I've noticed that both liberals (or "progressives") and conservatives really have this childish bullshit nostalgia for a better time.

For liberals, the nostalgia is for FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, etc and for the "vanishing middle class."

For conservatives, the nostalgia is for the 1950s in general (basically, some sort of Pleasantville idyllic past) or for the 1980s, when their hero Ronald Reagan finally beat those Commies for good.

It seems nobody has told these people that there never was a "good time" in America's history. America's government and institutions in general have always been collectively, a capitalist, imperialist scourge that is not only dangerous to other nations, but is dangerous to itself, as we are seeing today.

Is nostalgia for times that never existed a crucial part of what keeps liberals and conservatives clinging desperately to their sorry beliefs?

but there's also the fact that the nostalgia is an artefact of the fact that they're very dissatisfied with the present. So they polish up the turd of Ronald Reagan or JFK or, worst, "the middle class"

Yippe ki-yi-yay as the saying goes.

two different responses to reality?

... political messages embedded in it.

Here is an example:

During the French Revolution and the early Empire, togas came into fashion. Why? Because the imagery of the French Revolution invoked the memory of the Roman Republic. Sixty years later, during the farcical "Second Empire" of Louis Bonaparte, they came back into fashion but were supplemented by increasingly see-through and diaphanous garments which were supposed to be "oriental". Why? Because among the first glories of the earlier Napoleon Bonaparte, while he was still Consul, had been the invasion of Egypt - the "Orient" - and the imagined visions of the East dominated French Culture for a generation.

In Louis' Army, units were renamed "Turcos", and "Spahis", and "Zouaves", and dressed in French versions of Ottoman finery to fully invoke the nostalgia for the dreams of the earlier Bonaparte. Apparently, they impressed the shit out of Europe with their "style and dash".

At the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, units on both the Union and Confederate sides were designated as "Zouaves" and dressed in Crimson pantaloons and turbans or fezzes. Perhaps the most famous of these were the "Fire Zouaves", or the 11th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment. The "Fire Zouaves" were so named because they were largely recruited from the New York Fire Department of the time.

My... what handsome uniforms invoking such grand visions...

The New York Fire Department was shot to pieces at Bull Run, the very first battle of the Civil War, at least in part because of the "splendor" of their highly visible uniforms... whose origins had long been forgotten.

That is some "nostalgia".

http://www.bradyssharpshooters.org/images/717026328106_0_BG.JPG

http://www.myrtle-avenue.com/firezou/11thposter.jpg