Are we entering a Conservative Golden Age?

Or will the vibe soon shift back to the left?

In his inaugural address on Monday, President Trump asserted that we have just entered the “golden age of America,” one in which the United States will “flourish and be respected again all over the world.” And make no mistake: Trump envisions this as a Conservative Golden Age. In a series of executive orders announced by the White House, Trump has already swung policy far to the right on immigration, the environment, transgender rights and other issues. He’s come considerably more prepared to implement his agenda than he was eight years ago, and much of it doesn’t require the consent of Congress.

Of course, Trump was president once before, and it hardly brought him the America of his dreams or Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill.” Instead, cultural institutions shifted sharply to the left during Trump’s first term, almost from when he took office. Trump never had a 50 percent approval rating during his presidency. Republicans lost 41 House seats in the 2018 midterms — and then Trump lost the White House in 2020. His successor, Joe Biden, signed a series of consequential bills and executive orders during his first two years, and much of it was distinctively left of center — though perhaps that was to Biden’s ultimate detriment since he wound up being just as unpopular as Trump had been.

Political scientists and number-crunching types like to speak of thermostatic effects in public opinion, and the reactions to both Biden’s and Trump’s first terms are good examples of it. The public’s mood has often moved opposite the president’s agenda, especially in the faster news cycles of recent decades. When the government gets “too conservative,” the people adjust the thermostat to a more liberal setting and then gradually actualize it through electoral victories — plus fighting back through the institutions they remain in control of (in recent years, typically cultural institutions for the left and judicial ones for the right.) And vice versa when it becomes “too liberal.”

According to this framework, the inauguration on Monday could be the high-water mark for the Conservative Golden Age. With narrow majorities in Congress — and a less unified caucus than Democrats had under Biden — legislative accomplishments may be hard to come by for Trump, and Democrats are favored to retake the House in 2026. Courts will challenge his executive orders. The alliance between MAGA and the Tech Right — Trump’s new Silicon Valley buddies — already shows signs of strain. Furthermore, Trump is now a 78-year-old, lame-duck president, and few other Republicans have been able to achieve star power under his shadow. The potential efficacy of his government, or lack thereof, is another potential weak point. Although he deserves more credit than he gets for Operation Warp Speed, Trump mismanaged the biggest crisis of his first term, COVID, and many of his Cabinet appointments and civil servants will have little experience in government. And Trump can put personal pique or profit above the good of the country or the long-term interests of his party and the conservative movement.

What’s more, there is a pretty good argument for simple mean-reversion. Democrats, for all their problems, are a highly competitive party. Kamala Harris became the first Democrat to lose the popular vote since John Kerry, but she lost it by only 1.6 percentage points — and Kerry lost his election by just 2.4 points against a president who’d had an 90 percent approval rating just two years earlier. No Democrat has lost the popular vote by more than that since 1988, while five Republicans have, including Trump in 2020. Republicans’ Electoral College advantage all but disappeared last year, meanwhile, so a narrow popular vote win like Al Gore’s in 2000 or Hillary Clinton’s in 2016 might be enough to flip the White House for a fourth time in a row in 2028.

Sounds pretty convincing, right? Well, maybe not. For me, it’s a head-versus-heart thing. The heart loves “number go up,” “momentum,” and extrapolations from small sample sizes — Lamar Jackson will never win a Super Bowl. It always wants to bet on the Current Thing accelerating. The head loves regression — regression to the mean, regression analysis, any type of regression; you name it. It knows from experience that if the heart bothers to look at the data, it will find that its confidence in the Current Thing will often be misplaced.

But I’ve given short shrift to the claim that we are entering a new era — whether a Conservative Golden Age or something else entirely. That’s because, as Ezra Klein writes, the evidence for a conservative vibe shift goes beyond Trump’s narrow popular vote margin. To take a few data points:

• It’s much harder than in 2016 to write off Trump’s win as a fluke. He won the popular vote. There’s no Electoral College, Comey Letter or (dubiously) Russian interference to blame for his win. Democrats essentially lost the election twice last year — first with Biden and then with Harris — and this came on the heels of Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016. Maybe it’s bad candidates — the Democrats’ presidential nominees lately have been about as successful as New York Jets quarterbacks — but their product isn’t selling.

