cyclical theory (United States history)

• Lib: Liberal
• Con: Conservative

The Schlesingers' periodization closely parallels other periodizations of United States history, like in History of the United States, and links to Wikipedia articles on those periods are given as appropriate.

The features of each phase in the cycle can be summarized with a table.{{cite journal |last1=Brown |first1=Jerald B.|date=June 1992 |title=The Wave Theory of American Social Movements |journal=City & Society |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=26–45 |doi=10.1525/city.1992.6.1.26}}

The Schlesingers proposed that their cycles are "self-generating", meaning that each kind of phase generates the other kind of phase. This process then repeats, causing cycles. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. speculated on possible reasons for these transitions. He speculated that since liberal phases involve bursts of reform effort, such bursts can be exhausting, and the body politic thus needs the rest of a conservative phase. He also speculated that conservative phases accumulate unsolved social problems, problems that require the efforts of a liberal phase to solve them. He additionally speculated on generational effects, since most of the liberal-conservative phase pairs are roughly 30 years long, roughly the length of a human generation.

The Schlesingers' identified phases end in a conservative period, and in a foreword written in 1999, Schlesinger Jr. speculated about why it has lasted unusually long, instead of ending in the early 1990s, from how long previous conservative periods typically lasted. One of his speculations was the continuing Computer Revolution, as disruptive as the earlier Industrial Revolution had been. Another of them was wanting a long rest after major national traumas. The 1860s Civil War and Reconstruction preceded the unusually-long Gilded Age, and the strife of the 1960s likewise preceded the recent unusually-long conservative period.

An alternative identification is due to Andrew S. McFarland.{{cite journal |last1=McFarland |first1=Andrew |date=1991 |title=Interest Groups and Political Time: Cycles in America |journal=British Journal of Political Science |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=257–284 |jstor=193728 |doi=10.1017/S0007123400006165 |s2cid=153440024 }} He identifies the liberal phases as reform ones and conservative phases as business ones, and he additionally identifies transitions from the reform ones to the business ones. From his Figure 1,

Roughly agreeing with Schlesinger's identifications.

Historian Samuel P. Huntington has proposed that American history has had several bursts of "creedal passion".{{cite book |last=Huntington |first=Samuel P. |date=1981 |title=American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony |publisher=Belknap Press}}[https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2016/1/6/10725086/promise-of-disharmony This 1981 book eerily predicted today's distrustful and angry political mood - Vox] Huntington described the "American Creed" of government in these terms: "In terms of American beliefs, government is supposed to be egalitarian, participatory, open, noncoercive, and responsive to the demands of individuals and groups. Yet no government can be all these things and still remain a government."

This contradiction produces an unavoidable gap between ideals and institutions, an "IvI" gap. This gap is normally tolerable, but it is a gap that sometimes leads to bursts of "creedal passion" against existing systems and institutions, bursts that typically last around 15 years. He identified four of them:

• 1770s: Revolutionary era
• 1830s: Jacksonian era
• 1900s: Progressive era
• 1960s: S&S: Sixties and Seventies (Huntington's name)

Huntington described 14 features of creedal-passion eras. Nine of them describe the general mood:

1. "Discontent was widespread; authority, hierarchy, specialization, and expertise were widely questioned or rejected."
2. "Political ideas were taken seriously and played an important role in the controversies of the time."
3. "Traditional American values of liberty, individualism, equality, popular control of government, and the openness of government were stressed in public discussion."
4. "Moral indignation over the IvI gap was widespread."
5. "Politics was characterized by agitation, excitement, commotion, even upheaval — far beyond the usual routine of interest-group conflict."
6. "Hostility toward power (the antipower ethic) was intense, with the central issue of politics often being defined as 'liberty versus power.{{'"}}
7. "The exposure or muckraking of the IvI gap was a central feature of politics."
8. "Movements flourished devoted to specific reforms or 'causes' (women, minorities, criminal justice, temperance, peace)."
9. "New media forms appeared, significantly increasing the influence of the media in politics."

