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. (Af

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