Questions of national identity have historically been tied to collective memory and the popular and political interpretations of history. This paper aims to explore the political-discursive convergences involved in the politics of memory and the construction of national identity in the contemporary (1980 to present) United States of America through an overview and analysis of the concept of nostalgia. I reconstruct the word nostalgia, focusing on creating a nuanced definition based on its usage and connotations before the 20th century, Anna Wierzbicka's Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), and the idea of societal pessimism. Drawing from Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia, I analyze her conceptions of restorative and reflective nostalgia in the context of political efforts to construct the notion of a single "American people." I draw from political speeches, campaign slogans, party platforms, and other means of political communication to place nostalgia in the context of contemporary American discourses on politics and identity. Overall, I argue that the politics of nostalgia is deeply linked with the construction of a homogeneous, and often exclusionary, conception of the American nation, one which is still fiercely debated about today.
