(This is an archived page, from the Patterns of Power Edition 3 book. Current versions are at book contents).
Some people, who are discontented with the status quo and who feel that the past was somehow better, want to turn the clock back. Changes in society can make people fearful and resentful:
· They might feel that they have been ignored by a political establishment that has favoured other people.
· Terrorism might make them fearful for their security.
· They might see immigrants as competing for resources.
· They might not welcome recent cultural changes, some of which might be associated with immigrants.
· They might resent the loss of their jobs, or feel that their jobs are threatened; they might blame immigrants for this, although automation and globalisation are probably more significant.
· They might be experiencing financial hardship, or loss of status, due to low pay; immigrants might be seen as a contributing factor.
· They might resent perceived unfairness, if others are prospering while they aren’t.
· They might feel uncomfortable with emerging liberal attitudes in matters of gender and human rights – seeing them as unfamiliar and as threats to their own values.
· They might see international governance as a threat to their own country's autonomy – feeling a loss of control.
Reactionary conservatism is a desire to reverse recent changes and to retreat to an imaginary, idealised, notion of what the past was perceived to have been like.
The BBC report, Eight reasons Leave won the UK's referendum on the EU, noted that Britain's vote to leave the EU was partly due to “Older voters flock[ing] to polls”. Jeffrey Kluger’s article, How Psychology Made the Brexit Vote Inevitable, argued that older voters remembered the country's importance in the world prior to joining:
“Britain once ruled the waves and has been diminished for a long time,” says psychologist Frank Farley of Temple University, who studies risk-taking, history and political psychology. “It remains a power in Europe for sure, but it’s diminished to the island geography. We shouldn’t be surprised that at a deep level, Britons chafed at just being one cog in the wheel as opposed to the wheel.”
Further evidence of nostalgia was revealed in a YouGov poll that was reported in The Independent: Half of Leave voters want to bring back the death penalty after Brexit, and many regarded a return of Britain's distinctive pre-EU blue passport as a benefit of ‘Brexit’.
In practice, people have a tendency to remember a few good things about a past time whilst forgetting its drawbacks – as mocked in the SKZ cartoon Good Old Days. Another problem is that the past is irrecoverable. The world has changed and it isn’t possible to wind everything and everybody else back to a favoured point in time but, as discussed later, that doesn’t stop unscrupulous politicians in democracies from promising to do so – by promoting a form of nationalism known as ‘authoritarian populism’ (6.3.2.6).