• Furthermore, Democrats show every sign of being defeated. Unlike in 2017, there’s little protest activity against Trump. MSNBC ratings and Washington Post subscriptions are down. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s teams are fighting, but none of it is particularly constructive or forward-looking, and there’s no clear consensus on what the Democratic Party should do next.

• Trump’s win was buoyed by some sharp demographic shifts, including among voters that Democrats once took for granted as being part of their “team”: Hispanic and Asian American voters, and to a lesser degree Black voters (especially Black men) — and younger voters, too. Democrats can no longer credibly claim to win elections just by turning out their base; in fact, Republicans outnumbered Democrats in the November electorate by 5 points. Americans are also voting with their feet, fleeing blue states and cities.

• To borrow the terms from my book, the River is ascendant, and the Village is reeling. Trump’s alliance with the Tech Right is something mostly new and potentially quite powerful in terms of media and especially financial muscle — even if it also offers Democrats opportunities for pushback, given how unabashed Trump is at alternatively cultivating and threatening the world’s wealthiest men.

• The media is making a sharp and conspicuous turn to the right from Meta eliminating its fact-checking program and DEI initiatives to Jeff Bezos quashing the Post’s endorsement of Harris and Saturday Night Live poking fun at its sibling network, MSNBC. The left’s constellation of A-list celebrities aren’t interesting or cool in a way that pays political dividends: Joe Rogan’s endorsement seems to have mattered more than Taylor Swift’s. Even universities, in part because of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, are retreating from peak wokeness-or-whatever-you-want-to-call-it, from restoring standardized testing requirements to cracking down on pro-Palestine activists.

• And these shifts are broader than just the United States — even famously immigrant-friendly Canada is turning against open borders. The status quo is deeply unpopular around the world in a way it hasn’t been in many years — although if the same pattern persists for another four years, that could be a problem for Republicans in 2028. There’s also new terrain to fight on, particularly given the rise of AI and the decline in fertility rates. The latter will probably favor conservatives initially, and with the former, it’s hard to say — but Trump has picked a side by repealing Biden’s executive order on AI.

So yeah, at a heart/gut level, Ezra’s case is convincing. It’s even made some inroads into my head — which, if we’re being honest, doesn’t have that much conviction at this moment for the mean-reversion hypothesis. But what does American history say?

100 years of political mood swings

Well, I hope I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew here. I do know a lot about presidential politics, but I’m not a scholar of American history. Anyway, here’s my foolish idea: compress the past 100+ years of American history into a single left/right or liberal/conservative dimension. When did the pendulum swing from left to right and back again, and how long did these changes persist?

Let’s acknowledge three obvious problems upfront. One, this is inhrently subjective, although I did solicit feedback from AI models — which are increasingly good at extracting quantitative signals from qualitative data — and Silver Bulletin readers on Substack Notes. Election outcomes, including midterms, are the most important factor I consider — but presidential approval ratings, landmark legislation, court decisions, cultural moments, news events, and the overall size and scope of government matter too.

Two, I generally object to treating “left” and “liberal” as synonyms — and also to treating the partisan axis (Democrat vs. Republican) as being concomitant with the ideological one (left/liberal vs. right/conservative). But I’ve written plenty about that, so I hope you’ll indulge me in ignoring those distinctions for this newsletter.

