AN UNEVEN PENDULUM

I HAVE LONG THOUGHT OF POLITICS being modeled by the swing of a pendulum. There are always extremists, I concede, though most of us are generally centrists on many matters. Here are tidbits in support of this thesis—and particularly the moral consequences of pendulum swings.

A Pendulum’s 100 Years. Republicans were in power during the Roaring Twenties. A Great Depression followed. Franklin Delano Roosevelt led a liberal swing with such New Deal features as Social Security, TVA, and WPA. Eisenhower, even with his warning of a military-industrial complex, was part of a pendulum swing in the conservative direction. Indeed, William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review gave it an intellectual base. 

Liberalism of the 1960s featured anti-war activism and also the Civil Rights Movement. Conservatism bloomed as a backlash, particularly in the South’s shift from Democrat to Republican alignment. Democrat (and Southerner) Lyndon B. Johnson, succeeding after JFK’s 1963 assassination, beat Republic (and conservative) Barry Goldwater in a 1964 landslide, with the highest popular vote (61.1 percent) since 1824 (that election, a complex one indeed). 

Reagan was a fiscal conservative and also a strong advocate of U.S. power (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”). The Obama presidency expressed a new liberalism; dare I say a new awakening? Trump has been a reaction in the opposite direction, with a Biden interregnum. 

A Moral Scorecard. Each of these swings has had implications in terms of powers of the federal government, voter rights, civil rights, human rights, and their many relational interactions. FDR, for example, tried to pack the Supreme Court in 1937; he was unsuccessful. Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy and his cohorts came to define “Red Scare Madness—The Fifties,” with its attack on those expressing anything resembling a progressive political position.

Voting Rights, 1965. According to The National Archives, the Voting Rights Act “was signed into law on August 6, 1965, by President Lyndon Johnson. It outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting. This ‘act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution’ was signed into law 95 years after the amendment was ratified.”

Citizenship, 2025. Speaking of amendments, I note that the fourteenth amendment ensures due process and equal protection for all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. However, as reported by The Guardian, December 5, 2025, “The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide the legality of Donald Trump’s order to heavily restrict the right to birthright citizenship, the long-held constitutional principle that individuals born on US soil are automatically United States citizens. The justices will hear the president’s request to uphold his executive order on birthright citizenship, issued just hours after Trump took office for his second term and immediately blocked from taking effect.”

“Multiple judges across the country,” The Guardian recounts, “filed injunctions blocking the order, finding it violates or probably violates the constitution, federal statute and US supreme court precedent.”

Judges, the Department of Justice, and the Supreme Court, 2025. The fourteenth amendment is only one aspect of the pendulum swing of justice. Indeed, in one sense it traces back to Republican Senator Mitch McConnell and his blocking President Barak Obama (a so-called “lame-duck”) from filling the Supreme Court vacancy left by death of Justice Antonin Scalia. 

In stunning hypocrisy, McConnell later had no problem promoting Amy Coney Barrett after Justice Ruth Ginsberg’s death, despite this being close to another election. 

A 6-3 SCOTUS. The result is today’s 6-3 conservative/liberal Supreme Court with its judgements on Roe vs Wade, presidential immunity, affirmative action, birthright citizenship, and who knows what other judicial perversions to come.

Currently, even the traditional independence of certain governmental agencies, the separation of the three federal branches, and even the separation of church and state have come into question.

Can this truly be what Trump voters really want of their choices?

A Personal Assessment. At one time and another through life, I have aligned myself somewhat to the right (I’ve always thought William F. Buckley was cool) and other times to the left of centrist ideologies. But when I compare the moral implications of liberalism (civil rights, voting rights, affirmative active, D.E.I, even “woke”) with the moral implications of current conservatism (a narcissistic foul-mouth Queens Felon, selling out Ukraine to Putin in the interest of bankrupt-ridden “dealing,” wack-theorist “health” advocats, right-wing ex-news sycophants, ICE operations, “emergency” killings on the high seas), I surely hope and pray the pendulum is on its return swing—and rapidly too. ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025