The Past as a Weapon

On nostalgia as state strategy and why it works

1. Two images, one mechanism

On 27 January 2024, satirical Dutch outlet De Speld published a piece about a Dutch tradwife who longed so intensely for the past that she accidentally ended up in 1917 — and no longer has the right to vote. “Well, that’s a bit annoying,” she says to her 5,000 TikTok followers, washing dishes in full make-up. Spanish flu, World War One, and no say in anything. She is considering joining the Association for Women’s Suffrage.

It is satire, but it cuts more sharply than most analyses of the tradwife phenomenon. Because the mechanism it exposes is exactly the same as that of Viktor Orbán, who on 12 April 2026 might lose an election for the first time in sixteen years — but perhaps not, because he has hollowed out the checks and balances thoroughly enough to stay in power even if he loses.

Orbán also sells a longing for the past. Only grander. And with state resources.

2. Trianon as a myth-engine

To understand Orbán’s use of the past, you need to know the Treaty of Trianon. In 1920, Hungary lost two thirds of its territory and three fifths of its population as a result of the post-World War One peace settlements. A 1991 opinion poll found that Hungary, of all European countries, had the highest share of citizens claiming that parts of neighbouring countries rightfully belong to them: 68 percent. That feeling has not disappeared. A 2020 study by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences found that 85 percent of respondents called Trianon the greatest national tragedy in the country’s history.

Orbán did not invent this. He instrumentalised it. The constant deployment of history, memory and identity politics was a building block of the Orbán regime. The Fidesz government declared 4 June the ‘Day of National Cohesion’ in commemoration of Trianon — and the 2011 constitution literally promises “to preserve the spiritual and intellectual unity of our nation, torn apart in the storms of the last century.” Make Hungary Great Again is not written above it, but it comes close.

The politics of nostalgia binds populist, nationalist and authoritarian frames into a coherent whole: the elites are corrupt, but they weren’t always; they have lost their way, because they lack a moral compass and have been captured by minority interests. It is a story with a villain, a victim and a saviour. Orbán is the saviour. The enemy is Brussels, Soros, Ukraine — the content varies, the structure does not.

What makes this so effective is its emotional logic. Trianon offers a way to reassert personal dignity in a situation of powerlessness — the emotions around this treaty tell us not something about the past, but about the current condition of those who commemorate it. Nostalgia is never about then. It is always about now.

3. The universal pattern

It is tempting to treat Orbán as an exceptional case. He is not. The pattern is recognisable everywhere.

Trump’s “Make America Great Again” evokes nostalgia for a time that was relatively good for white, male working-class Americans — and structurally bad for almost everyone else. Erdoğan builds his legitimacy on the glorious days of the Ottoman Empire. The Dutch version is milder but recognisable: the 1950s as the benchmark for what has been lost. The tradwife on TikTok is that logic in its most innocent — and therefore most revealing — form.

Nostalgic rhetoric offers a powerful antidote to heightened levels of anxiety and perceived threat — and that is precisely why it works, even when it is historically demonstrably false. Nobody at Orbán’s speeches asks whether the Dual Monarchy was actually so good for the average Hungarian peasant, just as nobody at tradwife videos asks how women who wanted a job in the 1950s but were kept at home fared. De Speld’s satire does precisely that — and is therefore more lethal than many an academic analysis.

The central question is not whether the nostalgia is accurate. The central question is: which current problem makes it attractive?

4. Nostalgia as symptom

There is wounded national pride in Hungary because the economies of Central European neighbours have overtaken a stagnating Hungary. The unexplained wealth of Orbán’s inner circle, which parades on luxury villas, yachts and private jets, also provokes anger. And yet a substantial part of the Hungarian population has voted for him for sixteen years. Not despite his failures, but partly because of his story.

This is the point that the progressive and liberal centre structurally misses. Nostalgia does not win because people are stupid. It wins because it offers a narrative that connects people’s fragmented experience into something comprehensible. There was a time when things were better. That time was taken from us. We can bring it back. The culprit is known.

It is wrong. But it is a story. And the centre no longer has a story — only policy documents.

The Hungarian elections are not just a contest between parties, but a test of whether a political change of power can still bring meaningful democratic change after years of state capture. But even if Orbán loses, that does not resolve the underlying problem: his system has become a reference point for illiberal actors across Europe. The question is not whether he stays in power — the question is who will tell the next Orbán-style story, and in which country.

5. The antidote is not counter-nostalgia — it is going further back

The wrong conclusion is that the centre must invent its own glorious past. A better version of the same drug is not a cure.

But there is another problem with the right-wing nostalgic timeline: it is simply too short. Orbán refers to pre-Trianon Hungary. Dutch nostalgics refer to the 1950s, or to the Belle Époque, or sometimes to the VOC era. Trump refers to a mythical America before the civil rights movement. These are all fairly recent reference points — and each has been carefully chosen to keep certain people in the picture and exclude others.

Go further back, and the story changes completely.

Take the idea of a closed, self-sufficient European nation-state as the historical norm. That norm has never existed. Already in the early Middle Ages, trade routes ran from India to Scandinavia — spices, silk, knowledge, technology moved via the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, the Gulf and the Red Sea, overland through West Asia, via Venetian and Genoese trading posts to Western Europe. Nutmeg, pepper and cardamom were already known in European kitchens long before Vasco da Gama, and centuries before Jan Pieterszoon Coen massacred the Banda Islands to seize the monopoly. The Crusades did not bring knowledge to Europe — they collided with knowledge already in transit. To pretend that a closed Netherlands or a closed Europe would be a return to something normal is therefore not conservatism. It is historical fiction.

The same applies to the position of women. The tradwife ideal — submissive, domestic, dependent on her husband — is presented as a return to the natural order. But that timeline too is carefully edited film. Hunter-gatherers and early farmers very likely had a far more egalitarian division of labour than the late-medieval and early-modern hierarchy taken as the reference point. The stories of shield-maidens among the ancient Germanic peoples — women as warriors, as political actors — are not exceptions but part of a much older pattern. Wengrow and Graeber show that rigid gender hierarchy is historically the exception rather than the rule. The “natural order” of the tradwife is a fairly recent and geographically specific experiment, not an ancient standard.

That makes the irony of figures such as Eva Vlaardingenbroek or Lidewij de Vos, party leader and parliamentary leader of Forum for Democracy, almost too large to ignore. Both hold prominent public and political positions. Both simultaneously propagate the ideal of female submissiveness. That is not a consistent conservative position — it is the use of rights won by feminism to undermine feminism. You don’t even have to frame that moralistically. The logical contradiction speaks for itself.

The point of Wengrow and Graeber — and the reason why going further back is so politically useful — is precisely this: the past as an arsenal of possibilities. Not “things were better before” but “it has always been possible to do things differently, and the choices we now present as inevitable never were.” Nostalgia looks backward and excludes: this people, this glory, this territory, these gender relations. Memory looks backward in order to look forward — and discovers in doing so a world that was always more unpredictable, more diverse and more experimental than the nostalgics want to acknowledge.

The tradwife who ends up in 1917 is out of luck. But she could also have ended up in the year 900 CE, among the Norsemen, as a shield-maiden with an axe. The default is not what the nostalgics are selling. The default has always been more complicated than that.

This essay is the second in a series. The first essay, ‘Other Paths Were Always Possible’, was published earlier on luxzenburg.nl. The next contribution will be about systems thinking as a political instrument — and how fragmentation works as a governance strategy.