From CYCLES OF AMERICAN HISTORY about the Schlesingers' model,
Thus, the Constitution's creators and the Sixties radicals had something in common, despite having lots of differences.
Let's take one particular line and examine it in more depth to look at the sloppy scholarship of that chart.
1776-1788 - Liberal Movement to Create Constitution
One thing most people forget is that the Signers (signed the Declaration of Independence) and the Founders (ratified the constitution) are not the same group. They have people in common but are distinct. The Signers might be considered liberal, but it is hard to apply that same designation to the Founders.
If "Liberal" means to "increase democracy" as the author wrote and as Nice Squirrel repeated then it is very hard to make the case that the Founders were in any way liberal. It was the constitution that created layers to insulate the government from the populace, such as the Electoral College, how Senators were originally chosen by state legislatures, and how the Supreme Court justices are appointed entirely outside the control of any voter. You can tell when the Democrats and Republicans have lousy candidates by the way the rhetoric isn't about what the candidate would do but about how the voter should think about the SCOTUS appointments (such as Obama v Romney).
Also consider that one of the Founders was Alexander Hamilton. Now if I was alive at the time I'd have been aligned with the Anti-Federalists, and then later with the Democratic Republicans. He would have felt comfortable with today's conservatives, so much so that your chart even names the next "conservative" period after that bastard. He was part of the movement that brought us the constitution.
Unless the author means to indicate that the liberal period ended with the passage of the constitution. That would be a very interesting interpretation.
So the first era that is labeled "liberal" either culminated with the constitution or ended with the constitution.
As we go down the chart into later eras, I agree that IF the Articles period is liberal, than the Washington and Adams administrations would be conservative and then the Jefferson period would be liberal. But look later. "Domination of the National Government by Slaveowners."
Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party became Jackson's Democratic Party, and it was the same party that wound up on the same side as the slaveowners opposed to the Hamilton-Clay Whig Party of the north. This means that wanting the US government to spend money to help corporations is now considered a "liberal" value. Back when the fight was Jefferson-Hamilton, using the government to assist local businesses was considered conservative and the liberals opposed it. Now, leading up to the Civil War, doing so is considered liberal and apparently conservatives oppose it. So is it a liberal value or not? If a protective tariff is put in place to safeguard a local business, and the money used to subsidize that local business, is it liberal or conservative?
And are the heirs of Hamilton liberal or conservative? How about the heirs of Jefferson?
The Civil War ushered in an era of Republican domination, where it was considered good for the government to put protective tariffs in place and use the money to subsidize businesses. Many northern states did it before the Civil War, few southern states did. After the Civil War, many of the reconstruction governments started doing it as well, but in what was an amazing show of honesty (although for less than honorable reasons) when the populations of the states were finally given control of their own state governments they repudiated the reconstruction/internal-improvement debts racked up by the reconstruction governments.
So we've established that "liberal" and "conservative" have switched at least once already, and we haven't even gotten past reconstruction.
Then we get to the "Gilded Era" and the "Progressive Era". Personally I do not see them as separate eras. Having had a "liberal" era where businesses were soaking the public using the government, we had that happen without Reconstruction also happening and called it the Gilded Era. Then, when people started complaining about the excesses of those businesses and asking for regulation, we had those businesses writing the regulations on themselves. The Gilded Era and the Progressive Era were the time of a huge feud between the Morgan interests and the Rockefeller-Kuhn-Leob interests. Whenever one faction was in power, they used the "progressive" powers of the government to hurt the other family. "Teddy" Roosevelt broke up Rockefeller trusts, Taft broke up Morgan trusts. It culminated with the founding of the Federal Reserve when the two families finally reached an accord, in the middle of a "liberal" era. And remember, Hamilton (conservative) liked central banking, Jefferson (liberal) didn't.
Now apparently central banking went from being conservative to being liberal. Usually as a concept gets older, it is viewed as more conservative, but now we have the reverse. And I fail to see how central banking is bringing more power to the people.
After 1919 it is clear we are using very different ideas about what is conservative and what is liberal than we were at the beginning of the chart. We are clearly using the modern definitions of those those terms to create the idea of eras for the modern time. No real examination is needed after this point, except to point out that Jefferson's heirs, the libertarians, are inexplicably considered to be somehow aligned with the modern conservative. It really is a mystery.
