As promised, the second Trump administration has quickly rolled out a slew of policies and executive orders that the president says are all aimed at” Making America Great Again”. This takes on various forms, including Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency immediately laying off thousands of workers at various federal agencies, and President Donald Trump pausing all cash for Ukraine.
Trump says that, among people, there are three teams that are making America not-great: refugees, people with disabilities, and people who are committed to diversity, equity and inclusion plans.
These management work began at a time when some Americans expressed an entire rising sense of dissatisfaction with the state of the country and politicians. Only 19 % of Americans said in December 2024 that they think the country is heading in the right direction.
This view is striking not only because it is so gloomy, but because it strongly resembles how Americans felt during a pivotal generation 100 centuries ago, when people’s frustration with the state of the country led to a series of unfair, cruel plans by the federal government.
It’s a time of British story that I think offers something of a picture of the current political situation in the U. S.
The Roaring ‘ 20s?
In the 1920s, the market was good, the US had won World War I and a bad epidemic ended.
But some Americans did not see it that way.
They entered the 1920s with a growing feeling of anxiety and a sense that they had been robbed of everything. Winning World War I had come at a bad price. More than 116, 000 British soldiers died and double that number came home wounded.
As the war came to a close, the US – and the universe – was in the midst of the flu pandemic that eventually claimed tens of millions of life, including about 675, 000 in the U. S.
Another Americans were concerned about the possible rise of communism in the US, as well as the introduction of some immigrants. This led fanatics to create and implement hate-based plans at the federal and state level that targeted nonwhite refugees and handicapped individuals.
Among the most important benefits of that social time was the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, a stringent immigration policy that, among other shifts, prohibited emigration from Asia.
Another important activity was the Supreme Court’s 1927 Buck v. Bell determination, which affirmed that the state of Virginia had the right to clean cognitively and developmentally handicapped individuals.
Discrimination against excluded parties
The Johnson-Reed Act prompted a significant change in American immigration plan, based on the fear of something that former President Theodore Roosevelt and another called “race suicide“.
The rules introduced firm limits keeping people out of the nation who were not from Northern and Western Europe. The emigration limits that it established may continue to be enforced into the 1960s.
The US politicians who lobbied for this laws were successful because they supported their efforts by presenting evidence that showed apparently medical proof that almost all people in the world were medically superior to a group they called the Nordic Race– meaning people from Northern Europe– and their British descendants, who formed a group they called the” National Race”.
By restricting emigration from all other parties, these politicians believed they were counterbalancing a crushing period where conflict and crisis had killed off what they saw as the government’s best people.
Various groups preyed on Americans ‘ pain about the conflict and crisis and directed it against minority parties.
From Maine to California, a revived Ku Klux Klan attracted millions of followers with its idea that white folks were superior to all others, and that Black people should be imprisoned. At the same time, a group of scientists, doctors and psychologists found enormous success in persuading the public that there were scientific reasons why hatred and discrimination needed to be incorporated into American government.
Their proof was something called eugenics, a pseudoscience which argued that humans had to use advanced technology and medicine to get people with good traits to reproduce while stopping those with bad traits from having the opportunity to do so.
Harry Laughlin, a eugenicist based at a research laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, was one of this movement’s most vocal representatives.
Laughlin worked for several different eugenics research organizations, and this helped him become successful at creating propaganda supporting eugenics that influenced public policy. He then gained a spot as an expert eugenics adviser to Congress in the early 1920s. With his position, Laughlin then provided the pseudoscientific data that gave the supporters of Johnson-Reed the claims they needed to justify passing the measure.
A push for sterilization
In Laughlin’s influential 1922 book Eugenic Sterilization in the United States, he detailed a road map for passing a law that would allow governments to sterilize disabled people.
After so much death during World War I and the influenza pandemic, Laughlin found fertile ground for making a case that the U. S. needed to stop people who might be considered “feeble-minded” from passing down inferior traits.
In the mid-1920s, Laughlin and his allies pressed a court case against a teenage woman whom the state of Virginia had deemed an imbecile and incarcerated at a massive Virginia institution for the feeble-minded. This woman, Carrie Buck, was incarcerated after she gave birth to a child in 1924 who was conceived as a result of rape. If Buck, who was 18 years old at the time, had any hope of being released, the officials who ran the institution demanded she be sterilized first.
All across the country, states had begun legalizing forced sterilization. Now, this case of Buck v. Bell made its way to the U. S. Supreme Court. In 1927, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. issued the court’s ruling, which had only one dissent. In it, he wrote that” three generations of imbeciles is enough” and extended the scope of a previous ruling, which allowed the government to compel people to get vaccinated, to include forced sterilization of disabled people.
Buck was forcibly sterilized in October 1927, shortly after the court’s ruling.
While it is unquestionable that sterilization and other discriminatory policies found common cause with Adolf Hitler’s rising Nazi movement – which used the eugenic ideas of sterilization and mass extermination– they persisted, largely unchallenged, in the US.
Some people, including myself, argue that the spirit of these discriminatory policies still exists in the US today.
A familiar story
Following stalemated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s and the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the American economy has been growing.
But, sensing a grave decline, some white Americans have turned their sights on people with disabilities, immigrants, transgender and nonbinary people and people of color as the source of their problems.
Trump regularly encourages this kind of thinking. In January 2025, after an air collision that occurred over the Potomac River and killed 67 people, he blamed it on disabled Federal Aviation Administration employees – implying that they did not possess the intelligence to do their jobs.
Trump falsely said that the January 1, 2025, New Orleans terror attack was caused by illegal immigration– even though a Texas-born man drove a car into a crowd of people, killing 14.
At a policy level, Trump’s administration has made significant changes to the immigration system, including taking steps to remove legal protections for 350, 000 Venezuelan immigrants in the US. And he has launched an unprecedented challenge to birthright citizenship.
There are limits to what history can say about the current situation. But these similarities with the early 1920s suggest that, contrary to many claims about the unprecedented nature of the current times, the country has been here before.
Alex Green is a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.