Stuck in the Overlook Hotel

The specter of lost futures haunts today just like the specter of Communism haunted Europe a century ago. You can find these lost futures everywhere, from movies to TV shows to music... For a far-leftist, regardless of his allegiance, it can feel like he is a stuck in the Overlook Hotel... the past keeps trying to reclaim him in the form of the present violently rejecting him. The same, of course, applies to the far right. Lost futures for everyone.
The Overlook Hotel is stuck in a history of violence with the ghosts of it's past enacting their violent bidding on the individuals of the present... is that not what is happening today? How many anarchists find themselves hopeless, instead hoping for the lost future of, say, a Free Catalonia, a Free Ukraine, a Free Korea? How many Stalin-apologists would rather fight the Nazis with the Red Army, how many neo-Nazis would rather fight the red army with the Nazis? These are all, of course, hauntological fantasies that turn individuals to violence, sometimes verbal, sometimes physical, but it does make our world, the so called Western world, very much haunted.

Just like the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel encourage Jack to kill his family so it can have him again (he has always been the caretaker, after all), so does the ghost of, say, dead anarchists in 30s Catalonia influence someone in Antifa to protest violently, or the ghost of Hitler and the Nazis influence individuals at Charlotsville to murder, in a more literal comparison.

Our ghosts beckon us towards hauntological fantasies of futures that never became.

Of course, there have been similarly violent actions for ideology before that were not hauntological. The difference is that these particular actions were done out of an original ideology, a new ideology, for a new future, rather than an ideology that froze in the 20th century (just like Jack Torrence freezes at the end of the The Shining, he can always thaw out) and has now thawed out in the form of nostalgia for lost futures, ghosts from the past.

We all live inside the Overlook Hotel, but it seems it's freezing soon... (Apocalyptic visions of WW1-levels of infantry brutality and climate change disasters...)

Much like the Hotel's anachronistic aesthetic, we can see praise of ghosts in the form of crusade aesthetics, Nazi day dreams, specters of Vietnam, Klan imagery on the "youthful" right-wing of today.

With all the specters going around in modern Western political talk, it's hard not to feel like we are being suffocated in the Overlook Hotel's droning atmosphere, while the Jack Torrences of this world see nothing but the beautiful aesthetics of their hauntological dreams. This notion of our past being eternally haunting is deeply disturbing, and I suspect this is what makes The Shining so effective.

When Jack Torrence says to Danny "I'm right behind you Danny". Obviously, in-universe, but one would be remiss in ignoring the thematic weight to this statement. He is predicting Danny's future. He's "right behind him" all the time, because of the trauma of the experience in the Overlook Hotel, the damage has already been done, Danny will be traumatized and it doesn't matter if Jack Torrence gets him or not because he already harmed him.
Likewise, returning to our hauntology analogy, the damage has already been done.
It doesn't matter that fascism and communism fell in the past, because they have been "thawed out" in the 21st century.

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.