I've written a lot about realignment this year. And in my series "Three Waves and A Wall", I connected the repeated waves of realigning elections with the longer waves of rising and falling world powers. Here's a chart--a modified version of one I came across yesterday (more aesthetic original here), from Visualizing Economics--that helps show how the two are connected. A second chart on the flip completes the process.
The long, relatively constant climb of income from 1933 to 1973 represents the rise of American power to its peak, when, like others before it, America experienced a rude, unexpected military shock, in Vietnam. As Philips explains, the elites continue doing well after such shocks, while the people as a whole do not, a condition that's bouyed by reactionary, jingoist politics. This lasts for a generation and a half or two, before there's a return to the more traditional eglitarian values that were the bedrock of national well-being in the first place. This realigning election should herald the beginning of that return. The dramatic end of that upward slope has given way to a long period in which average incomes have risen so slowly that they've only now reached the point they would have been in 1980 if the pre-1973 pace had continued.
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