Since the beginning of the year, the internet has been flooded by 2016 nostalgia. From rose-tinted filters to viral Musical.ly sounds and users sharing personal 2016 photos, a strong desire to return to the past has dominated digital platforms. This trend is not limited to Gen Z; people of all ages and backgrounds have participated, underscoring how widely this sense of nostalgia isfelt. 2026 marks a decade since 2016, so it is understandable why people are looking back and reminiscing. However, the scale of this nostalgia trend was not seen last year, when a decade had passed since 2015. This suggests that what appears at first to be a harmless internet trend may reflect something deeper. Widespread nostalgia often signals dissatisfaction with the present and a longing for a mythic past. It suggests that something has gone wrong in our current reality.
Scrolling through social media feeds, amid videos and pictures referencing 2016, it has been hard to escape more serious content depicting ICE brutality in the US, widespread protests in Iran and even discussions of Trump potentially invading Greenland. Many people around the world live in constant fear and uncertainty, so it makes sense for them to retreatto a time when life felt better. When people are nostalgic, often, what they remember is not the full historical reality of that year, but how life felt. Many people participating in this trend were younger at the time and so, more shielded from economic instability, rising living costs, climate anxiety, digital overload, and constant exposure to global crises through social media. Therefore, life felt a lot easier for them.
However, 2016 was, in many ways, the beginning of the political reality we are living in today. 2016 was the year Donald Trump won his first U.S. Presidential election, an event widely viewed as the catalyst for the intensification of the political polarisation that’s plaguing America today. Through his divisive rhetoric and politicisation of nostalgia, he mobilised millions of voters by framing the present as a decline and the past as something that needed to be restored. He promised to “Make America Great Again” by building a wall to curb migration levels. However, given America’s deeply contested history marked by slavery, Jim Crow laws and gender inequality, many commentators questioned what period this “greatness” referred to.
2016 also had major political implications in the UK. This was the year of the Brexit referendum, which resulted in the UK leaving the European Union after 52% of the country voted to “take back control”. The leave campaign, like Trump, also used the tactic of politicising nostalgia, as they framed EU membership as a loss of national sovereignty, promising a return to an earlier period of independence and control. For some individuals, this period is remembered as a time of greater cultural familiarity and less visible diversity. The leave campaign exploited this sentiment by strongly emphasising immigration.
This recent trend seems to have forgotten this, instead focusing only on the positives of 2016. This is significant because it highlights that, if overindulged, nostalgia can produce a paradise that never has and never will exist, but that is pursued at all costs, taking away all joy and potential from the present. The danger of nostalgia, therefore, lies in its ability to move politics away from solving current issues towards attempting to recreate a mythic past. When this happens, progress is framed as decline, and so societies become more vulnerable to divisive rhetoric, exclusionary policies, and authoritarian leaders who promise to “restore” rather than “reform”.
Whilst this recent wave of nostalgia has mainly been felt by young people focusing on internet culture and memories of childhood, rather than something as explicitly political as national history, the underlying sentiment can align with wider political narratives. The past becomes a symbol of comfort and safety, while the present is the opposite and something we need to leave. This feeling can be manipulated into making people believe that society has moved in the wrong direction. Consequently, instead of a politics of progress and democratic debate, we get a politics of division and democratic decline.
If we look through history, we can see that authoritarian and fascist movements have often drawn on similar emotional dynamics. Leaders of these movements employ nostalgic rhetoric to highlight their country’s past greatness for their own political gain. This past greatness is often characterised by economic stability and cultural purity, which fascists/ authoritarian leaders promise to restore if given power. Fascist parties leverage this nostalgia to mobilise the working and middle classes by appealing to a shared sense of loss, exploiting cultural anxieties and economic insecurities. Walter Benjamin argued that fascism invokes a mythical past not to genuinely recover it, but to reframe the present in ways that justify oppressive policies.
In emphasising the greatness of the nation in the past, fascist nostalgia is selective and ignores significant moments in the history of the nation. Things such as colonial violence, gender and racial inequality and class exploitation are omitted from the narrative of the nation’s past, instead presenting a homogenous society that never existed in reality. By manipulating cultural memory, fascism seeks to align popular discontent with its agenda, diverting anger away from the capitalist system and toward fabricated enemies of the state, such as immigrants or different cultural influences. The rise of far-right politics across Europe and America has coincided with an increase in this political tactic.
The 2016 nostalgia trend is an important reminder that a longing for the past can be exploited and manipulated for political gain. What begins as a desire for old trends and memes can evolve into a broader belief that the past was inherently better than the present. History illustrates how easily this feeling of longing can be redirected toward exclusion, blame, and promises of national restoration. Nostalgia itself is not a dangerous emotion to feel. It reflects humans’ natural desire for stability and security. The risk arises when these desires are directed toward chasing a version of the past that never truly existed.
