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be characterized by alternating cycles of liheral thrust and conservative
retraction. According to this thesis, the first decade of the twentieth cen–
tury was a progressive era that was countered by the conservative ten–
dencies of the 1920S. American radicalism experienced its greatest
decade in the thirties only to be followed, after the war, by the dominant
conservatism of the Eisenhower period. From this perspective, the sixties
represented the perennial liberal tendency within American society,
which was reversed by the Reaganite counterrevolution of the 1980s.
Schlesinger expressed the hope that with the Clinton presidency the
nineties would be a Liberal decade. This hope was dashed by the unex–
pected Republican Congressional triumph of 1994. The Clinton Admin–
istration, which had on occasion claimed the legacy of the Kennedy White
House, moved adroitly to the center. However, the conservative Congres–
sional majority proved unable to consolidate its temporary triumph,
resulting in continuous oscillation between Left and Right. By the end of
the decade, the Bush formulation of "compassionate Conservativism"
seemed to represent the softening, if not the end, of ideology and to her–
ald the rhetoric of bipartisan political Centrism as the wave of the future.
A significant implication of this Centrism is that the agendas of the
1960s have been consigned to the past and have left no permanent
imprint on American society. The convergent Centrist argument is that
the ideologica I positions of both Left and Right ha ve been underm ined
by changing reality.
American Conservatism had never achieved an ideological coherence,
but represented an overlapping consensus among diverse constituencies.
These included religious groups who supported the expression of fam–
ily values in the public sphere, joined with partisans of economic free–
dom who advocated free markets and the role of private enterprise, and
augmented by Burkean conservatives who saw themselves as defenders
of traditional standards.
In
1989, after the fall of the Soviet Union, this
coalition of groups was deprived of its unifying theme, the defeat of
Communism, which had been expressed in the postwar electoral victo–
ries of Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.
With the collapse of the Socialist economies, the Left has also been
shorn of much of its ideological foundation. It no longer seeks to pro–
vide a systematic economic theory against free market principles in the
United States or in the developing world. Similarly, it no longer belie\'es
in the feasibility of a utopian transformation of the human condition.
Such utopianism used to permeate many Liberal reformist programs,
from schools which practiced progressive education, to penal institu-
