The thing about cycles is that when you observe them, it's worth extrapolating forward and back, to see how well they carry. The generational cycle of 18-22 years actually fits in well with the principles of the Great Turning (see Strauss and Howe) which posits an eighty year cycle of societal disintegration, foundational rebuilding, maturation, corruption and back to disintegration. I suspect that it also has to do with demographic patterns (there's a demographic heartbeat pattern in which the percentage change in population between generations does this BUM ba Bum ba pattern of troughs and peaks). The social disintegration phase usually coincides with depressions, civil wars, and has done so consistently in England, Northern Europe and the United States since about 1600, and usually occurs when a society has become so unequal, stratified and polarized that class warfare becomes violent. In the US, this has coincided with the Revolutionary War (in 1776-1783), the Civil War (1858-1865), World War II (1938-1945), which means that we're at the tail end of the corruption phase and heading into the social disintegration phase (2018-2025?).
Given that, the existence of a roughly twenty year cycle within that 80 year period makes sense. It's a turning. Progressives push in one direction - towards broader rights for minorities, environmental regulation, more even distribution of wealth, and so forth, eventually getting to a point where the changes in society threaten the dominant status quo. Conservatives (reactionaries) react to these changes that threaten the status quo and push back, eventually reaching a point where what had been a healthy inhibitory response becomes an extreme, unhealthy one. Support for the conservative position in turn disintegrates as the conservative factions overreach and the priorities that had bound them earlier in the cycle now pit them against one another. Towards the end of the corruption phase, this reaches a peak, the two great factions of society (the Yankee communal idealism vs. the Deep South landed aristocracy) finally break, and all hell breaks loose.
I suspect that the great cycle might actually be double what Strauss and Howe believe. World War II was horrendous, but in the US it served to siphon off a lot of the anger that had been building up during the Depression, and the Revolutionary War similarly forced a common action between avowed enemies in the face of a potentially far more devastating one. In 1700, North America was not heavily populated, but it was a remarkably bloody period in European history. The problem is that such cycles are very large, and other factors may mask them, so you have comparatively few data points.
Overall, I'm not optimistic about the next decade. The Republicans are not at their zenith of crazy yet.
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