The Pendulum of History
By Niall Twohig
Got to admit it’s getting better
a little better all the time
- The Beatles
In order to push past common sense notions of history as an upward arrow of continual progress, I offer students a framework that sees history as a political and ideological tug of war. The image I use for this is a pendulum. As with a pendulum, a force must be applied to push or pull the ball leftward or rightward. This force is neither fully top-down or bottom-up. Force flows more dynamically. It is exerted by institutions, ruling groups, grassroots movements, and accumulated actions from common people like you and me.
The following diagrams give students a sense of the social forces on the political Left and political Right and how those forces move society toward different social formations throughout U.S. history. My goal is not to present philosophical ideals but to think about how these philosophies played or play out in real political praxis.
Pendulum 1. I introduce this chart after we’ve studied the Gilded Age and seen the results of a social order oriented towards corporate interest. We then look at how, within the context of The Depression and WW2, progressive and liberal social movements pressured FDR’s administration to push for liberal reforms in government and society.
Pendulum 2. We then consider how social movements on the Left attempted to push for further reform while groups even further Left made more radical calls for revolution.
Pendulum 3. We explore the corporate-led neoliberal backlash against the reforms and revolutionary demands of the 1960s.
Pendulum 4. This diagram shows the contrasts between liberalism and neoliberalism.
Pendulum 5 (as of 2024). A full spectrum of the political terrain. It shows how the field of electoral politics has been pushed rightward, with the neoliberals and neoconservatives occupying similar ground to the right-wing forces of the Gilded Age. It also shows how contemporary reactionary forces, presenting themselves as alternatives to a two-party hegemony, are located firmly in Far Right philosophy and praxis. These forces hijack the populist desire to lash back at neoliberalism while (1) maintaining a similar corporate orientation as neoliberals and (2) misdirecting populist rage through the prism of white supremacy, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, ableism.
The questions become: When the pendulum has been pushed this far Right, what opposing force must be applied to pull us back from the brink? Can such a force be accumulated given the fractures of the political Left? And, on a more immediate level, when we see the pendulum swinging so far rightward, where do we wish to apply the force of our lives?