The pendulum will swing back. It is a phrase invoked repeatedly, with variation, since Donald Trump’s reelection last November. Cable news anchor Chris Cuomo, Senator Angus King, and pollster Nate Silver have all invoked it to some degree. Presidential biographer Jon Meacham recently predicted that the pendulum would swing from a Donald Trump presidency to “the presidency of AOC.” The phrase conjures history, the past as prologue. The “pendulum”—the vagaries of change, the slow pace of history—will shift back to Democrats soon. Americans will tire of the status quo that Trump built. The MAGA movement will fall.
Talk of history, particularly American political history, in such ways returns us to the life and career of historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. For it was Schlesinger Jr.’s 1986 book, The Cycles of American History, that popularized the idea that American politics shifts from liberalism to conservatism, and back again, within every generation. Schlesinger also used the term “pendulum” to describe this shift. But whereas pendulums can only move back and forth, Schlesinger Jr. argued that history moves within itself, its phases interacting in ways that blur the origins of the present—hence a “cycle.” American history, he wrote, has circulated between “public action and private interest” since the early 1800s. “War, depression, inflations, may heighten or complicate moods,” he wrote in his second chapter, “but the cycle itself rolls on, self-contained, self-sufficient, and autonomous.”
The Cycles of American History
Mariner Books, 512 pp., $28.99
Schlesinger Jr. wrote these words in another era of conservative dominance. President Ronald Reagan had trounced former Vice President Walter Mondale in the 1984 presidential election, winning every state but Minnesota and capturing the largest number of Electoral College votes in American history. Since coming to office in 1981, Reagan had attracted the traditional constituents of the Democratic Party (blue-collar, working-class, union voters, as well as Blacks and Hispanics)—into the GOP, in what commentators at the time referred to as the “Reagan revolution.” The Democrats floundered for relevance and a strategic path over the next eight years, lost in incredulity at their collapse and the quest for a new coalition.
Sound familiar?
Revisiting The Cycles of American History in 2025 helps us make sense of how much the “Trump revolution,” if it can be called that, is indebted to the dynamics of American politics—Americans’ perennial search for something new or different in a two-party system. But the book also reveals the limits of relying on “whiggish history,” of teleological narratives, to forecast the future. Schlesinger tried to show that the American experiment is conditioned to face challenges from the right—and in fact, those challenges are natural, endemic, and essential to our politics—and with “hard work at the experiment,” liberal democracy will naturally prevail.
But nothing seems natural about our current age. Progress is elusive, if not illusionary. In 2020, Joe Biden’s election as president offered an antidote to four years of dysfunction and chaos, of unrepentant xenophobia and nationalism. By the measure of Schlesinger’s thesis, history had worked. It did what it was destined to do.
But the pendulum swung quickly and forcefully back with Trump’s reelection in 2024 and now even seems in a retrograde state. And while we know that history will outlast him, what, when the “age of Trump” is over, will we return to?
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. did not create the idea that history operates in cycles. He inherited it.
Born in Ohio in October 1917, Schlesinger Jr. followed in the authorial footsteps of his father, Arthur Schlesinger Sr., who taught history at Harvard for three decades and wrote multiple books on the American Revolution and urban life, before retiring in 1954. Schlesinger Sr. had first proposed a new theory of “cycles” in American history in his December 1939 article in Yale Review, “The Tides of American Politics.” Quoting Thomas Jefferson, he identified two classes of people in American politics: those who “fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society” and those who “consider the people as the safest depository of power in the last resort; they cherish them, therefore, and wish to leave in them all the powers to the exercise of which they are competent.”
Schlesinger Sr. posited 10 eras in postcolonial American history in which one political point of view held sway over the other. Each conservative era had “an average of 15 years,” while every liberal era lasted 16.5 years. In putting precise numbers to historical ages, Schlesinger Sr. took inspiration from Henry Adams, who in the late nineteenth century sought to apply scientific principles to history—part of his attempts to develop a “theory of the universe.” Schlesinger Sr. concluded that every 12 years of American history “measured the beat of the pendulum.”
His division of liberal and conservative eras was instrumental in the development of the cyclical theory of political history. He predicted the “revolt against conservatism” that gave rise to the New Deal and the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (the “Roosevelt revolution”) would “last until 1947 or 1948” and that Americans would not see another liberal era until “the neighborhood of 1963.”
For decades, history seemed to vindicate the cyclical theory of history. Republicans did gain control of both houses of Congress by 1947, passing legislation such as the Taft-Hartley Act that weakened collective bargaining and the power of labor unions. Roosevelt’s vice president, Harry Truman, eked out a presidential win in 1948, but his “Fair Deal”—designs for full employment and universal health care—was stymied by Republicans, and his foreign policy became defined by the Korean War, leading to the election of Republican Dwight Eisenhower in 1952.
Schlesinger Jr. made his own name as a liberal intellectual in the postwar era. His first book, The Age of Jackson (1945), received the Pulitzer Prize for its depiction of Andrew Jackson as a key figure in the transformation of democracy in nineteenth-century America—although it conspicuously left out Jackson’s racism and how his slaughter of the Cherokee Nation continued after the Supreme Court’s efforts to stop it. Schlesinger Jr. even regarded FDR—a populist, a “traitor to his class,” who expanded democracy, particularly economic democracy, through his New Deal programs—as the successor to Jackson’s political tradition.
