Reagan’s ascendence provided the pretext for The Cycles of American History. The book was typical of Schlesinger’s work—a collection of erudite essays rather than a treatise on a single theme. Schlesinger Jr. updated his father’s theory of history as a way of explaining America’s behavior as a superpower since World War II—and to, perhaps, predict its future. Reagan’s shake-up of the New Deal coalition had led Schlesinger Jr. to conclude that his father’s paradigm of “conservatism versus liberalism” obscured the complicated dynamics of American political history; so too did periodizing them in specific years. Instead, Schlesinger Jr. saw cyclical change in generational terms, in a “thirty-year alternation between public purpose and private interest.” He also applied his theory to U.S. foreign policy. No clear correlation existed between domestic and foreign policy, he argued, only that “the domestic cycle” determined the priorities of U.S. foreign policy and how the U.S. deployed power abroad—protecting private interests at home often meant securing the fortunes of corporations and the titans of capital abroad.
In the second chapter, “The Cycles of American Politics,” Schlesinger invoked his generational thesis when he argued that there was nothing exceptional about the Reagan coalition and that Reagan’s ability to attract new voters—religious fundamentalists and young Americans—simply signified a generational shift: an aging baby boomer population and voters too young to experience the radicalism of the 1960s. A lack of historical memory motivated Reagan’s campaign to “Make America Great Again.” Reagan was a corollary of the cycle working, churning as it did every generation. Schlesinger held faith that the “1980s will witness the burnout of … the age of Reagan.” Economic downturns, perennial in America history, would, he felt, discredit fealty to the private sector and Reagan-era individualism, and liberalism would experience a rebirth in the 1990s.
But Schlesinger also recognized the significance of the times. The sociologist Daniel Bell had argued in 1960 that the Cold War birthed “the end of ideology,” since the debate over federal power had been settled. “Few serious conservatives … believe that the Welfare State is ‘the road to serfdom,’” wrote Bell. Yet ideology did in fact return with a vengeance in the 1980s, as a host of free-market, fundamentalist ideologues flocked to the Reagan coalition. The creed of individualism and rejection of the welfare state soon pervaded American politics, reshaping voters’ allegiances to both parties.
Written before Ronald Reagan developed a close relationship with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, Cycles critiqued the ideologues surrounding Reagan who saw this late era of the Cold War in dichotomies: Are you a Communist or not? Chapters 3 (“Foreign Policy and the American Character”), 4 (“Human Rights and the American Tradition”), and 5 (“America and Empire”) also meditated on a series of foreign policy questions that have returned to us in the age of Trump: Is the United States an empire? Does it have imperial ambitions? Should (or can) the U.S. secure and promote human rights abroad?
