By Cerni Roig Rabada
Every few years, democracy digs up a corpse and calls it renewal. The microphones become wands, the flags become wizard coats, and…poof! What’s that smell of formaldehyde? Oh, right. Patriotism. The great trick of modern politics is pretending resurrection is progress. From Westminster to Washington, we keep reviving ideas that already failed once and insisting they’re new.
Britain still dreams in imperial time. You can hear it in every “Unite the Kingdom” poster, a country trying to haunt itself back into importance. The speeches promise control but deliver known phrases, some déjà vus, if you will. Brexit was the perfect séance. It was more of pretending they could summon a ghost called sovereignty than it was leaving the EU. They thought the enemy was Brussels, when in reality it was the truth. The truth that the Great British Empire is gone and the world has moved on. Nostalgia sells better than realism, so they powdered the corpse, gave it a slogan, and paraded it through Westminster.
Across the pond, MAGA tries to cast the same spell, just with red caps instead of red coats. It’s a mass exorcism in the form of a policy, a wish to banish the present and resurrect the 1950s (or 1930s, depending on who you talk to). Every MAGA rally feels like historical cosplay: factories roaring, men decisive, women decorative, minorities ungrateful. The enemies are the same: experts, immigrants, and the future. To them, history peaked when they were young, and everything since has been moral decline. But necromancy has side effects. The more you raise the dead, the less room there is for the living.
Governments love reviving one fantasy in particular: the dream of a self-sufficient national economy. Chants about “reindustrialisation,” “sovereign supply chains,” and “taking back control” surge the speeches, as if tariffs could bring back post-war prosperity. Protectionism disguised under new names; “patriotic economics,” or “strategic autonomy.” Everyone wants a 1950s wage with 2025s Wi-Fi. The invisible hand’s gone cold, but they keep rubbing it anyway.
Every culture war is another spectacle. Politicians promise to defend “traditional values,” as if morality were a museum piece that needs armed guards. Words like family, nation, and the people shuffle through speeches like zombies of celebrities, once meaningful, then hollow, now dragged out for likes. And it works. It works because it’s like emotional taxidermy: you stuff fear into the skin of “virtuous values” and call it culture. A frightened public finds comfort in repetition. Old slogans feel safe because we’ve survived them before. Utopias rot, but nostalgia is embalming. They call it heritage. It’s really necrophilia with better marketing.
And social media is the perfect home for ghosts. Algorithms don’t care if an idea is alive. No, they care if it moves. So, the spirits of empire, nationalism, and fear keep trending because outrage performs perfectly. AI, then, makes it literal. Spitting out new Churchill speeches and Thatcher quotes for people too young to know they’re reruns. Machines can’t raise the dead, but they don’t need to – they can just keep them talking.
Political necromancy flatters everyone. Leaders look powerful calling up ghosts, and voters feel noble obeying them. It’s a theatre where everyone plays their ancestors. A political Phantom of the Opera. But ghosts stay as long as you let them. Real courage in politics is burying properly the past, not raising it. But, until then, every ballot box will be a coffin we keep reopening, hoping the dead will vote differently this time.
