In much of today’s online culture, the political past appears less as a record of conflict and crisis than as a series of carefully styled scenes.
On TikTok, Instagram, and Tumblr, images of John F. Kennedy and Jackie on the campaign trail circulate alongside yacht photos and East Coast mansions under the hashtags of “Americana” or “Old Money”. Clips from All the President’s Men are re-edited into “Watergate summer” aesthetics that emphasize typewriters, dim newsrooms, and late-night phone calls. Fan art and screenshots from Stranger Things sit next to real Soviet posters and photographs, forming a “Soviet core” that turns the Cold War into an aesthetic rather than a historical era.
What connects these trends is not a detailed engagement with policy or ideology, but a desire to make the past feel emotionally and visually appealing. In each case, history is filtered through aesthetics that soften or sideline the violence, fear, and inequality that define these periods for many people. This new trend is the perfect showcase of what has been gained and what is lost when political history is transformed into a romanticized image.
Coquette Aesthetics and the Kennedy romanization
One of the clearest examples of this romanticization is the resurgence of Kennedy-era Americana and Old Money aesthetics. On social media, John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy appear less as political figures and more as style icons; grainy campaign footage becomes proof of their effortless charm, while photos of Hyannis Port, tailored suits, pillbox hats, and sailing trips are repurposed into mood boards for a life of classical wealth. Under hashtags like Americana, Old Money, and Camelot, the Kennedy presidency is recast as an idealized moment when politics seemed glamorous, youthful, and unified.
The label Old Money in these posts rarely refers to the class structures, family dynasties, or forms of exclusion that produced and protected that wealth; instead it signals good taste, stability, and a soft, nostalgic patriotism that feels especially appealing in a moment of economic uncertainty and political polarization. This aesthetic world often overlaps with the romanticization of famous book Lolita and the coquette look on TikTok. Clips styled with bows, lace, Mary Janes, and heart-shaped sunglasses are paired with Lana Del Rey songs and Kennedy imagery, folding Nabokov’s deeply disturbing novel into a broader mood of tragic, beautiful Americana. In this reframing, the story’s central narrative of predation is itself aestheticized, its horror softened into just another facet of a tragic romance.
The coquette aesthetic, when placed alongside images of the Kennedys and 1960s campaign crowds, helps construct a version of the era that is more about longing and performance. It suggests a past where femininity was perfectly styled, presidents were movie-star handsome, and national identity could be worn like a well-tailored outfit.
In this context, the early 1960s become a collage of convertibles, parades, schoolgirl aesthetics, and sunlit crowds rather than a time marked by Cold War tensions, racial segregation, and the buildup to the Vietnam War. The violence of Jim Crow, the anxiety of nuclear brinkmanship, and the limits of liberal reform are not necessarily denied, but they are pushed to the edges of the frame, overshadowed by a narrative of lost elegance, innocence, and desire. What remains is a version of the Kennedy years that is easy to admire and easy to consume: a presidency remembered less for its contradictions and unfinished projects than for how seamlessly it fits into a romanticized, coquette-ified vision of America.
Tumblrization and all the president’s men
The new political nostalgia is the recent fascination with “Watergate summer,” a term that circulated on TikTok as users revisited the scandal through a distinctly romantic lens. Instead of treating Watergate as a constitutional crisis that exposed the fragility of American democracy, many posts reframe it as a gritty, cinematic moment defined by smoky newsrooms, clacking typewriters, and exhausted young reporters piecing together the truth late at night.
Clips from the 1976 film All the President’s Men, particularly scenes featuring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein, are edited into romanticized and aesthetic short videos and posted to TikTok. Even the mysterious figure of Deep Throat is recast in this style, less as a high-ranking FBI official leaking information and more as an enigmatic character whose cryptic warnings add to the overall aesthetic.
Part of the reason this nostalgia resonates so strongly now is that Watergate feels strangely reassuring in hindsight. Corruption that was exposed; journalists following and investigating the story; institutions worked properly and the president ultimately resigned. For a generation raised in an era of seemingly endless crisis of climate catastrophe, political polarization, disinformation, foreign wars, and the burnout of constant doomscrolling, the Watergate narrative can look almost comforting, a scandal that followed a coherent plot and produced a decisive outcome. Yet, this aestheticfication risks flattening the historical reality of the moment. By transforming Watergate into a mood, social media makes it easier to consume the scandal as a stylish thriller rather than a serious warning about how close American democracy came to unraveling.
Mall Culture Meets the Iron Curtain
The rise of “Soviet core” an aesthetic that merges Cold War imagery with the retro, neon vibrance popularized and mainstreamed by Stranger Things. On TikTok, Instagram, and Tumblr, users assemble moodboards that blend Soviet propaganda posters, brutalist apartment blocks, red stars, and grainy photographs of uniforms or parades with 1980s mall culture, synth-heavy soundtracks, and saturated color palettes that come straight out of the show’s visual language. Beginning in its later seasons, Stranger Things leans heavily into Cold War plots with secret Soviet laboratories, underground bases beneath American malls, and coded transmissions. The show’s bright lighting, nostalgic needle drops, and exaggerated Soviet villains turn the era’s tensions into something that feels thrilling and cinematic rather than frightening or exhausting.
On social media, Stranger Things doesn’t just reference the Cold War; it becomes the template through which many viewers imagine it. Short edits cut together scenes of the Starcourt Mall, secret underground corridors, Russian control rooms with archival footage of Soviet parades, concrete housing blocks, and propaganda posters. The result is a seamless blend in which it is often hard to tell where Netflix ends and history begins. That blurring is not neutral.
When real images of a surveillance state, political repression, or everyday scarcity are placed alongside glamorous lighting, attractive actors, and carefully scored soundtracks, the original context is softened. Photographs that once documented fear, control, or hardship are repackaged as aesthetic material, stripped of the people and politics they were meant to represent.
This aestheticization depends on distancing the imagery from the realities it once represented. The same symbols and spaces that now circulate as edgy decor were tied to authoritarian rule, economic hardship, proxy wars, and the constant threat of nuclear escalation.
By turning the Soviet Union and the Cold War into aesthetic, social media flattens a period marked by genuine fear and repression into a set of visual motifs that feel safely distant and aesthetically pleasing. As with the Kennedy and Watergate trends, the appeal of Stranger Things driven Soviet core lies in the way the past can be consumed without fully confronting its complexities. What survives is not the political content of the era, but an aesthetic toolkit that helps users express contemporary anxiety while keeping the harsher parts of history comfortably out of frame.