The remaining five describe the resulting changes:

1. "Political participation expanded, often assuming new forms and often expressed through hitherto unusual channels."
2. "The principal political cleavages of the period tended to cut across economic class lines, with some combination of middle- and working-class groups promoting change."
3. "Major reforms were attempted in political institutions in order to limit power and reshape institutions in terms of American ideals (some of which were successful and some of which were lasting)."
4. "A basic realignment occurred in the relations between social forces and political institutions, often including but not limited to the political party system."
5. "The prevailing ethos promoting reform in the name of traditional ideals was, in a sense, both forward-looking and backward-looking, progressive and conservative."

The United States has gone through several party systems, where in each system, the two main parties have characteristic platforms and constituencies. Likewise, the United States has had several realigning elections, elections that bring fast and large-scale changes. These events are mentioned here because their repeated occurrence may be interpreted as a kind of cycle.

Opinions differ on the timing of the transition from the fifth to the sixth systems, opinions ranging from the 1960s to the 1990s. Some political scientists argue that it was a gradual transition, one without any well-defined date.

Other dates sometimes cited are 1874, 1964 (Lyndon B. Johnson), 1968 (Richard Nixon), 1992 (Bill Clinton), 1994, 2008 (Barack Obama), and 2016 (Donald Trump).

Political scientist Stephen Skowronek has proposed four main types of presidencies, and these types of presidencies fit into a cycle.[https://spot.colorado.edu/~mcguire/skow2 The Presidency in the Political Order]{{Cite web |url=https://www.thenation.com/article/what-time-is-it-heres-what-the-2016-election-tells-us-about-obama-trump-and-what-comes-next/ |title=What Time Is It? Here's What the 2016 Election Tells Us About Obama, Trump, and What Comes Next {{!}} The Nation |access-date=2019-12-14 |archive-date=2020-01-06 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200106171756/https://www.thenation.com/article/what-time-is-it-heres-what-the-2016-election-tells-us-about-obama-trump-and-what-comes-next/ |url-status=dead }}[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/opinion/trump-history-presidents.html Opinion | The Fight Over How Trump Fits in With the Other 44 Presidents] The New York Times[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/05/11/is-trump-the-last-gasp-of-reagans-republican-party/ Is Trump the last gasp of Reagan's Republican Party? - The Washington Post][https://www.jstor.org/stable/3124393?seq=1 Review of "The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to George Bush" by Stephen Skowronek], reviewed by Richard J. Ellis, Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Spring, 1995), pp. 128-130[https://www.jstor.org/stable/27552023 The Politics of Politics: Skowronek and Presidential Research on JSTOR][https://www.vox.com/mischiefs-of-faction/2016/12/19/14010172/trump-transformation-harrison Donald Trump will follow a failed political transformation, just like Benjamin Harrison - Vox][https://presidential-power.net/?p=11419 Preemptive Presidents and President Trump – Presidential Power] He proposes that the United States has had several political regimes over its history, regimes with a characteristic cycle of presidency types. Each political regime has had a dominant party and an opposition party. Presidents can be in either the dominant party, or the opposition party.

The cycle begins with a reconstructive president, one who typically serves more than one term. He establishes a new regime, and his party becomes the dominant one for that regime. He is usually succeeded by his vice president, his successor is usually an articulation one, and that president usually serves only one term.

This president is usually followed by a preemptive president, and articulating and preemptive presidents may continue to alternate. The cycle ends with one or more disjunctive presidents. Such presidents are typically loners, detached from their parties, considered ineffective, and serving only one term.

{{columns-list|colwidth=10em|

• Rec: Washington
• Dis: Adams, J.
• Rec: Jefferson
• Art: Madison
• Art: Monroe
• Dis: Adams, J.Q.
• Rec: Jackson
• Art: Van Buren
• Pre: Harrison, W.H.
• Pre: Tyler
• Art: Polk
• Pre: Taylor
• Pre: Fillmore
• Dis: Pierce
• Dis: Buchanan
• Rec: Lincoln
• Pre: Johnson, A.
• Art: Grant
• Art: Hayes
• Art: Garfield
• Art: Arthur
• Pre: Cleveland
• Art: Harrison, B.
• Art*: McKinley
• Art*: Roosevelt, T.
• Art: Taft
• Pre: Wilson
• Art: Harding
• Art: Coolidge
• Dis: Hoover
• Rec: Roosevelt, F.D.
• Art: Truman
• Pre: Eisenhower
• Art: Kennedy
• Art: Johnson, L.B.
• Pre: Nixon
• Pre: Ford
• Dis: Carter
• Rec: Reagan
• Art: Bush, G.H.W.
• Pre: Clinton
• Art: Bush, G.W.
• Pre: Obama
• ?: Trump
• ?: Biden

}}

Some of the articulating and preemptive presidents' types have been inferred from their party affiliations. George Washington is here classified as a reconstructing president because he was the first one.

