Last week I took a dispassionate look at economic cycles. This week let's take an equally dispassionate look at political cycles.

Political cycles are generational in nature. (The cartoon is from 1800 and AmericanPresident.Org. ) They're set in a time of great crisis. They're re-set when a new crisis occurs that the old assumptions can't deal with.

But they also wear out. Ideologies are like roads. You set off in a direction but, at some point, go beyond your destination. Yet the road keeps leading you on. And the kids finally say, let's go a new way.

Traditionally, both age and crisis resulted in American political assumptions changing at regular intervals.

1. The first crisis came in 1800 and was based on the Jeffersonian ideal of a weak central government, suspicion of the British, and a mythological village ruled by the best people.
   
2. The second crisis, in 1828, represented a renewal of the first myth, adding the culture of the "west" and the idea of "rule by the common man," along with the modern Democratic Party structure.
   
3. Slavery was the third crisis. Note this came 32 years after Jackson, in 1860. Civil War resulted.
   
4. By 1896, 36 years after the Civil War, "waving the bloody shirt" no longer worked. The battle was joined between industry and world leadership or the rural myths of Populism. Industry won.
   
5. Again, 36 years later, the Great Depression saw the rise of the New Deal, a government big enough to deal with common problems, the idea that we're all in it together.
   
6. Another 36 years later, in 1968, came Vietnam. The Nixonian myth is centered on the suburb, on enemies in the culture, again with businessmen at the center.
   

I really thought 2004 would be a generational election. It was simple math. We were 36 years removed from Nixon and Vietnam. (The Nixon pin is from the collection at Duke University, where he went to Law School.) But nothing in fact changed. The issues of Vietnam still resonated. If they hadn't the Swift Boat Veterans would have been laughed off the political stage.

The generation that made its choice in the 1960s, who stood against the extremist elements of that time, and hence against the New Deal, against the academy, against sex, drugs, and hard rock music, continues to age. If you were 24 in 1968, this will be your 61st birthday. You are far healthier than your grandfather was at that age, but for how much longer?

Meanwhile the ideological road of that time is coming to look worn. Republicans are making war on one another, much as Democrats came to in the 1960s.

The question is, however, whether there is a defining crisis emerging that will force the new generation to choose sides, as the Vietnam Generation did, as the New Deal generation did, as the Bryan and Civil War generations did?

I think there is. We're living far beyond our means. We're not renewing the strengths that brought us power. Most of the world will be happy to see us brought low. And we're engaged in a war that seems increasingly irrelevant to these problems, and which is costing us hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

What's needed, and it's something I can't create because I'm a tag-along to the Vietnam era (I turned 18 in 1973 and saw it all on TV) is a new way to synthesize all this into a set of choices young people will want to make, choices that will define their lives, and that of the country, going forward.

It's overdue. And everything that is happening today -- everything -- will be seen as irrelevant, even silly, when the next generation writes the history of our time. Because they will see it through a different prism than we do, a set of assumptions, of myths and values, that frankly don't exist yet.

Politics has become a sideshow. When it takes center stage again you will know it. You will be consumed by the fire, and forever changed.

But not yet.