From Gary Hart’s America’s Next Chapter: “Ralph Waldo Emerson noted the political oscillations between the party of memory and the party of hope, the party of conservatism and the party of innovation. Henry Adams believed that ‘a period of about 12 years measured the beat of the pendulum’ during the era of the founders. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., borrowing from his historian father, estimated that the swings between eras of public action and those of private interest were nearer to 30 years. But what matters more than the length of the cycles is that these swings, between what Schlesinger called periods of reform and periods of consolidation, clearly occur. If we somewhat arbitrarily fix the age of Franklin D. Roosevelt as 1932 to 1968 and the era of Ronald Reagan as 1968 to 2008, a new cycle of American political history — a cycle of reform — is due.”