The flamboyant drag restaurant Zelda's once resided here at 542 Church Street, but high rent prices pushed it over from Church and Wellesley to Yonge and Bloor. Vacant as of New Year's Day, the location now hosts an outpost of Toronto's Acme Burger chain. An explicitly family-themed restaurant, true, but the chain's definition of "family" is thankfully broader than that commonly used by some.
The objects of nostalgia are political, often glaringly so. If Salam had bothered paying attention, he would have noticed more than a little nostalgia for 50s and 60s American on the left. The objects of this nostalgia, however, are the things that Yglesias mentions; a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth, a strong labor movement, and so forth. Nostalgia for these things makes complete sense given the political preferences of left-wing Americans. Nostalgia for a time in which white men held a complete monopoly of cultural, political, and financial power in America is… well, it says something rather different about the political preferences of conservatives.
To put it on a more personal level, I recall my late uncle (of whom I was, and am, very fond) once telling me a story about North Carolina in the early 1960s. The blacks in line at a counter, he said, would step aside when a white man entered the store. Not like that anymore, he said with some regret, using the term “respect.” There’s no doubt that my uncle’s sentiment reflected nostalgia in some sense, but this hardly made it either admirable or worth apologizing for.
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