[suthener]

A very wise man, my late father, told me many yeas ago that the pendulum does swing, but never as far to the right as it had been before. He was right.

[Robert DeLong]

True that, unless it gets a push on the swing back. 8>)

[Mmmike]

Our society was compromised from the start by a fundamental dedication to subjectivist self-assertion in a Protestant-turned-secularist way, so your swinging-pendulum analogy holds true for our society. Our predicament is that no matter how far out the pendulum swings, people are inoculated against a full swing back to the right because they stop short of staring down questions of truth square in the eye. They are deeply allergic to questions of truth, smelling in them some kind of conspiracy to take away their personal sovereignty. Hence no equilibrium is possible.