Last week, amid fervent chants of “USA! USA!,” Sarah Palin trumpeted America’s position as “that shining city on a hill” to the National Tea Party Convention, while repeatedly wishing the late Ronald Reagan–the man behind this famous quote–a happy birthday. One of the saddest aspects of Palin’s speech was the feeling that, for her and her supporters, America today is the same America as when Reagan was elected almost 30 years ago.

This sort of rhetoric from Palin is not new. Roger Cohen wrote a 2008 column in the New York Times noting Palin’s constant proclamations of American exceptionalism and deriding her beliefs as “the angry refuge of the America that wants to deny the real state of the world.” In the Tea Party movement, and the “shining city” rhetoric of Palin, the Editorial Board sees the epitome of what Cohen describes as an inertial unwillingness to accept the challenges facing continued American supremacy, as well as a nostalgia for an American past that did not ever really exist.

The idea that America is the greatest nation on Earth arose out of the post-World War II reality that America alone had escaped the war without suffering massive social devastation. The 1950s saw America further its prosperity through unprecedented economic and consumer growth. Truthfully, America never had it so good. Yet despite the challenges that America faces today–and the continued success of economic rivals abroad–a great many Americans today have turned nostalgia for the past into a certified ideological worldview founded on a yearning to return to, in the words of “Mad Men” character Don Draper, “a place where we ache to go again,” namely the idealized America of a time long ago.

In the 1980s, President Reagan capitalized on nostalgia by proclaiming that it was “morning in America” once again, that America had shrugged off the problems of the ‘60s and ‘70s and was back on the up and up. Today, much of the Tea Party movement, and even mainstream conservatism, is driven by nostalgia for the nostalgia of the Reagan era. As Palin told her supporters, Reagan’s “spirit lives on” in the political consciousness of the present. To many conservatives today, Reagan represents the ultimate vindication of their ideologies–he cut taxes, boosted the economy and made government smaller. That is his legacy, according to his nostalgic, sentimental disciples.

But unfortunately, the conservative veneration of Reagan and his massive tax cuts are based more on a glamorized vision of the past than on straight statistical facts. Contrary to popular belief, the 1980s saw the slowest economic growth in America of any decade since World War II, while middle-class wages stagnated and poverty rates rose. Furthermore, Reagan did not pay for his tax cuts because he did not decrease spending. As a result, the national debt nearly tripled under his watch.

Yet, with Reagan occupying a high pedestal in many hearts and minds, it comes as no surprise that there is a long line of politicians trying to copy his ideas. In some cases, living up to Reagan’s legacy even trumps fiscal responsibility–Tea Party hero Jim DeMint’s (R-SC) tax cut proposal would cost $3.5 trillion, more than three times the stimulus bill. Meanwhile, Palin and the Tea Party movement appear to remain firm in their belief that America fundamentally excels above all other nations, despite United Nations rankings that show America ranks 33rd in the world in terms of infant mortality rates and 37th in health care.

The longer Americans continue to remain fixed on the past, especially the idealized past, the more difficult it will be to address the major challenges of the present in ways that do not make things worse. History cannot move backward; it can only stagnate or progress.