When Will the Pendulum Swing Back?
On the "cycles of American history," and our political future.
Is the Electoral Map of 2024 an aberration?
In the weeks after Donald Trump was re-elected in 2024, I noticed political commentators already making predictions that the “pendulum will swing back” to Democrats again. Wait two or four years. Trump will overplay his hand; people will want the Democrats back in power after four years of prospective chaos. Nothing lasts forever.
This is true in life and politics, but I also thought it was too wistful a phrase, too easy a claim to make given the things that Trump was doing—and already done—to remake American politics and democracy. Waiting for the pendulum to shift to Democrats struck me as an opportunity to be complacent. Let events take their course, it implies. Our democracy will work. The right side of history will prevail.
But I’m not so sure anymore. Six months into Trump 2.0, things seem dire. The future is bleak. Lawfare and street protests have run into stark limits, perhaps even insurmountable obstacles, in terms of stopping Trump and his administration’s agenda. Institutions and individuals are getting worn down. As the historian Nikhil Pal Singh just tweeted this morning, “I don’t think this can be allowed to go on much longer.” This feels true—waiting for the cycle to play out seems like giving up.
The phrase also resonated with me as a historian. The historian and adviser to John F. Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., made the “pendulum” or the cyclical theory of history popular, even ubiquitous, with his book The Cycles of American History. Schlesinger posited that American politics shifted every generation (every 20 or 30 years) between conservative and liberal sympathies within the body politic. When he published the book in 1986, he predicted that the Reagan revolution would eventually be displaced by a new era of liberal reform.
But that didn’t quite happen. The years of Bill Clinton were very much about cutting social welfare and strengthening the free market and the neoliberal order, not reviving the New Deal. We had bursts of social reform under Barack Obama—essentially one major piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act—but Obama was not another Franklin Roosevelt. That raised the question, to me, of what would displace the “Trump revolution.” What comes next? Trumpism lite or a something more ambitious from the Left? The presidency of AOC perhaps?
Given these questions, I thought it would be interesting to revisit the themes and arguments raised in The Cycles of American History for the “age of Donald Trump.” Where are we in the “cycles of American history?” What will the pendulum swing back to after Trump? I pitched The New Republic my idea, they liked it, and the essay I wrote for the magazine was published today.
You can read the entire essay by clicking here. I hope you enjoy.
And as always, please feel free to leave a comment to let me know what you think.
Schlesinger, adding, “let us not be complacent.”
RIP Schlezinger but WE are not complacent. WE are desperate for turning our current state of affairs around. WE are restless for change BUT:
The system is greased by constant wars. Our major and minor satellite companies feed our wars and are well greases for doing so. Our politicians are well greased for keeping on waring on. We the people are well greased if you participate in the greasing. Those that are not participants don't fair so well but the greased don't care about them.
Our system is so greased with waring it can't be salvaged. I see only 2 possibilities:
1.)The most likely: we war on keeping greased till some one in this playing field presses the nuke button and bang bang we're all mostly dead or at the very least alive living in a dystopia.
2.) A revolution similar to the Carnstion revolution that took place in Portugal and we reboot to a world that is more peace minded more DEI minded.
I like the latter alternative but think it's not very likely why? We've been zombified by the greased propaganda bull shit.
Bye...its been nice knowing you biosphere.
The riots and radical judges trying to stop trump from doing what he was elected to do is pushing the pendulum further to the right my guy. Example: democrats literally calling for blood to stop the enforcement of immigration law on national television is not going to win over the moderate vote that can still be swayed. The media and left wing politicians comparing a migrant detention center with a/c, 3 meals a day, and medical and legal services to concentration camps where millions of innocent Jews were starved and gassed is insulting both to holocaust victims and every rational person who hears that shits intelligence. We've have migrant detention centers for decades. Many of which with much worse conditions than the one in the Everglades. The difference is social media and the tv told people to be mad about this one so they're pretending to care.
Democrats have alienated too much of the population to breeze through elections like they did with Obama (whom I voted for twice) and Clinton (whom my parents voted for twice) And until they stop acting like lunatics I'll never be able to support them again. Just can't do it.