Revisiting National Nostalgia: Make America Moral Again!

Sometimes people miss the “good old days” of their country. This national nostalgia canfuel populist movements worldwide, rallying supporters with promises of restored glory.Socio-psychological work has characterized national nostalgia as a coping mechanism forcollective self-discontinuity, but it remains theoretically unclear which aspect of collectiveidentity (e.g., national, political, or moral) is most central in shaping national nostalgia.We propose the Moral Nostalgia Hypothesis (MNH), which posits that moral identity iscentral. MNH predicts trait sensitivity, meaning that people who prioritize moral valuesare dispositionally prone to national nostalgia, and threat sensitivity, meaning thatperceived moral decline evokes nostalgia more strongly than economic decline as asituational response. We test MNH across four studies in 20 societies (N = 4,924) usingsurveys and two centuries of English and Chinese texts. Values tied to hierarchy andtradition emerged as the strongest dispositional predictors of national nostalgia, even aftercontrolling for multiple individual- and societal-level variables, while perceived fairnessdecline was the most powerful situational trigger. These findings identify moral identitycontent, rather than material welfare or generic group cues, as the key mechanism linkingcollective self-discontinuity to national nostalgia, illuminating why nostalgic politicalrhetoric framed as moral restoration resonates so powerfully.