What If the Political Pendulum Doesn’t Swing Back?

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.”

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.