Third, I’m also going to ignore the argument that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” or progress. Progress is underappreciated as an empirical fact by both the right and the left. Even if Trump’s second term rolls back protections for disadvantaged groups, for instance — like LGBTQ people — they’ll be in a better position than they were 50 or 100 years ago. And even if DOGE succeeds in making all sorts of budget cuts — I’m doubtful it will — the size of the government will be much larger than before World War II. But I’m not considering the long arc of the moral universe here — instead, just the medium term, the shifts from left to right given the Overton window (what was conceivable) at the time. If you want to tilt the chart I’m about to show you 30 degrees to the NNE, such that it indicates overall progress toward liberalism over the very long run, I won’t really object. I’m just not sure it’s germane to the points about the ebbs and flows of American politics that I’m trying to illustrate here.

One more proviso: I am unapologetically looking at this data with the advantage of hindsight bias — knowing what happened next. This may differ from how contemporaneous observers would have assessed the situation. When Richard Nixon resigned after Watergate, you might have expected it to set Republicans back for a generation, but it didn’t: Ford nearly defeated Carter, and then the GOP won three terms in a row. That’s a reason to be more cautious when evaluating recent political shifts. If Democrats win back the White House in 2028, the next four years will read very differently to history than if another Republican succeeds Trump.

All right, then, here’s what I did. I took every year in American history since 1916 and rated it on a scale from −10 (very liberal) to +10 (very conservative). Why 1916? Well, I wanted to go back 100 years — to 1925 — but that created an awkward division in the middle of a trio of Republican presidents who won by landslide margins in 1920 (Harding), 1924 (Coolidge) and 1928 (Hoover). So I ran the chart back another four years, 1916, just to show the more liberal, capital-p Progressive Era we emerged from amidst the First World War.¹ Enough throat-clearing — here’s the chart:

I have the peaks for liberalism being between 1934 and 1936 — the height of the New Deal, when Democrats actually gained a massive number of seats during FDR’s first midterm, and then he won the general election by 24 points in 1936 — and then again in ~1964 when LBJ had maximum political capital after Kennedy’s assassination and a landslide win against Barry Goldwater and advanced the Great Society and civil rights. Recent liberal peaks have been more short-lived, but Obama’s election in 2008 counts as one. And 2020 saw a rapid but brief leftward cultural shift amid COVID and the George Floyd protests, followed by Trump’s defeat.

Conservatism has several peaks: in 1924, with the passage of the restrictive Immigration Act along with laissez-faire economic policies and Coolidge’s landslide re-election; Reagan’s re-election in 1984; and then briefly under George W. Bush after September 11. Nixon’s landslide re-election in 1972 isn’t quite as high because, while he benefited from a backlash to liberalism, we’re still in the tail end of the Civil Rights Era — the Equal Rights Amendment passed Congress that year (with Nixon’s support) — plus a vibrant counterculture.²

There are a few other features you might notice. First, you’ll see a lot of wobbles back and forth. Many of those are midterm elections, which usually do obey thermostatic properties — the president’s party nearly always loses seats, and the exceptions like in 1934 or 2002 are noteworthy because they’re so rare. There are also events ranging from Congress passing women’s suffrage in 1919 to Watergate represented on the chart. These were sometimes a sign of a vibe shift but on other occasions were the last gasp of a dying era or produced a backlash. Many of these thermostatic wobbles were short-lived, in other words. Reagan’s unpopularity early in his term and relatively bad midterm in 1982 didn’t preclude his landslide re-election or the 1980s from being a conservative decade.

Even if you smooth out the wobbles, the chart looks like roughly a random walk. So, to a rough approximation, the fact that things have moved in a conservative direction during the past few years isn’t necessarily predictive of what will happen next.

And when you do see big swings, they are usually precipitated by some sort of global crisis: especially clear are the Great Depression and the Global Financial Crisis. These tend to work against the interests of whichever party was in power — although World War II is a notable exception. COVID is another world-historical event that may qualify in this category, although it’s weird because it spanned both the Trump and Biden administrations. I think COVID’s political impacts have become oddly understated, not least because of inflation that resulted as the world tried to restart the economy — but it may take more time to gain perspective on that.

