A cyclical theory of modern political alignments

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Cyclical theories of history are such mystical rubbish. If there is any truth in them it is because, in this case, the United States hasn't genuinely changed that much.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Why do you people have to turn everything into pseudoscience?

Look, as any student of history worth his salt knows you can easily pick a series of data on a similar subjects arbitrarily, compare with some other data and... Ta Dah!... there's a pattern.

Let's study a very early pattern in US presidential history:

George Washington (F) 1789-1797
John Adams (F) 1797-1801
Thomas Jefferson (DR) 1801-1809
James Madison (DR) 1808-1817
James Monroe (DR) 1817-1825

Now let's remove all context for a minute (like for example that Monroe didn't even face a challenger in 1820) and look at this pattern - only once did a president not serve the two full four-year terms. There were only 5 presidents in 36 years. Now I suppose looking at this (and remember we are being context-free here) you could deduce a few things such as, for example, the electoral system of Early America was very stable, incumbents rarely lost and there was strong continuity over the period. Of course, Early America was not very stable (much less stable than most people now realize) but those sort of things have other ways of manifesting themselves than mere election results (and have to consider "the meaning" the presidency had in this period which is quite different to now).

Now let's imagine that Obama is re-elected (we require no great imagination for this) and survives until 2017, that gives us:
Ronald Reagan (R) 1981-1989
George H. Bush (R) 1989-1993
Bill Clinton (D) 1993-2001
George W. Bush (R) 2001-2009
Barack Obama (D) 2009-2017

It's the exact same pattern*. LIKE OMG THAT MUST MEAN SMTHING!!111eleven!!11

So then what similarities are there between the Early presidency of the first five presidencies and those of the 36 year period between 1981-2017. Clearly we must deduce something about these two periods that didn't exist at any time between 1825 and 1981. This must have some statistical significance, right?

I'm now going to wait and see who can figure out what it is because honestly I have no idea. So alignment fans, please explain...

* (Yes, I know J.J the pattern of the political parties is different. You don't need to tell me, what you need to inform me what that actually means).

** (I could think of one or two if I were so inclined, which I'm clearly not. But they are rather unfashionable thesis about American politics, so I suspect that nobody will list them).