November 9, 2016. I didn’t wake up that morning, as I hadn’t gone to sleep the night before. Eight hours earlier, Donald Trump had been elected president of the United States. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the red lines he had crossed that had now ceased to be red lines: deriding war heroes, boasting of sexual assault, insulting gold-star families, mocking the disabled, promoting violence, fomenting nationalism. And on top of the insult I felt from these grotesqueries were all the policy differences I had with the Republican party that would now control the House, the Senate and the White House.

The pain of the moment – a moment set to last at least four years – was such that I sought refuge elsewhere, tangentially, in examining the trajectory of America’s decades-long electoral path that had delivered me to the abyss.

The first presidential election I could recall was 1976; knowing nothing about Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter, I knew Ford was the name of a car, and that was cool, so he was my man. But his unseemly pardon of Richard Nixon was unrecoverable and he lost. In 1980, I still had no real feelings for the candidates, or issues, for that matter, but both my parents were voting for the 3rd-party Independent, John Anderson, and my excitable grandfather, who was living with us at the time, was an avid Reagan guy, and I remember sharing vicariously in the joy of his victory. Four years later, I began to develop my own feelings about these people I would see on TV as my parents watched the news, and The Gipper’s – to an impressionable teenager – effortless charm made me happy enough to see him reelected. And I was far from alone, as Reagan won a now-unimaginable 525 of 538 electoral votes in embarrassing Walter Mondale. My first vote, resulting in my first truly sour election, was in 1988 for Michael Dukakis, who reflected the liberal instincts of this now fully cognizant college kid, yet lacked all the political instincts needed to overcome the well-oiled Republican machine behind George Bush I. 1992 brought with it my first electoral thrills, as Bill Clinton, with an assist from 3rd-party Independent Ross Perot, thumped the incumbent, and for the first time I saw how higher-up government officials can sometimes seem relatable, even inspirational. Although the shine had been somewhat tarnished, Clinton’s reelection in 1996 against Bob Dole (and again Perot) seemed a foregone conclusion and yielded satisfaction if not glee. But this would be the last “normal” election of my life.

When I went to sleep on Nov. 7, 2000, Al Gore, after having being named the projected recipient of Florida’s 25 electoral votes, had been declared the winner of the presidential election over George Bush II. Waking up the next morning was indeed a shock, but not so much the Supreme Court ruling giving bush the presidency after a nauseating five weeks of counting, recounting and blocking recounts. Although not quite as close as 2000, 2004 was even more disappointing. The lack of repudiation for the Bush administration’s war mongering and war profiteering – and the election having been swung by a war dodger defaming a war hero, John Kerry – was so debilitating, I lay “sick” in bed for the entire next day. Before Barack Obama shocked and elated jaded political junkies like me by soundly defeating the popular, moderate Republican John McCain in 2008, I had consoled myself that the US political establishment could never sink lower than it was, that America’s overseas reputation could never sink below its ebb under Bush.

Needless to say, my naïveté now seemed quaint. Even before Trump’s inauguration, and well before proceeding to isolate and alienate the US from its closest allies and to tacitly condone some of the world’s least democratic regimes, it promptly became clear that Bush II would no longer be considered the worst president in recent memory.

The narrative was quickly written and widely accepted that it was the forgotten white working-class Rust Belt voters – particularly in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, three states Trump won by very narrow margins – that swung Trump the election. While it’s an undeniable fact that, for instance, Hillary Clinton neglected to make even one campaign stop in Wisconsin, the result was a confluence of factors including a mishandled FBI investigation into Clinton’s private e-mail server, two exceedingly unpopular candidates and a general global trend of vilifying elites, of which Clinton was perceived to be yet Trump was laughably not. But all these actual and considered theories were too painful for me to ponder on my morning of despair, which I feared would be followed by at least 1455 more until the next election on November 3, 2020.

No. At that dark moment, my mind could only contemplate the emotionless coordinates on a graph charting the US presidential election results in my lifetime. These points on the graph tend to create a jagged line. Because the country employs an – it must be said – inane two-party, winner-take-all political system, as opposed to the superior parliamentary democracies so prevalent in Europe, the chance that a new incoming administration will administer policy that is diametrically opposed to that of the outgoing government is considerably higher. So, one conservative administration is followed by a progressive one, and vice versa, with usually zero political appointees bridging both governments. Indeed, America’s binary system seems almost designed to breed disruption. One party is in power until enough swing voters become weary or disillusioned to vote for the opposing party. And then the pendulum swings back. For the second half of the 20th century until the end of the Cold War, this dynamic was less severe, as the policy differences between Democrats and Republicans were relatively mild.

But with the intense polarization of recent decades (see gerrymandering and media echo chambers), the swings have grown more violent: Bill Clinton’s center-left neo-liberals followed by a reactionary neo-conservative right, followed by a culturally far-left Barack Obama, and then finally neo-nationalist Trump. Although my graph gave me comfort that this too shall pass, the prospect of waiting four – or eight! – years for the next sharper-than-ever left turn was nearly unbearable.

But then something unexpected happened, and I don’t mean the attack on the US Capitol or a second impeachment by the House, which are in some ways the logical coda to the Trump era. That something was Joe Biden, not a polarizing figure, not a Donald Trump of the Left. Trump fatigue, Trump incompetence and Covid-19 conspired to nominate the least exciting Democratic candidate in the field and to award him the presidency by 7 million votes. While Biden may have been the passionate choice of only a few voters, his election has broken the jagged, unsustainable cycle of the last 30 years.

Jonathan Lutes is an editor for the German Times and the Security Times.