• Some of the sources propose that Presidents William McKinley or Theodore Roosevelt were reconstructing presidents instead of articulating ones.

Biologist and quantitative historian Peter Turchin works on secular or long-term cycles in large-scale societies that have occurred over recorded human history (Social cycle theory: secular cycles and Structural-demographic theory). In summary:

• Integrative phase
• Expansion: Common people well off, population increases, elites small and undemanding, state united, may conquer territory.
• Stagflation: Elites rise, take more from the common people, immiserating them.
• Disintegrative phase
• Crisis: Elites fight each other over the limited number of top positions, population declines, state may lose territory.
• Depression / intercycle: attempts to rebuild the state.

Most of this work has been done for preindustrial societies, but he has extended that work to an industrialized nation, the United States. He has found a similar sort of cycle, though a faster one, about a century long instead of typically three or four centuries.{{cite book |last=Turchin |first=Peter |title=Ages of Discord |publisher=Beresta Books |date=2016-10-02 |isbn=978-0996139540 |url=https://berestabooks.com/books/ages-of-discord }}{{cite book |last=Turchin |first=Peter |title= End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration |publisher=Penguin Random House |date=Jun 13, 2023 |isbn=9780593490501 |url=https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/703238/end-times-by-peter-turchin/ }}

His data on common-people well-being and elite overproduction[https://peterturchin.com/age-of-discord/ Age of Discord II – Peter Turchin][https://peterturchin.com/dimensions-of-well-being/ Dimensions of Well-Being – Peter Turchin] and on sociopolitical violence{{cite journal |last=Turchin |first=Peter |title=Dynamics of political instability in the United States, 1780–2010 |journal=Journal of Peace Research |publisher=Sage Journals |volume=49 |issue=4 |date=July 9, 2012 |doi=10.1177/0022343312442 |doi-broken-date=5 April 2025 }} show correlations similar to what one finds for preindustrial societies:

• CPWB: common-people well-being: relative wage, labor supply, date of first marriage, physical health
• EOP: elite overproduction: top fortune, elite-university tuition, political polarization
• SPV: sociopolitical violence: terrorism, lynching, riots

Historian Frank J. Klingberg described what he called "the historical alternation of moods in American foreign policy," an alternation between "extroversion", willingness to confront other nations and to expand American influence and territory, and "introversion", unwillingness to do so. He examined presidents' speeches, party platforms, naval expenditures, wars, and annexations, identifying in 1952 seven alternations since 1776. He and others have extended this work into more recent years, finding more alternations.{{cite book |last=Holmes |first=Jack E. |date=1985 |title=The Mood/Interest Theory of American Foreign Policy |publisher=The University Press of Kentucky}}{{cite journal |last1=Pollins |first1=Brian M. |last2=Schweller |first2=Randall L. |date=April 1999 |title=Linking the Levels: The Long Wave and Shifts in U.S. Foreign Policy, 1790-1993 |url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271799688 |journal=American Journal of Political Science |volume=43 |issue=2 |pages=431–464|doi=10.2307/2991801 |jstor=2991801 }}{{Cite web |url=http://citation.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/3/1/2/4/2/pages312428/p312428-7.php |title=(Page 7 of 56) - Long-Term US Foreign Policy Moods and Involvement in System Wars: Is There Any Way to Reduce the Odds? authored by Lawrence, Colin., Holmes, Jack., Johnson, Lauren. and Aardema, Sara. |access-date=2019-06-24 |archive-date=2020-01-23 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200123211411/http://citation.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/3/1/2/4/2/pages312428/p312428-7.php |url-status=dead }}

• Ext: Extroversion
• Int: Introversion
• (none): no events listed in the sources

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. concluded that this cycle is not synchronized with the liberal-conservative cycle, and for that reason, he concluded that these two cycles have separate causes.

