because it didn’t specify control of what from whom. It simply promised to restore a feeling of agency and cultural coherence.
Research by UK in a Changing Europe found that areas experiencing rapid demographic change, even if ending up with relatively small immigrant populations, voted more heavily for Leave than areas with stable demographics. The pace of change mattered more than the absolute level.
Former industrial towns in the North of England, seaside communities experiencing economic decline, rural areas facing agricultural restructuring—these communities weren’t primarily voting on EU trade policy or regulatory alignment. They were expressing grief over lost community cohesion, economic security, and cultural familiarity.
The subsequent reality—economic disruption, political chaos, continued immigration, and no restoration of lost industries—hasn’t discredited the underlying emotional appeal. When faced with evidence that Brexit hasn’t delivered promised benefits, many supporters don’t reject the project but instead blame inadequate implementation or continued obstruction by elites.
This demonstrates how nostalgia politics becomes self-sustaining: failures don’t disprove the vision but instead confirm that restoration wasn’t complete enough, that enemies of the people blocked true return.
America: MAGA and the Imagined Past
Trump’s Make America Great Again represented the most successful deployment of nostalgia politics in modern American history, tapping into decades of cultural and economic transformation that left many Americans feeling dispossessed.
The slogan’s genius lay in its temporal vagueness. “Again” implied a previous great era without specifying when, allowing each supporter to project their own idealized past. For some, it meant the 1950s industrial prosperity and cultural homogeneity, conveniently forgetting Jim Crow, restricted women’s rights, and marginalized LGBTQ people. For others, it evoked the Reagan era. The ambiguity was a feature, not a bug.
Research from the Public Religion Research Institute found that Trump’s strongest support came from Americans who reported feeling like strangers in their own country, who believed American culture had changed for the worse, and who felt the American way of life needed protection from foreign influence.
Economic anxiety mattered, but cultural displacement proved equally if not more predictive. College-educated white voters without financial distress supported Trump in significant numbers when they scored high on cultural threat perception scales. Research consistently showed that racial resentment and immigration attitudes predicted Trump support more strongly than economic factors alone.
The specific grievances varied: immigration changing neighborhood demographics, loss of manufacturing jobs, political correctness constraining speech, LGBTQ rights challenging traditional family structures, Black Lives Matter questioning police authority, women’s advancement disrupting gender hierarchies.
But the underlying emotion was consistent: a feeling that the America they knew had been taken from them, and Trump promised to restore it. That this restoration required demonizing immigrants, attacking democratic institutions, and embracing authoritarian tendencies didn’t diminish its appeal. Those became necessary measures to overcome obstacles to restoration.
Beyond the West
Similar patterns appear in non-Western contexts, strengthening the argument that these are responses to globalization rather than purely Western phenomena. Bolsonaro’s Brazil combined nostalgia for military dictatorship with promises to restore traditional family values and Christian dominance. Duterte’s Philippines deployed nostalgia for strong-man leadership while waging brutal drug wars. Japan’s conservative nationalism under Abe and Kishida has promoted nostalgia for imperial greatness while downplaying wartime atrocities and pushing traditional gender roles against demographic decline.
Europe’s Nationalist Wave
The formula repeats across Europe: Le Pen’s National Rally in France, AfD in Germany, Law and Justice in Poland (recently voted out but influential), Fidesz in Hungary, the Sweden Democrats, Brothers of Italy, Vox in Spain. Each adapts nostalgia politics to local circumstances while maintaining similar core elements.
All promise protection of national culture from external threats—immigration, EU bureaucracy, globalization. All evoke idealized national pasts while warning of cultural extinction. All position themselves as defenders of “real” citizens against cosmopolitan elites who’ve betrayed national identity.
The success varies. Some win elections, others remain in permanent opposition. But the formula’s consistency across diverse national contexts suggests it responds to common conditions created by rapid globalization and cultural change.
These parallel movements across continents share not just similar promises but similar mechanisms for transforming grief into harm.
Part IV: When Grief Becomes Grievance
Understanding the genuine losses behind nostalgia politics doesn’t excuse the harm these movements cause. The same forces that tap into real grief also deploy dangerous scapegoating, undermine democratic institutions, and target vulnerable populations.
The Racialization of Belonging
Nostalgia politics almost always defines the lost golden age in racial or ethnic terms. The imagined past wasn’t just economically prosperous and culturally coherent. It was white, or Hindu, or ethnically homogeneous.
This isn’t accidental. When politicians promise to restore a nation’s greatness, they’re defining who counts as authentically belonging to that nation. Immigrants, religious minorities, and people of color get coded as recent arrivals or foreign elements, regardless of how long their families have lived there.
British Asians whose families have been in the UK for three generations still face demands to “go back where you came from.” Muslim Indians whose ancestors lived in the subcontinent for centuries get questioned about their loyalty to India. Black Americans descended from enslaved people brought to America centuries ago still get told America is a white country.
This racialization transforms economic and cultural anxieties into ethnic nationalism. The solution to industrial decline becomes immigration restriction. The response to cultural change becomes enforcement of traditional hierarchies with white/Hindu/ethnic majority dominance.
