“The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create.” — Leonard I. Sweet

In 21st century’s political arena, the past is staging a comeback as the future takes a step back. Leaders once elected to navigate uncertainty are instead resurrecting the past. Donald Trump’s promise to ‘Make America Great Again’ is not an act of visionary ambition but an act of historical ventriloquism. He conjures a version of greatness from a mythic past — a nation untouched by immigration, globalisation or liberal pluralism. It is a mirage, to be sure, but a compelling one for voters buffeted by change.

Yet Trump’s nostalgia-driven populism is not unique. It is mirrored in the reactionary turn of politics elsewhere: in Viktor Orbán’s illiberal Hungary, in Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, and in Narendra Modi’s India where the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party reframes history itself as a battleground for ideological legitimacy. Across continents, right-wing regimes are rejecting the future as an uncertain terrain and seeking refuge in an imagined past.

This global alignment of retrograde populisms does not merely betray democratic principles; it erodes the very idea of progress. The politics of looking back — whether clothed in American red caps or Indian saffron — is a war against the future.

Trump’s MAGA movement is less a campaign than a cultural spasm. It finds energy not in ideas but in resentments. Under the banners of nationalism, religious orthodoxy, and economic sovereignty, it dismantles decades of liberal consensus. His movement opposes the future because it represents a threat: the future belongs to minorities, women, scientists, and climate activists. MAGA offers an alternative — a return to coal, to the monoculture of White Christian identity, to a hierarchical gender order.

This is not just reactionary; it is nihilistic. MAGA does not promise to solve the crises of our times — it denies their existence. Climate change? A hoax. Systemic racism? A lie. Multilateralism? Weakness. Trumpism weaponises grievance against complexity.

In India, Modi’s BJP grounds its vision similarly in a curated past, recasting history as a mandate for the present. But here, it is not the post-war industrial boom that’s glorified — it is a mythic Hindu civilisation that predates Islam, colonialism, and modern secularism. The ‘New India’ is paradoxically ancient — an eternal Bharat filtered through the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s vision of Hindu primacy.

This reclamation of a cultural past is enforced through historical revisionism — rewriting textbooks, renaming cities, bulldozing Mughal-era monuments, and promoting civilisational exceptionalism. Dissent is portrayed as anti-national; secularism as betrayal. India is no longer imagined as a pluralistic democracy but as a unified, Hindu homeland cleansed of its syncretic past and wary of its liberal future.

Where Trump dismantles institutions, Modi infiltrates them. The judiciary, press, universities all are made to serve the ideological contours of the Hindu Right. This, too, is a war on the future: on rational inquiry, gender equality, scientific education, and environmental stewardship.

In Europe, the tide has also turned. Meloni in Italy invokes god, nation, and family — a familiar trinity of exclusion. Marine Le Pen in France frames multiculturalism as national suicide. In Hungary, Orbán openly declares his intention to build an ‘illiberal democracy’ where the Christian identity trumps civic rights.

Across the continent, ‘Fortress Europe’ is not just a reaction to migration; it is a civilisational panic. The EU, once a beacon of shared futurity, is now split between progressives embracing climate action and digital rights and traditionalists longing for ethnic purity and sovereignty.

The underlying motif remains the same: the past is safe, the future is foreign. Europe’s radical Right turns national memory into policy, myth into mandate.

What binds Trump, Modi, Meloni, and Orbán is not ideology alone — it is the politics of anti-modernity. They reject what modernity demands: openness, diversity, complexity, and science. They replace it with what the past appears to offer: certainty, order, homogeneity, and patriarchal control.

Environmental degradation is dismissed as globalist propaganda. Scientific consensus is attacked as elitist dogma. Public education becomes a site of culture war. Modernity is portrayed not as a collective triumph but as a dangerous drift from ‘true’ identity.

This is a global epistemic crisis. Facts themselves are politicised. Expertise is ridiculed. Truth is flattened into partisan loyalty. We are living through what Václav Havel once called the “politics of post-truth” where lies are not hidden but glorified as a mark of strength.

Nostalgia in politics can be lethal. It breeds authoritarianism not because it offers solutions but because it absolves responsibility. The present becomes a site of failure; the future a source of fear — only the past offers meaning. But a nation that believes its best days are behind it cannot govern the crises ahead.

Climate change, Artificial Intelligence, demographic shifts, global pandemics — none can be addressed by retreating into borders, myths, and monocultures. These are challenges of the future. They demand forward-looking coalitions, not retrospective crusades.

If Trumpism, Hindutva, and Europe’s New Right share a DNA of denial, then the counter to them must be a shared commitment to democratic reinvention. The choice before the world is not merely between the Right and the Left — it is between nostalgia and imagination, regression and possibility.

As democracies falter under the weight of memory, the task is to reclaim the future — not as a utopia but as a democratic horizon. The real greatness of nations lies not in their ability to remember but in their capacity to evolve.

The MAGA Mirage is not uniquely American. It is a global hallucination. But so too can be the resistance — not a politics of looking back, but of building forward.

Debashis Chakrabarti is a political commentator and Commonwealth Fellow (UK)