atavism

Democrats treated patriotism as an unpleasant atavism that we need to get over.

His atavism came with the weekend’s most polish.

They think illiberal authoritarianism — “made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science,” to quote Winston Churchill — is the wave of the future, not an atavism from the past.

A fervent believer in atavism, he was particularly drawn to the fine-tuned measurement of the skull as an indicator of the savage proclivities of man.

That a word we now perceive as benign would have such macabre origins is a reminder that we don’t live terribly far removed from superstition and atavism, either historically or psychologically.