The 4 major political eras of the past American century

If you look at the chart, I’d argue that it divides relatively cleanly into four eras. For simplicity’s sake, I’ve timed the start and end dates to coincide with presidential election years, but you could argue for more precision. Almost by definition, some precipitating events or clear signs of political change occur before turnover in the White House. The beginning of the end of the first era I’m about to describe was Black Tuesday on October 24, 1929, for example — even though FDR wouldn’t assume the presidency until 3+ years later.

The Quiet Conservative Era (1920-1932)

I asked ChatGPT whether there’s any generally accepted historical name for the string of consecutive GOP landslide wins in 1920, 1924 and 1928, and apparently there isn’t. So I had it offer me some suggestions, and the “Quiet Conservative Era” — inspired by “Silent Cal” Coolidge — was the least bad option. It’s a monicker that fits in other respects, too, with the government playing a quiet role in the economy and the United States playing a quiet role in the world — Harding opposed the League of Nations, for instance, which was founded toward the end of Wilson’s term.

If the Progressive Era that preceded it doesn’t map entirely neatly to the modern day, the Quiet Conservative Era is legibly conservative by today’s standards: Ron DeSantis has cited Coolidge as his favorite Republican, for instance. Tax cuts and deregulation, anti-immigrant legislation, isolationism, and Prohibition — which began under Wilson but Hoover called a “noble experiment” by 1928. Harding’s scandals and licentious behavior got the era off to a bad start for Republicans, including a poor midterm in 1922. But Coolidge succeeded him in 1923 and defeated Democrat John W. Davis by 25 points in 1924. Black Tuesday and the Great Depression ended the Roaring Twenties quickly, though, along with the GOP’s hold on power — with Republicans losing control of the House in 1930 and FDR winning 472 electoral votes in 1932.

The Long Liberal Era (1932-1968)

The opposition party winning a presidential term or even two in a row — as with Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 — need not interrupt an era. Especially not when Eisenhower brought about a notable expansion in the size of government and top tax rates remained extremely high in this period. Culturally, the 50s were extremely “normie,” which reads as conservative, and the Red Scare blew in but fairly quickly out again — Joseph McCarthy was censured by the Senate by 1954. But it was mostly not an era of extremes, notable for its lack of polarization in Congress.

Eisenhower’s two terms were the only interruption in a string of 7 out of 9 Democratic presidential victories — four by FDR, of course. His powers peaked in 1934-1936 as Democrats controlled an astonishing 74 percent of seats in the Congress following the 1934 midterms (the Social Security Act was signed in 1935). FDR squandered some of his political capital in 1937 with his court-packing plan and as the Great Depression (which officially ended in 1933) began to be more in the rearview mirror, with Democrats offsetting bad midterms in this era with strong margins in presidential years, including in 1944 after America’s entry into World War II. FDR’s mixed record on civil rights nevertheless produced enough of a backlash for Strom Thurmond to carry four Southern states on a State’s Rights platform in 1948. Still, Truman won a surprising re-election that year, although his approval ratings then tanked and he wasn’t as highly regarded at the time as he is by history.

But there was plenty of juice in the liberal tank. After a close presidential race in 1960, John F. Kennedy’s Democrats gained seats in the House in the 1962 midterms. LBJ’s popularity peaked following the assassination of Kennedy and then his landslide against Barry Goldwater, and he cashed it in for the Great Society (Medicaid was enacted in 1965) and his civil rights program.

Republicans had begun to exploit their Southern Strategy by 1968, though, and George Wallace won five states that year as LBJ became deeply unpopular amid the Vietnam War. Still, Hubert H. Humphrey nearly won the popular vote despite all of it. The transition way from the Long Liberal Era didn’t happen overnight.

The Long Conservative Era (1968-2008)

As I wrote above, I don’t regard Nixon’s presidency as a peak for conservatism. Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan took more of a “mend it, don’t end it” approach to welfare reform, and he was a self-proclaimed Keynesian as the country battled through one relatively mild recession and then a severe one in 1973-75. But he also thrived on grievance and backlash to civil rights, anti-war protests, and “acid, abortion and amnesty,” crushing George McGovern in 1972, even as cultural vibes took longer to shift away from the free love era of the 1960s. Watergate sapped Nixon’s popularity almost immediately in his second term, producing an awful midterm for Republicans in 1974. But Carter’s margin of victory in 1976 was underwhelming under the circumstances, and he was among the least accomplished modern presidents, as honorable as his post-presidency was.

