Thread by @mcpli

Worth noting that the Roaring Twenties also were a period of increased xenophobia & racism as the country struggled to deal with increased diversity - leading to a virtual cutoff of immigration in 1924 & a resurgence of the Klan. I think we’ll face similar stresses this decade.

https://twitter.com/tiffanycli/status/1343725928048779267

But those stresses this decade will be exacerbated by the fact that - unlike in the 1920s when the US was still an emerging super economy in its prime - we are in a more fragile and vulnerable economic state today.

Indeed, though we like to think the demographic changes of the last few decades were big, the impact this decade is going to be even more intense in states like Texas as a *much* more diverse younger generation comes of age and older white people leave the scene.

That will feel threatening to many people. (It shouldn’t but it will.) And it will be compounded by the fact that China will overtake the US as the largest economy before the decade is out (it is already larger on a ppp basis).

That I suspect will be a huge psychic shock to many Americans because so much of our national identity is built on the idea that we are preeminent (“the world’s richest economy,” etc.) The US still will be a giant economic power but things will feel ominous.

And that will reverberate into our politics - heck, it already has.

Oh, one other way the 1920s are like today - the census & redistricting! When the results of the 1920 came out it showed a much more diverse country & one increasingly concentrated in cities and bigger towns. So what did Congress do? It decided simply to ignore it.

Yep. Congress refused to accept the 1920 census and there was no redistricting for a decade. Similarly, this decade has seen efforts by the Trump administration to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census to allow states to redistrict based on adult citizens.

And after the citizenship question was blocked, the Trump administration moved to trying to remove undocumented immigrants from the census. As in the 1920s, all these efforts are rooted in fears of a changing America.