Let me introduce you to four of the most dangerous words in politics: “the good old days.”

Humans have a demonstrated tendency to remember the past as better than it actually was. It’s called “nostalgia bias,” and it can lead to us unfairly comparing the conditions of the present to some better imagined past. Memory, as the political scientist Lee Drutman wrote in a smart piece last year, is like a record store: It stocks both the hits and stinkers of the present, but only the hits of the past. “The old days were full of stinkers, too,” he wrote. “It’s just nobody replays the stinkers.”

Nostalgia bias has become a bigger and bigger part of our politics, thanks in part to President Donald Trump’s largely successful ability to leverage a collective longing for a supposedly better past. (After all, it’s called “Make America Great Again,” not “Make America Great.”) But it’s hardly the domain of one party: A 2023 survey from Pew found that nearly six in 10 respondents said that life in the US 50 years ago was better for people like them than it is today.

Fifty years ago was the 1970s, and it doesn’t take too much historical research to see how that decade doesn’t match up to our happy memories. (One word: disco.) But what about a more recent, seemingly actually better decade? One that’s suddenly surfing a wave of pop-culture nostalgia? A decade like…the 1990s?

One 2024 survey from CivicScience found that the 1990s were the single decade respondents felt most nostalgic for (while the most recent decade, the 2010s, finished dead last). Nor, to my surprise, is this just the product of aging Gen X-ers pining for their flannel-clad youth — another survey found that over a third of Gen Z-ers were nostalgic for the 1990s, despite the fact most of them had not yet been born then, while 61 percent of millennials felt the same way.

As collective memory goes, these were years of steady economic and........

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