Then Ronald Reagan came roaring in, having wrestled control of the GOP away from the moderate faction, and defeated Carter in the biggest landslide against an incumbent president since 1932. Although his popularity ran aground early in his term, Reagan rebounded along with the economy until the Iran-Contra scandal in 1986 — but by 1988, Reagan was popular again, and Vice President George H.W. Bush easily defeated Michael Dukakis. Bush was more of a center-right moderate in the Ford mold, and his popularity gyrated, peaking after the Gulf War but quickly declining to the point where a Democratic presidential nomination that had once seemed to be a lost cause translated into a victory for Bill Clinton. Culture also began to shift away from the AIDS crisis and the Cold War: the term “political correctness” was in widespread use beginning in about 1990, and Bush invoked the Insurrection Act in the Rodney King riots.

Just as Eisenhower’s two terms didn’t interrupt the Long Liberal Era, Bill Clinton’s back-to-back wins — neither with a majority of the popular vote — don’t break the Long Conservative Era, especially after “Hillarycare” failed and his whooping in the 1994 midterms. Instead, Clinton moved unapologetically to the center, balaning the budget, signing conservative crime and welfare bills, and winning re-election in 1996 on a campaign emphasizing the healthy economy. And if the early 90s had been grungier, the late 90s were a more normie time.

History would have been different if not for poor ballot design in Florida, costing Al Gore the election by 537 votes. But any auspices George W. Bush made of bipartisanship went out the window after the September 11 attacks, when his popularity surged to 90 percent, In that period — a formative political moment for people of about my age who were then just getting out of college³ — it was conservatives, not liberals, doing the canceling.

But Bush expended his political capital more on foreign wars, domestic surveillance, and an expansion of the executive state rather than on domestic policy accomplishments. Republicans, unusually, retook the Senate from Democrats in the 2002 midterms after Jim Jeffords had briefly given Democrats a majority, but all he really got done with it was another tax cut. Then Bush’s 2004 re-election win was underwhelming given how popular he’d been three years earlier and that his opponent was John Kerry. Republicans had sought to boost conservative turnout in 2004 by putting a series of gay marriage referendums on the ballot — the efficacy of this strategy is debated, but in retrospect, it looks like a sort of last hurrah for the power of the Christian Right that Reagan had cultivated. Between the Iraq War, the Global Financial Crisis, and the rise of the Internet as an organizing tool, Bush was completely discredited by 2008, leading to a landslide win by a guy named Barack Hussein Obama.

The New Liberal Era (2008-2020)

Did liberals fulfill the promise they felt on November 4, 2008 — the night of Obama’s victory? I’d argue probably not. They did get Obamacare, which Democrats bravely trudged on with even after losing Ted Kennedy’s seat in a shocking special election in Massachusetts. But it was costly legislation. The rise of the Tea Party in 2010 gave Obama a very short honeymoon — and a first taste of Trumpism — and stymied his legislative agenda, though Obama didn’t pander to the right in the same way that Clinton did to win re-election in 2012.

Culture moved decisively to the left during this period, though, such as with Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders campaigns. Perhaps the capstone being the Supreme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage in 2015. And politics began to reconfigure into its current form, with Democrats as the party of the educated classes.

Rather than produce an “Emerging Democratic Majority,” however, that college-educated coalition began to create problems for Democrats, first in the Electoral College in 2016 and then more decisively in 2024 as racial and ethnic minorities without college degrees began to migrate to Trump.

