I first learned about the cycles of US history from Professor Charles Forcey at the State University of New York at Binghamton.  In the early-1890s, I took his seminar on the Wave Theory of American political history, in which he discussed the periodic era of reform and conservatism going back to the colonial period.  This was based of earlier cyclical theories put forward by originally by the Arthur Scheslinger's, Senior and Junior. 

Basically, Forcey stated that every 30-40 years there is a period of liberal reform in America, that lasts approximately 8-12 years, followed by a conservative reaction.  For example, the American Revolution in the 1760s and 1770s took place during a reform phase, while the Constitution was written during the conservative phase of the cycle, in the late-1780s.  Many historians have noted that the Constitution was in part a conservative reaction against the more radical, populist and democratic aspects of the American Revolution (such as the radical Pennsylvania constitution of 1776, for example), and this theory of waves or cycles simply puts these developments in a broader historical context.

The Civil War and First Reconstruction happened during another reform wave in the 1860s and 1870s, which ended with the depression of 1873 and he Compromise of 1877.  Historians call the conservative reaction that followed the Second Gilded Age, Redemption in the South, the age of Jim Crow, and so on.  It lasted until the (First) Progressive Era in the early 20th-Century. 

Similarly, I claim that the Second Gilded Age (approximately 1970-2000) was a reaction against the radials changes of the 1960s, which included the Second Reconstruction, the counterculture, the various antiwar, protest and civil rights movements, feminism, green politics, gay and lesbian rights, and so on.  Like the First Gilded Age, the Second also coincided with an intensely free market, Gold Rush phase of capitalism, and a generalized rollback of the welfare state, organized labor and the social democratic consensus that came out of the Great Depression and New Deal. 

Other reform eras included the Jeffersonian Era of the early-1800s, the age of Jacksonian Democracy in the 1820s and 1830s, and the New Deal of the 1930s.  If the historical pattern holds good, Barack Obama rode to office on another reform wave that had been building for a few years, and his presidency will be remembered as a Second Progressive Era, Second New Deal or something like that.

I could speculate further on the origins of this waves or cycles.  I believe they originated in the two-party, Whig-Tory system in Great Britain, going back to the politics of the Reformation in the 16th and 17th Centuries.  Out of this turmoil of civil war, revolution, popular rebellion against the established church and absolute monarchs emerged this stable two-party system and regular periods of reform and conservatism--probably based on generational shifts.  I am not an expert on British history, but I believe you can easily find such a regular reform-conservative cycle there, and also in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.  The dates of the reform waves will not be the same, nor do we all have the same electoral systems or the same years for elections, but in my opinion, this is an Anglo-American political tradition that affects all the countries influenced by Great Britain and its economic, cultural and political history. 

You could even say that this IS the Anglo-American political tradition.  To carry it even further, you could even ask the question of how it might have affected ALL the colonies in the British Empire and Commonwealth?  Is there also a cyclical pattern in old, established parliamentary democracies in Scandinavia or the Netherlands? Professor Forcey thought there might be, but neither of us knew the history of these countries well enough to speculate further about it.

LINKS RELATED TO CYCLES OF HISTORY, POLITICS AND ECONOMICS

Time Page
http://www.timepage.org/time.html

Hill Pundit's Blog
http://pundits.thehill.com/2008/10/06/obamas-time-the-cycles-of-american-history/

JSTOR
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3791890

Raves and Rants
http://patterman.blogspot.com/2008/11/cycles-of-american-political-history_16.html

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