The Age of Jackson established Schlesinger Jr. as a serious historian, and he soon became a torchbearer for Cold War liberalism. In its early years, Schlesinger tried to distance liberals—including himself—from being too closely associated with the left, lest they be branded as Communists. His next book, The Vital Center (1949), made the case for “opposing the extremes of tyranny” from the left and the right. The right needed to admit that the New Deal reforms were not communistic (“Roosevelt hated socialists”), but the left was also inattentive to the threat of authoritarianism from the Soviet Union. The left did not need Marx anymore, Schlesinger wrote; no one did. The Vital Center soon became the bible of Cold War centrism.
For the rest of his life, Schlesinger blurred the lines between historian and partisan. For much of the 1950s, he worked on his unfinished Age of Roosevelt series, a three-volume history of the Roosevelt presidency that ended with FDR’s reelection in 1936. He also searched in vain for a successor to FDR during this time, writing speeches for Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson—who lost to Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956—only to be disappointed by Stevenson’s apathy for political campaigning and lack of charisma.
But Schlesinger found who he was looking for in John F. Kennedy. Schlesinger even left a professorship at Harvard to take up a speechwriting and advisory role in the Kennedy White House in 1961 and later memorialized the experience in his 1965 book, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House.
Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 unmoored Schlesinger. Essentially the court historian of that administration, he remained loyal to the Kennedy family, particularly Robert F. Kennedy, until the latter’s own assassination in 1968. He spent the 1970s criticizing Richard Nixon’s presidency, America’s continued involvement in Vietnam, and the expansion of executive power, also detailed in his 1975 book, The Imperial Presidency. (He also advised one last Kennedy—Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy—during his primary challenge to President Jimmy Carter in 1980.)
Reagan’s ascendence provided the pretext for The Cycles of American History. The book was typical of Schlesinger’s work—a collection of erudite essays rather than a treatise on a single theme. Schlesinger Jr. updated his father’s theory of history as a way of explaining America’s behavior as a superpower since World War II—and to, perhaps, predict its future. Reagan’s shake-up of the New Deal coalition had led Schlesinger Jr. to conclude that his father’s paradigm of “conservatism versus liberalism” obscured the complicated dynamics of American political history; so too did periodizing them in specific years. Instead, Schlesinger Jr. saw cyclical change in generational terms, in a “thirty-year alternation between public purpose and private interest.” He also applied his theory to U.S. foreign policy. No clear correlation existed between domestic and foreign policy, he argued, only that “the domestic cycle” determined the priorities of U.S. foreign policy and how the U.S. deployed power abroad—protecting private interests at home often meant securing the fortunes of corporations and the titans of capital abroad.
In the second chapter, “The Cycles of American Politics,” Schlesinger invoked his generational thesis when he argued that there was nothing exceptional about the Reagan coalition and that Reagan’s ability to attract new voters—religious fundamentalists and young Americans—simply signified a generational shift: an aging baby boomer population and voters too young to experience the radicalism of the 1960s. A lack of historical memory motivated Reagan’s campaign to “Make America Great Again.” Reagan was a corollary of the cycle working, churning as it did every generation. Schlesinger held faith that the “1980s will witness the burnout of … the age of Reagan.” Economic downturns, perennial in America history, would, he felt, discredit fealty to the private sector and Reagan-era individualism, and liberalism would experience a rebirth in the 1990s.
But Schlesinger also recognized the significance of the times. The sociologist Daniel Bell had argued in 1960 that the Cold War birthed “the end of ideology,” since the debate over federal power had been settled. “Few serious conservatives … believe that the Welfare State is ‘the road to serfdom,’” wrote Bell. Yet ideology did in fact return with a vengeance in the 1980s, as a host of free-market, fundamentalist ideologues flocked to the Reagan coalition. The creed of individualism and rejection of the welfare state soon pervaded American politics, reshaping voters’ allegiances to both parties.
Written before Ronald Reagan developed a close relationship with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, Cycles critiqued the ideologues surrounding Reagan who saw this late era of the Cold War in dichotomies: Are you a Communist or not? Chapters 3 (“Foreign Policy and the American Character”), 4 (“Human Rights and the American Tradition”), and 5 (“America and Empire”) also meditated on a series of foreign policy questions that have returned to us in the age of Trump: Is the United States an empire? Does it have imperial ambitions? Should (or can) the U.S. secure and promote human rights abroad?
Schlesinger saw Reagan’s foreign policy vision as part of an isolationist tradition “reincarnated as global unilateralism” that challenged the liberal vision of an international order led by the major great powers—not the U.S. alone. Further, the rejection of that vision did not signal a realignment but a “dealignment,” according to Schlesinger: The real story of American politics in the 1980s was not the Reagan revolution after all, but the decline of political parties themselves. Reforms to the presidential primary system and the resulting decline of machine politics had muted the traditional purposes of political parties. A new “electronic age” would mean a deference to personality over party, Schlesinger predicted. Reagan was the test case for this new era.