Despite that, I think we can accommodate the first Trump term as being within the New Liberal Era in a way that we might not be able to for Trump 2.0. I’ve already mentioned some of the reasons: Trump’s first win was a bit fluke-ish, coming without a popular vote win on a relatively light turnout; the resistance (literally) to Trump began almost immediately, and Democrats had an excellent 2018 midterm and then made Trump a one-term president — or so they thought. Still, despite narrow Congressional majorities, Biden got as much done legislatively in two years as Obama did in eight. And, although Democrats did lose the House in 2022, they gained a seat in the Senate, partly due to backlash to the Dobbs decision.

When were the first clear signs that something was going wrong for the left — and that Democrats’ relatively solid midterm had perhaps given Biden false hope? The stickiness of Biden’s unpopularity was clear by mid-to-late 2023; the economy was improving, but Biden’s numbers weren’t. Still, I’m not sure there’s any one bright line; it was more of a Boiling Frog Syndrome problem as Democrats didn’t seem to appreciate the full extent of the backlash to inflation, immigration, and wokeness until it was too late. The relatively muted reaction to the Supreme Court’s June 2023 affirmative action decision, in contrast to Dobbs, might have been one sign that the left had overreached on culture.

Still, as quick as Trump will be to reverse much of Biden and Obama’s accomplishments, the left isn’t coming away empty-handed. Three presidential victories in four tries from 2008 through 2020 — and a popular vote win in the one election they lost — is more than enough for this to count as a distinct era.

So what comes next?

From the way I’ve set this up, you might assume there are two possibilities: either we are indeed at the start of a new conservative era — the Conservative Golden Age — or we’re still within the New Liberal Era, and Trump’s win in 2024 won’t be enough to terminate it once we look back a few decades from now. It’s still an open question. If two consecutive Eisenhower terms weren’t enough to interrupt the Long Liberal Era, and likewise for Clinton and the Long Conservative Era, then in principle, liberalism could survive two non-consecutive terms for Trump.

I actually think there are four possibilities, not two, but let’s cover the two base cases first.

Scenario 1 — Conservative Golden Age — is that this is indeed a straightforward victory for populist conservatism, with more of it on the way, starting with JD Vance or another Republican winning in 2028. It’s easy enough to imagine there’s more backlash to wokeness, immigration, and liberal governance left to unwind in the coil after a 16-year shift toward liberalism.

But any Conservative Golden Age will probably require a strong economy over the next four years — and more effective governance than Trump offered in his first term. One advantage to Democrats being the party of the expert classes is that they have more human capital — and as many errors as the experts might have made, you’d rather have them on your side than not. Republicans have imported some human capital from Silicon Valley, but it’s a high-variance play given the mercurial personalities (i.e., Elon) involved. Perhaps Republicans can run back the playbook by riding a reservoir of cultural grievance to the White House again in 2028, and by that point, they’ll have developed a more robust set of institutions. I just don’t think they should take much for granted about it.

The easiest route to Scenario 2 — The New Liberal Era is Still Alive, Baby! — would be if Trump mismanages some sort of crisis. That’s not to wish any ill will on the administration or the country. But crises have a way of popping up once every 5-10 years (Bush, 9/11; Obama, the Global Financial Crisis; both Trump I and Biden, COVID). And there are as many threats as ever: a war in Taiwan, another pandemic, a financial crisis, AI gone haywire, you name it. Although I’d resist overly deterministic ways to predict elections, the heuristic that the electorate rewards an incumbent party if it manages a crisis well and punishes it if doesn’t should still be basically sound.

If Democrats return to the White House, what new president would they bring to power? One can imagine a few different options — let’s run through these from center to left:

• Scenario 2.1: Oligarch vs. Oligarch. Maybe Democrats could nominate an explicit centrist in the Mike Bloomberg mold or a Mark Cuban type. I tend to doubt it: the most explicitly centrist nominees like Eisenhower and Clinton usually come only after a party has spent longer in the wilderness. But who knows: maybe politics is fundamentally different now and requires more social media and financial power. The thing is, though, that a sufficiently centrist candidate might not qualify as a vibe shift back to the left. Rather, it could be a sign that we’re in a conservative era instead and Democrats are recalibrating to the new normal.