{{See also|Indeterminism|Probability|Probability theory|Randomness}}

Sean Trende, senior elections analyst at RealClearPolitics, who argues against realignment theory and the "emerging Democratic majority" thesis proposed by journalist John Judis and political scientist Ruy Teixeira in his 2012 book The Lost Majority states, "Almost none of the theories propounded by realignment theorists has endured the test of time... It turns out that finding a 'realigning' election is a lot like finding an image of Jesus in a grilled-cheese sandwich – if you stare long enough and hard enough, you will eventually find what you are looking for."{{cite book|last=Trende|first=Sean|author-link=Sean Trende|title=The Lost Majority: Why the Future of Government Is Up for Grabs–and Who Will Take It|year=2012|publisher=St. Martin's Press|isbn=978-0230116467|page=xx|url=https://archive.org/details/lostmajoritywhyf0000tren}} In August 2013, Trende observed that U.S. presidential election results from 1880 through 2012 form a 0.96 correlation with the expected sets of outcomes (i.e. events) in the binomial distribution of a fair coin flip experiment.{{cite news|last=Trende|first=Sean|date=August 13, 2013|title=Are Elections Decided by Chance?|website=RealClearPolitics|publisher=RealClearInvestors and Crest Media|url=https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/08/13/are_elections_decided_by_random_chance.html|access-date=April 7, 2021}}

In May 2015, statistician and FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver argued against a blue wall Electoral College advantage for the Democratic Party in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,{{cite news|last=Silver|first=Nate|author-link=Nate Silver|title=There Is No 'Blue Wall'|website=FiveThirtyEight|url=https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-is-no-blue-wall/|date=May 12, 2015|access-date=January 6, 2020}} and in post-election analysis, Silver cited Trende in noting that "there are few if any permanent majorities" and both Silver and Trende argued that the "emerging Democratic majority" thesis led most news coverage and commentary preceding the election to overstate Hillary Clinton's chances of being elected.{{refn|group=list|name=Post-election analysis|{{cite news|last=Trende|first=Sean|title=It Wasn't the Polls That Missed, It Was the Pundits|date=November 12, 2016|website=RealClearPolitics|publisher=RealClearInvestors and Crest Media|url=https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/11/12/it_wasnt_the_polls_that_missed_it_was_the_pundits_132333.html|access-date=October 28, 2021}}{{cite news|last=Trende|first=Sean|title=The God That Failed|date=November 16, 2016|website=RealClearPolitics|publisher=RealClearInvestors and Crest Media|url=https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/11/16/the_god_that_failed_132363.html|access-date=May 10, 2020}}{{cite news|last=Silver|first=Nate|title=The Electoral College Blind Spot|website=FiveThirtyEight|url=https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-electoral-college-blind-spot/|date=January 23, 2017|access-date=January 6, 2020}}{{cite news|last=Silver|first=Nate|title=It Wasn't Clinton's Election To Lose|website=FiveThirtyEight|url=https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/it-wasnt-clintons-election-to-lose/|date=January 23, 2017|access-date=January 6, 2020}}{{cite news|last=Silver|first=Nate|date=March 10, 2017|title=There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble|website=FiveThirtyEight|url=https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-really-was-a-liberal-media-bubble/|access-date=October 28, 2021}}{{cite news|last=Silver|first=Nate|date=September 21, 2017|title=The Media Has A Probability Problem|website=FiveThirtyEight|url=https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-media-has-a-probability-problem/|access-date=October 28, 2021}}}}

• Cycle of violence
• Deterministic system
• Social cycle theory
• Strauss–Howe generational theory
• Fat pope, thin pope

; Bundled references

{{reflist|group=list}}

• {{Citation |last=Sweeney |first=Nathan |title=An Introduction to Schlesinger's "Cyclical Theory" of U.S. History}}
• {{Citation |last=Goertzel |first=Ted |title=Generational Cycles in Mass Psychology |url=http://www.crab.rutgers.edu/~goertzel/cycles.htm |date=2001-06-08}}

{{American political eras}}

Category:Cyclical theories

Category:Historiography of the United States

Category:Jacksonian democracy

Category:Confederation period