In the aftermath of this fall’s presidential election, some commentators argued that for a critical constituency of Trump voters, the second “A” in “MAGA” had referred to Trump’s first term. If, during the 2016 campaign, “Again” had evoked—however hazily—a midcentury idyll of professional stability and aggressively policed racial and gender hierarchies, in 2024 the gesture had become recursive: vote me back in for more of the same. RETVRN . . . to that? It was hard to figure. The early Trump years were a frenzied and unproductive time, placid only in contrast to the pandemic that followed, but maybe this was what voters’ short-term nostalgia was really all about: a longing for a time before Covid, a transformative event that rapidly dispersed suffering across class and race (if still unevenly) and compelled everyone to endure the terrible hardship of having to think about other people.…