• Scenario 2.2: Obama nostalgia. With Biden’s reputation having suffered — appropriately, I’d argue — and Clinton and Harris having lost, I’d expect an uptick in Obama nostalgia, as he’s the one figure in the party who still has his reputation mostly intact. Candidates like Obama don’t fall out of coconut trees, but Democrats have plenty of young-ish, charismatic-ish candidates elected in their solid 2018 and 2022 midterms. Think someone who’s a little more chill about the culture wars — and more friendly toward Big Tech.

• Scenario 2.3. Run it back. You might think that the people associated with the Harris and Biden campaigns would be discredited but there’s a lot of inertia within the party — the DNC just hired Harris’s social media team, for instance. Surely this will lead to electoral disaster? Well, if you believe strongly enough in thermostatic effects, or Trump screws up badly enough, then maybe not — tinkering around the edges could be enough.

• Scenario 2.4. Bern, baby, Bern. No, I’m not actually suggesting Democrats will nominate Bernie Sanders, who will be 87 years old in 2028. But I do think there’s an opening for the left, which will have ample basis to critique both the failures of the Democratic establishment and Trump’s friendless with the oligarch class. There doesn’t seem to be much of an appetite for this right now — and if you’re asking me, a more successful version would need to be someone from the Sanders wing, not the Social Justice Left. But if you’ve read this far, you’ve learned that the political needle can swing in unpredictable directions.

Scenario 3 — Stalemate — isn’t well represented over the past 100 years, which has the relatively distinct conservative and liberal eras I’ve argued for. But five elections in a row between 1876 and 1892 were fought to within 3 points in the popular vote, with the presidency flipping back and forth to Grover Cleveland’s Democrats twice. True, that was followed by a string of four straight GOP wins — two of them by one of Trump’s favorite presidents, William McKinley. But maybe we’ve entered an era in which being an incumbent is a disadvantage. And perhaps campaigns are extremely efficient these days, to the point where the game theory adaptation is that every election is a jump ball. We’ve had three straight party shifts in the White House; would a fourth and fifth surprise me? Not at all.

Finally, Scenario 4 — Off the Charts — means that the liberal/conservative axis, as I’ve depicted it in the chart, will cease to represent American politics well. Maybe it’s centrist oligarchs and technocrats against a horseshoe theory coalition of the populist left and right. Probably these battles are still fought under the auspices of parties named “Democrats” and “Republicans,” but with enough tectonic shifts to constitute what historians describe as a new “party system.”

Then, there are some darker scenarios in which the United States transitions to being what scholars describe as an “electoral autocracy” — or maybe an electoral oligarchy with democratic elements. I’m not an alarmist about this path, but I don’t think the possibility can be rounded to zero. And if artificial general intelligence or superintelligence comes soon and is as big a deal as Silicon Valley thinks, maybe we’ll need a new form of government as well — technological revolutions so profound often produce literal revolutions, too.

We might not recognize the changes at first — maybe we get Scenario 3 (a stalemate) until the Big New Thing comes along, slowly at first and then all at once. However, historians would look back on 2024 as an inflection point.

It might surprise you to learn that I’d put roughly an equal amount of probabilistic weight in each of these buckets, including Scenario #4. The conclusion from studying history is that American politics is quite unpredictable at medium-to-long time scales. And the start of a new presidential term is often when we have the least perspective on the trends.

1. Although the Progressives, and especially Woodrow Wilson, were a bit “problematic” as the kids say — they had some attitudes that would today be regarded as illiberal, such as on race and Prohibition.

2. Check out how the list of best-selling albums changes from folk and R&B in the early 70s to more pop by the mid-70s, for instance.

3. This is perhaps why you detect a certain inherent amount of concern about “cancel culture” among political writers about my age. We grew up and came of age in a conservative era, so we were skeptical that the pendulum had permanently swung to the left even before it was cool.