The grief over economic devastation and cultural change is real. The choice to channel that grief into racial hierarchy and ethnic violence is a political decision, not an inevitable outcome.
Authoritarian Drift
Nostalgia politics creates appetite for authoritarian leadership by positioning democratic constraints as obstacles to restoration. If the nation must be saved from existential cultural threats, then normal democratic processes—protection of minority rights, independent media, judicial constraints on executive power—become unaffordable luxuries.
This explains why nostalgia-based movements consistently attack democratic institutions: courts that limit executive authority, media that document corruption, civil society organizations that advocate for minorities, universities that challenge traditional narratives.
Hungary’s Orban has systematically dismantled democratic institutions while deploying Christian nationalist nostalgia. Turkey’s Erdogan has crushed opposition media and imprisoned thousands while promising restoration of Ottoman greatness. Modi’s India has seen attacks on press freedom, academic independence, and judicial autonomy while promoting Hindu rashtra.
Even in countries with stronger democratic institutions, nostalgia politics normalizes authoritarian impulses. Trump’s refusal to accept electoral defeat, attacks on free press, attempts to weaponize justice system all become acceptable when framed as necessary to save the nation from those who would destroy it.
Scapegoating Mechanisms
Perhaps most dangerously, nostalgia politics requires identifying enemies responsible for preventing restoration. If the promised return doesn’t materialize, and it never does because you can’t actually go backward, the explanation can’t be that the project was impossible. It must be that enemies sabotaged it.
This creates an ever-expanding list of scapegoats: immigrants, cosmopolitan elites, minorities, intellectuals, journalists, judges, civil servants—anyone who can be coded as obstacles to restoration.
In India, this manifests as attacks on Muslims framed as defending Hindu civilization. In America, it appears as QAnon conspiracy theories about elite pedophile cabals preventing Trump from saving children. In Europe, it emerges as Great Replacement theories claiming immigration is deliberate ethnic replacement.
These aren’t unfortunate side effects of nostalgia politics. They’re structural requirements. The movement needs enemies to explain why the impossible restoration hasn’t occurred.
Part V: Addressing Grief Without Weaponizing It
If nostalgia politics succeeds by tapping into genuine grief over real losses, opposing it effectively requires more than fact-checking or moral condemnation. It requires addressing the underlying losses honestly while refusing the false solutions and dangerous scapegoating.
Acknowledging Loss
Progressive politics often fails to validate the genuine grief underlying nostalgia movements. Celebrating globalization’s benefits while dismissing concerns about cultural disruption or community decline creates space for right-wing populists to monopolize acknowledgment of loss.
Effective opposition to nostalgia politics must begin with honest recognition: Yes, your community experienced devastating economic decline. Yes, rapid cultural change creates genuine disorientation. Yes, democratic institutions often feel distant and unaccountable. These losses are real.
This validation doesn’t require accepting nostalgia politics’ solutions or scapegoating. It means taking people’s experiences seriously rather than dismissing them as backward or bigoted.
Some labor unions and community organizations have found success with this approach, organizing around shared economic interests while directly confronting attempts to blame immigrants or minorities for problems caused by capital mobility and policy choices.
Concrete Forward-Looking Solidarity
Rather than promising impossible return, progressive alternatives must offer specific, achievable visions of belonging and security. This requires moving beyond platitudes to concrete mechanisms:
Economic security through modern structures:
Universal healthcare that doesn’t depend on employment
Strong sectoral collective bargaining that raises wages across industries
Public investment in infrastructure creating quality jobs in abandoned communities
Federal job guarantee programs providing employment at living wages
Wealth taxes funding community development in deindustrialized regions
Not promising to bring back factories that won’t return, but building new economic foundations that provide dignity and security.
Cultural respect without requiring homogeneity:
Funding for community institutions—libraries, cultural centers, public spaces—that create local gathering places
Educational approaches that teach both universal principles and local history
Immigration policies that balance integration support with acknowledgment of legitimate community adjustment needs
Media representation showing working-class communities beyond stereotypes of backwardness
Finding specific ways to preserve valued traditions and community cohesion without requiring cultural or ethnic exclusion.
Democratic reform that restores agency:
Campaign finance reform reducing corporate power over elections
Trade agreements requiring public comment periods and democratic ratification
Local control over development decisions currently made by distant authorities
Ranked choice voting giving voters more meaningful choices
Breaking up monopolies that undermine democratic accountability
Addressing genuine democratic deficits through structural reforms rather than blaming immigrants or minorities.
Inclusive identity that transcends nostalgia:
National identities built around shared commitment to democratic values and mutual care rather than ethnic or religious homogeneity
Celebration of how communities have always changed while maintaining continuity
Recognition that “tradition” itself has always involved adaptation and evolution
Creating new forms of belonging that don’t require excluding others, with specific community-building programs that bring diverse people together around shared interests.
