Downstairs," "The Pallisers," "The Forsyte Saga"—declared, "The disease, if it is a disease, has suddenly become universal." The nostalgic "climate," he said, indicated a "general abdication, an actual desertion from the present." Alvin Toffler advanced a similar view in his Future Shock. The transition from industrial society to "postindustrial" society, according to Toffler, left people disoriented and confused. Unable to face the future, all too many sought refuge in the past. "Reversionists" like Barry Goldwater and George Wallace "yearned for the simple, ordered society of the small town," while the left developed its own version of the "politics of nostalgia," based on "bucolic romanticism," an "exaggerated veneration of pre-technological societies," and an "exaggerated contempt for science and technology." In Toffler's view, both left and right harbored a "secret passion for the past." A historian, Peter Clecak, claimed in I983 that the "theme of nostalgia dominated popular culture" in the seventies and early eighties. "Caught in the transition from industrial to post‐ industrial society, Americans in large numbers felt themselves losing their psychological, social, and moral bearings." They sought solace in a "thoughtless clinging to the social past," even though "such behavior makes adaptation to present realities difficult if not impossible."

Even those who took a more sympathetic view of the "nostalgia boom" shared the prevalent confusion of nostalgia with conservatism, the age‐ old opposition to change. According to Fred Davis, a sociologist at the University of California at San Diego, the "nostalgia wave of the seventies" represented a response to the "massive identity dislocations" of the sixties. "Rarely in history has the common man had his fundamental ... convictions ... so challenged, disrupted, and shaken." Nostalgic "reactions" had always followed "periods of severe cultural discontinuity," but they performed a useful purpose by cushioning future shock. "Collective nostalgia acts to restore ... a sense of sociohistoric continuity," Davis argued. It "allows time for needed change to be assimilated" and provides "meaningful links to the past." "Nostalgic sentiment ... cultivates a sense of history."

But a sense of history, as we have seen, is exactly what the nostalgic

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