Facing these headwinds, Schlesinger made a robust case for government power in an age of austerity. In his ninth chapter, “Affirmative Government and the American Economy,” Schlesinger, quoting Roosevelt, claimed that “dictatorships do not grow out of strong and successful governments but out of weak and helpless ones.” When free markets dominate at the expense of civil rights, labor rights, and human rights, society unravels. Conservatives also overestimate voters’ opposition to the federal government. Only 20 percent of Americans today have trust in the federal government, but press closely on the pulse of the public, and you will find that Americans love government programs such as Social Security and Medicare, as well as interventions to protect the environment. The GOP cannot overlook the fact that, as Schlesinger notes, “a sizable majority approves the intervention of the state” on matters of public welfare.
Cutting federal programs to the predominant benefit of the rich has dire political consequences in American politics after the age of Roosevelt. “There is something distasteful … when one class calls for purification through the suffering of another class,” noted Schlesinger.
But what happens when large numbers of Americans are indifferent to that suffering? Or seek to exacerbate it?
On some matters, The Cycles of American History is quite prescient. While Schlesinger missed the advent of the internet, he recognized that a new age of information exchange would irrevocably disrupt American politics. As he predicted, personality matters more in American elections than it did in the early twentieth century, in no small part due to the way social media and smartphones have changed how we engage with political culture. Schlesinger even alluded to how disinformation and misinformation would shape our politics in the future. “The new media,” as he called it, has the “ability to reinforce representative democracy or to undermine it.” In the age of Trump, the latter has won out over the former, but we have the right to remain agnostic, as Schlesinger was, about how technology will shape a pluralistic democracy like the United States in the years to come.
Schlesinger also accurately captured the dynamics of the modern conservative movement, even if he underestimated its staying power. Indeed, Reagan’s legacy is conspicuous. Fealty to tax cuts and to reducing the size of government persists, as does the notion that government largesse is antithetical to the interests of the nation. Reagan-era slogans also remain—“Make American Great Again” and “peace through strength.” But as the historian Nicole Hemmer has pointed out, while Reagan was a conservative hard-liner, he was also a pragmatist who abandoned ideology when the public pushed back against his designs to cut Social Security, or when he decided tax increases were needed to address the deficit. He may have railed against “big government” rhetorically, but in practice, his ideology had limits.
Trump is another matter altogether, and his second term—marked by its indiscriminate firing of longtime federal employees, shuttering of long-standing agencies, and successful plans (Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”) to cut Social Security, Medicare, SNAP benefits, and other essential programs of the American welfare state—signals that a new age of conservative ideology is here, and it is not just illiberal and revanchist but repressive and hostile to the idea of natural rights drawn from the Enlightenment.
Schlesinger’s idea of cycles would position Trump as the current generation’s answer to his predecessor, Barack Obama: as the antithesis of a multiracial president who offered an affirmative vision for government’s role in Americans’ lives. The pendulum swung back. But that is too facile a characterization of what Trump has done to reshape American politics; to expose the limits of American liberalism. Schlesinger’s “cycles”—and for that matter, Schlesinger—never accounted for elements of mass society abandoning tenets of liberal democracy. He never reconciled the tension between the determinism of his theory and the agency of history to shake the foundations of the current order. He failed to imagine that the darkest parts of American history were ahead of us or, if interrupted or abated, could still return in a more frightening form.
Schlesinger’s idea of cycles focused on continuities rather than discontinuities; in the parlance of historians, he was a “lumper” rather than a “splitter.” His theory worked in the twentieth century because it presumed that all Americans accepted liberalism or liberal tenets—everyone lived in the shadow of liberalism, even if they tried to avoid or repudiate it. But that is not the case anymore, not when the U.S. Marines patrol the streets of major cities, or when the U.S. is disappearing people without due process.
Liberals—Democrats—seem not to know how to meet our moment. The reflexive tendency has been for the Democratic Party leadership to do nothing but wait for Trumpism to atrophy, the assumption being that the midterm elections will (once again) rectify his dictatorial overreach. “Trump will screw up,” as New York Senator Chuck Schumer said back in February. The pendulum will swing back.
But the urgency of our times cannot wait. Modern liberalism has seemingly given up on the improvement of humankind in the twenty-first century, and FDR’s vision of human progress has been subsumed by a preoccupation with “abundance” that sidelines government regulation in favor of growth. But a depreciation of government power is not an answer to the age of Trump’s vision for an autocratic yet undersupplied state. Liberals must offer a vision of the good life that rests on an activist, not absent, role for government on all levels—local, state, and federal. Americans need a revitalized age of Roosevelt to counter the age of Trump. Otherwise, we risk the perpetuation of the latter.
Indeed, just because Trump will not be with us forever does not mean he will be gone. Trump is a product of American history, and he will continue to live within it after he leaves office. But history is not metaphysical; it does not operate autonomously. The unmade past, a post-Trump America, is within our control. History might reveal our fate, but the present determines our future. “It takes people to make the cycle work,” wrote Schlesinger, adding, “let us not be complacent.” On this, there is good work being done, and much still to do.