Does this sound familiar? A president comes into office promising to make America great. Actually, in 1920, Warren G. Harding’s promise was a “return to normalcy,” but he meant the same thing – a reversal of everything his progressive predecessors had enacted.

Trust busting would no longer be in vogue. Labor unions would be unwelcome. Immigration would be restricted. Taxes on the wealthy would be opposed. This program was abetted by a “conservative laissez faire” Supreme Court was instrumental in striking down progressive laws regulating how corporations, which it had earlier declared to be people, should treat actual laboring people.

The Republicans felt free to exempt business from regulation because a roaring economy had created a buoyant stock market and a plethora of new consumer goods. With industry humming and the farm economy, in part due to plenty of international trade, Harding’s cabinet of millionaire businessmen concluded America’s most pressing need was to cut taxes on people like them.

This was in reaction to the arrival of the income tax in 1913, a major progressive reform that had gained popularity because the previous system, using regressive tariffs as a source for government revenues, hit the working class hardest by taxing the necessities they could not avoid purchasing. By contrast, the income tax was progressive, imposing higher tax rates on higher earners, thereby ameliorating a growing economic inequality.

The growing economy required a plentiful supply of labor that was being supplied by immigration, but this was suddenly undermined when the Harding administration embraced the racist pseudo-science of the eugenics movement and embodied it in the immigration act of 1924.

Under its terms total immigration would be cut to 150,000 a year, and those admitted would have to be in ethnic or racial proportion to the population at the time. Thus, preferential treatment was given to immigrants from northern and western Europe, while those from southern and eastern Europe were deemed to be of inferior stock. In addition, Asians “could not immigrate into the United States legally…and were excluded from citizenship on racial grounds.” An exception was made for farm laborers crossing the Mexican border because a Colorado congressman argued that “American laboring people will not get down on their hands and knees in the dirt to pull weeds.”

To protect America from being exploited by these same undesirable foreigners, and millionaires from competition, a new tariff regimen was enacted. Unsurprisingly, countries attacked by our tariffs soon retaliated, so American producers and farmers lost access to lucrative markets and American consumers were forced to pay higher prices for goods.

In a Europe still recovering from WWI and struggling to repay war debt, economies were weakened when markets dried up and tax revenue was lost due to tariffs. Many began to default on loans which were often owed to American banks. This vicious circle led in time to a market crash and the beginning of an economic depression.

By then Hoover was in office. The sane response when you find yourself in a hole is to quit digging, but Hoover doubled down, increasing tariffs in 1930. Soon the stock market was down by 40% or more, unemployment rose to 23%, and 20% of the nation’s banks failed. As if that weren’t enough, Hoover refused to consider government relief for the poor and unemployed because that would be “socialism.”

Is U.S history repeating itself before our eyes? We now have another administration that inherited a robust economy that is dedicated to policies similar to those of Harding. He was a corrupt, philandering, tool of big money who until now regularly placed first on the list of worst presidents in history.
Like Harding, Trump favors tax cuts for the rich and has no problem with stacking up debt for the working class and their children to pay. His administration is opposed to government help for the average person but favors welfare for the Mar-A-Lago crowd. It Is anti-immigrant, anti-government, anti-tax, isolationist, and nativist.

Trump, too, has embraced a long ago discredited racist eugenic fiction and is doubling down on tariffs that are weakening the economy and hurting farmers, manufacturers, and consumers. In Harding’s day there was no worry about climate change but if here had been, he would have ignored it, as Trump has, in order to pander to the fossil fuel industry.

Is no one in the Republican Party aware that Trump is now recapitulating a program that same party followed,ruinously,100 years ago? One that led to the Great Depression and World War II? As then, it includes ignoring staunch democratic allies and enabling the rising threat posed by dangerous autocratic enemies in Europe and Asia?

The feckless followers of Trump could discover the disquieting parallels in the chapters on that period in “These Truths” by Jill Lepore, to which I am indebted for some of the facts cited above. Or they can just sing along with Jacques Brel’s “Marathon” which describes with jaunty irony the mess that began in the Nineteen Twenties and is being replayed in 2020.

We must dance because the Twenties roar
The Twenties roar because there’s bathtub gin…
Black, black Monday and the market drops
But we keep on dancing, dancing, we can’t stop…
We must dance because the Thirties scream
The Thirties scream because the Horsemen ride…
Adolf Hitler and the Siegfried follies
Joseph Stalin and a bag full of jollies.

Join us now, we’re on a marathon
We’re always dancing when the music plays.
Join us now, we’re on a marathon
Dancing, dancing through the nights and days.

Do we really want to do the same dance again?