And the present is always better than the past for some people, and worse for others. Which is why the fascist framing is described as the "mythic" past, not a genuine comparison of ways the country may have improved or regressed.

Yup.

As P.J. O'Roarke put it in All the Trouble in the World,

Things are better now than things have been since men began keeping track of things. Things are better than they were only a few years ago. Things are better, in fact, than they were at 9:30 this morning, thanks to Tylenol and two Bloody Marys. But that's personal and history is general. It's always possible to come down with the mumps on V-J Day or to have, right in the middle of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a piece of it fall on your foot. In general, life is better than it ever has been, and if you think that, in the past, there was some golden age of pleasure and plenty to which you would, if you were able, transport yourself, let me say one single word: 'dentistry.'

To put it in musical terms, everyone likes to harken back to the good ol' days of 60s or 70s music rather than contemplate the dreck that is sold today. Well, the 60s and 70s brought us The Beatles, the Beach Boys, Zeppelin, Jim Croce and Eagles. But they also brought us The Monkees (the "Pre-Fab Faux"), Bread singing "Baby I'm a want ya" and Starland Vocal Band which won TWO GRAMMYS for god's sake, beating BOSTON for best new artist and QUEEN'S Bohemian Rhapsody for Best Arrangment for Voices.

It's easy for demagogues to romanticize the past because humans have built in pschological defenses that supress most minor negative experiences from active memory. That leaves us looking at the present through unfiltered glass but the past through a rose-colored lens that makes nearly everything in the past look better than the present.


WTH