The Pendulum of Great Awakenings

In this episode, we discuss the pendulum in American culture between pragmatic eras of stability and the eras of moral politics and social reform called Great Awakenings.
Awakenings are turbulent eras in which America turns away from the politics of compromise and building institutions for a moralistic culture dedicated to tearing down institutions it believes wrong or unjust to replace them with what it hopes will be something better. These eras trade the politics of "better or worse" for the politics of "right and wrong".
America has had three awakening eras before the modern political period. The original Great Awakening created an enormous religious revival before the American Revolution that carried a social leveling message and drew people into public debate. The Second Great Awakening created a religious revival centered around tent revival meetings that fueled powerful new issues like the abolition of slavery, temperance, and women’s suffrage. The Third Great Awakening created the progressive movement, which that launched countless reforms, as well as a new religious revival following the ideals of the Social Gospel.
Many people look at the shift in American politics during the 1960s and believe, given so much sudden change in how America conducted politics, there must have been a realignment. Yet the core arguments of the party system-liberalism and conservatism-never changed. Each party even maintained almost all their key issues, only adding added some new ones, the ones we call "social" liberalism and "social" conservatism. Since there was no significant change in party ideologies, this wasn’t a realignment. Yet something big did happen-it was the start of an awakening. Realignments and awakenings are completely different phenomenon on completely difference cycles, but each naturally effect the other.
If you want to understand American politics since the 1960s, you therefore have to understanding awakenings and how they work. Particularly, because we still live in an awakening era today.
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