Where will the pendulum swing?

Political and social fluctuations throughout history have caused the political pendulum to swing rapidly from one extreme to the other in subsequent decades. 

One of the best examples of this political pendulum is the period Americans call the "Roaring Twenties" (the 1920s). These were years that saw the rapid healing of the wounds of the First World War, the transition to mass production with Ford, the inclusion of women in the workforce, high wages for workers, and the opening of doors to all kinds of artistic and social freedoms. 

The wave of the Roaring Twenties was not limited to America; it became even more tangible in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. After experiencing great poverty following the First World War, the Germans struggled with bloody street clashes and internal turmoil for a time, but then found some stability after a group of opinion leaders—including sociologist Max Weber, jurist Hugo Preuss, politician Friedrich Naumann, and historian Friedrich Meinecke—drafted a constitution that satisfied all parties. 

Even though they were dealing with the economic destruction brought by the war, poverty, and currency rendered worthless by high inflation, freedoms in cultural and social life continued at full speed with an attitude unique to the Roaring Twenties. 

While the Weimar Constitution expanded the right to vote in 1919 to include all men and women over the age of 20, it also ensured the inclusion of women in employment and social life, just as in America. While the Weimar Republic gave rise to the Bauhaus movement in architecture, a renaissance similar to the "Harlem Renaissance" led by African Americans in the United States took place on the streets of Berlin. 

Cultural liberalism reached a state of nirvana. While Weimar nurtured great thinkers like Adorno and Marcuse on one hand, it also produced scientists like Einstein and others who were nominated for the Nobel Prize every year. It should be noted that German Jews experienced their most brilliant period in trade and social life.

That was until the Great Depression... The Great Depression experienced by America had a chain reaction, pushing England and France, and then Germany, into a major economic bottleneck. The Weimar government could not cope with this economic depression, and the radical right and radical left rose...

Then the political pendulum swung to the other side, and the Nazi era began. The era of freedoms was over; anti-immigrant sentiment, the withdrawal of women from social life to be confined to housework, and many other oppressive, dictatorial practices began.

Once the pendulum swings toward anti-democratic rule, it spreads in waves all over the world. Political scientists have become able to predict the movement of the pendulum more or less.

Now you might ask; do states never learn from what they have experienced? 

Of course they did. For example, with the lesson they learned from 1929, Americans weathered the 1987 crisis much more easily. Furthermore, after the oil crisis in 1973, the speech Churchill made to the British Parliament in 1913 on oil policy became a roadmap: "Safety and certainty in oil lie in variety and variety alone."

Yes, coming to the present day, we see that the collapse of liberalism, which has been going on for a long time in America, is again spreading in waves across the world. Moreover, it is not as easy as it was in the past to predict where the pendulum will swing from here. 

We are entering a period where peace is being discussed between countries, moving away from a universe where, until just yesterday, Israel was preparing to declare war on Iran, Russia was at war with Ukraine, and India and Pakistan were raining bombs on each other.

Peace is always our wish, but the questions in our minds remain the same; 

How real is it? 

How reliable is it? 

How sustainable is it?

While anti-immigrant sentiment, authoritarian leaders, and anti-democratic practices are on the rise in the world on one hand, we will see over time whether this wave of peace will be permanent or not.