I’m not sure I agree with this theory, but you might find it interesting. The idea is that there’s periods of something like 10 to 40 years where things swing liberal, then conservative.
Historians Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and others have proposed that the United States has an alternation of national moods and tendencies between liberalism and conservatism.[2][3] Each phase has characteristic features, and each phase is self-limiting, eventually generating the other phase. This alternation has repeated itself several times over the history of the United States.
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. 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.[3]
I’m not sure I agree with this theory, but you might find it interesting. The idea is that there’s periods of something like 10 to 40 years where things swing liberal, then conservative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclical_theory
Historians Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and others have proposed that the United States has an alternation of national moods and tendencies between liberalism and conservatism.[2][3] Each phase has characteristic features, and each phase is self-limiting, eventually generating the other phase. This alternation has repeated itself several times over the history of the United States.