Examples of Alternative Approaches
Some political movements have found success offering security without scapegoating:
The New Deal in 1930s America addressed genuine economic catastrophe through massive public investment and social solidarity. While deeply flawed—it initially excluded many Black Americans from full benefits and reinforced racial hierarchies—it demonstrated how forward-looking collective action could address widespread economic grief through public works, social security, and labor protections.
Post-war social democratic movements in Europe built welfare states that provided security within capitalist economies, creating belonging through shared social programs rather than ethnic nationalism. Universal healthcare, free education, strong labor protections, and generous social insurance created security without scapegoating.
Uruguay’s Broad Front coalition has governed for much of the 21st century by combining progressive economic policy with cultural moderation, providing security and dignity without scapegoating or nostalgia. They’ve maintained high social spending, progressive taxation, and strong labor protections while keeping unemployment low and avoiding the authoritarian drift seen elsewhere.
Recent progressive movements like Bernie Sanders’ campaigns attempted to channel economic anger toward structural reforms rather than scapegoating. While electorally unsuccessful, they demonstrated hunger for forward-looking economic populism that addresses legitimate grievances without ethnic nationalism.
What Margaret Needs (That Brexit Can’t Provide)
Margaret in Sunderland needs:
Quality employment paying living wages in her community
Public investment rebuilding local institutions and infrastructure
Community spaces where neighbors gather around shared interests
Democratic voice in decisions affecting her region
Economic security not dependent on unstable global markets
Cultural continuity alongside adaptation to inevitable change
Brexit promised these implicitly but delivered none of them. The shipyards won’t reopen through nationalism. Community cohesion won’t return through immigration restriction. Economic security won’t come from trade barriers that increase costs without creating jobs.
What could actually help: massive public investment in her region creating quality employment, community wealth-building initiatives giving locals ownership of economic development, proportional representation giving her region more political voice, universal basic services providing security regardless of employment, community centers and public spaces facilitating local gathering.
These require political will and resources that nostalgia politics actively undermines by directing anger toward immigrants rather than toward the policy choices and corporate power that actually devastated her community.
Closing: The Grief We Can’t Escape
Nostalgia will always be part of human experience. Looking backward to times that feel simpler, more secure, more comprehensible—this is how people respond to disorienting change and genuine loss.
The question isn’t whether people will feel nostalgia but whether political movements can weaponize that longing into support for harmful policies and scapegoating of vulnerable populations.
Effectively opposing nostalgia politics requires holding multiple truths simultaneously:
The grief is real. Communities have been devastated by deindustrialization, cultural change happens faster than many can adapt, democratic institutions often feel distant and unaccountable.
The solutions offered are dangerous lies. Ethnic nationalism won’t restore prosperity, authoritarianism won’t create belonging, scapegoating immigrants won’t rebuild communities destroyed by capital mobility and automation.
Better alternatives exist. We can provide economic security through modern structures, cultural continuity without requiring homogeneity, and democratic reform that restores agency—but only if we’re willing to confront corporate power and make massive public investments rather than directing anger at vulnerable populations.
The tangled net we’re pulling from the deep contains threads connecting us to every past we’ve ever lived and every future we might build. Nostalgia politics promises we can follow those threads backward to a simpler time. But the only way out is forward—building new forms of belonging, security, and dignity adequate to the challenges we actually face.
Margaret in Sunderland can’t get back the community she remembers. The shipyards won’t reopen. The tight-knit working-class neighborhood built around shared employment won’t return. Brexit won’t restore it, immigration restriction won’t create it, and no amount of nationalist rhetoric will bring it back.
But she could have something else: a community rebuilt around different economic foundations, cultural continuity that doesn’t require homogeneity, democratic institutions responsive to local concerns, and belonging that doesn’t require excluding others.
That future won’t look like the past she’s grieving. It will require letting go of what’s genuinely lost while building something new. It will require political movements brave enough to acknowledge her grief while refusing to weaponize it. It will require all of us to distinguish between validating loss and enabling harm.
The grief is real. The loss is real. And the only way through is building concrete alternatives that address legitimate needs without weaponizing pain against the vulnerable. That work starts now, with each of us refusing the comfort of impossible return and choosing instead the harder path of building forward together.
✨ The next edition of The Tangled Net arrives next week.
May you move through this week with compassion for those grieving lost worlds, clarity about why return is impossible, courage to build belonging that faces forward, and commitment to concrete solutions rather than comforting lies.
💛 If your own net feels too heavy to hold alone, we’re here.
The California Grief Center offers support for individuals, couples, families, and organizations across California and virtually nationwide.
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Eatwell, Roger, and Matthew Goodwin. National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy. Pelican Books, 2018.
Kaufmann, Eric. Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities. Allen Lane, 2018.
Goodhart, David. The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. C. Hurst & Co., 2017.
Autor, David H., David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson. “The China Shock: Learning from Labor-Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade.” Annual Review of Economics 8 (2016): 205-240.
Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart. Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Muller, Jan-Werner. What Is Populism? University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Case, Anne, and Angus Deaton. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton University Press, 2020.
Mishra, Pankaj. Age of Anger: A History of the Present. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
Sides, John, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck. Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America. Princeton University Press, 2018.
Mudde, Cas, and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2017.


