Tehran in the 1970s looked like a city moving fast toward modernity: young women in miniskirts, couples making out in parks in bell-bottoms, people by pools in bikinis. Then came 1979 and the Islamic Revolution, and the city became a symbol of reversal. That contrast is the frame for a larger argument now running through the Atlantic: much of the world is not racing toward the future, but backing into older, harsher forms of life.
The piece says the past quarter century has brought a reversion to authoritarian strongmen, from Vladimir Putin, who borrows ideas from Aleksandr Dugin to justify his imperial conquest of Ukraine, to Donald Trump, who has made the presidency his own personal fiefdom. It notes that Trump’s new National Security Strategy has revived the Monroe Doctrine, while the secretary of health and human services and his followers do not trust vaccines. What once looked in 1999 like a world likely to be dominated by the European Union and the World Trade Organization now reads as something else entirely: a return to 19th-century-style great-power rivalry between China and the United States, and between Russia and Europe.
That is not the whole story, though. The article argues that the pull toward the past is not only political but cultural. It points to young Americans flooding into Eastern Orthodox churches, along with Orthodox Judaism, conservative Catholicism and tradwives, as signs of a broader search for order. Make America Great Again, it says, taps into nostalgia and loss, and that impulse is not uniquely American. Some MAGA supporters want to go back to the Roman empire. Some theocrats want to go back to the Middle Ages. Many on the right in the United States want the social mores of the 1950s.
The tension in that vision is that the longing for stability is fed by the very fears modern life creates. Billions of people around the world want to stop the future they see heading toward too much emptiness, loneliness, technology, pollution, confusion and incoherence. But the article’s point is that reaching backward does not restore what was lost; it narrows the possibilities of what comes next. The real question is not whether the past still has a hold on politics. It does. The question is how much damage the world absorbs before nostalgia finally runs out of road.