“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Mark Twain
A century divides the Roaring Twenties from today’s so-called Turbulent Twenties, yet the distance feels strangely compressed. As we limp toward the midpoint of our own decade, the parallels grow sharper and harder to ignore — reminders that our present upheavals are rarely as unique as we like to believe. Historians are rightly suspicious of neat analogies, but here the similarities are too blunt to dismiss. Both eras arrived as uneasy aftershocks: one the exuberant release after a world war, the other the strained recovery from a pandemic and a fraying global order. Each decade carried the same volatile mix of acceleration, dislocation and contradiction — a burst of prosperity for some, rising anxiety for many, and technology racing ahead faster than society’s ability to adapt.
The 1920s began under the shadow of the Spanish Flu, just as the 2020s opened under the shock of COVID-19. Each pandemic left a public exhausted and hungry for stability, and the politics of both eras reflected it. In 1920, Republican Warren Harding — a small-town newspaper owner turned senator — won a landslide presidential campaign on the slogan “Return to Normalcy,” capturing a national longing to retreat from chaos. A century later, Donald Trump harnessed the same mood with “Make America Great Again,” a promise of restoration rather than reinvention. Two different eras, two different crises, but the same political instinct at work: a shell-shocked public reaching backwards in search of the world it felt it had lost. Harding died in office; with three years to go, Trump — now aged 79 — may well follow in his footsteps.
If the 2020s have been defined by the surge of “woke” politics — identity activism, cultural revisionism and a progressive class intent on remaking society — the 1920s had its own version of the same crusading zeal. Back then it was Modernism: a revolt against Victorian restraint that celebrated tearing down old structures and inventing new moral codes. The “New Woman” movement blew apart gender expectations as women cut their hair, entered professions and demanded social and economic independence — identity politics in flapper dresses. And if the New Woman of the 1920s was an actual woman pushing for freedom, the “new woman” of the 2020s is often a biological male who simply identifies as one. Different eras, different fronts, but the same cultural turbulence: a confident avant-garde convinced it is remaking civilisation, and an older generation convinced civilisation is losing its grip.
The upheaval widened through the Jazz Age. What older generations saw as decadent liberalism — youth rebellion, racial mixing in nightlife, and a rejection of traditional authority — became the defining mood. The Lost Generation of writers and artists, shaped by the First World War, dismissed patriotism and tradition as obsolete. They were the prototype for today’s progressive class: university-trained radicals who insist biology is optional, or chant “Queers for Palestine” while ignoring Hamas’s preference for throwing them off rooftops. They lecture working families about being climate friendly while jetting off to the next global climate conference. The methods have changed, but the pattern hasn’t — the same cultural self-confidence, the same performative radicalism, and the same gulf between elite certainty and everyday common sense.
Each decade also inherited the trauma of global conflict. The First World War shattered Europe; the War on Terror, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s rise have reshaped America’s strategic posture just as dramatically. The League of Nations was the 1920s answer to global instability, and it failed spectacularly. While it issued declarations and hosted conferences, Mussolini marched into Ethiopia and Imperial Japan carved its way through Manchuria — textbook proof that collective security collapses the moment real power tests it. Today we watch the same movie with modern actors: China building fortified islands across the South China Sea, Russia attempting to redraw borders by force, Iran using proxies to torch the Middle East, and the United Nations doing little more than passing resolutions no one reads. The world of the 2020s mirrors the world of the 1920s — lofty talk of global governance on one hand, and the cold reality of great powers using guns, ships and missiles to pursue imperial goals on the other.
In Australia, the Bruce–Page era was obsessed with building a new nation — factories, railways, tariffs, soldier-settlement blocks and a sweeping nation-building vision funded by unsustainable protectionist policy. A century later, the Albanese–Chalmers government is equally obsessed with building a renewable Australia — wind zones, transmission corridors, green hydrogen fantasies and billions in subsidies propping up industries that can’t stand on their own feet.
Both decades witnessed major migration waves into the developed world. The 1920s saw millions leave Southern and Eastern Europe for the United States, Canada and Australia in search of stability and work. The 2020s echo the pattern as migrants from unstable regions flow into Europe, North America and Australia — legally, irregularly or by boat. In both eras, wealthy nations tightened the gates even as they depended on migrant labour: America’s Immigration Act of 1924 slashed arrivals by 80 per cent, just as Trump closed the border. Today Europe scrambles to slow the surge of boats from Africa while relying on foreign workers to keep its economies running. And in both cases the pressure produced political backlash. The 1920s delivered the second Ku Klux Klan and a codified ethnic hierarchy; the 2020s have produced Brexit’s border politics, Trumpism, hard-right surges across Europe and rising tension in Australia as housing and public services buckle under population strain.
And then there is dependency. In the 1920s, Australia was welded to the British Empire economically and militarily — export markets, defence posture, identity, everything ran through London. In the 2020s, we are welded just as tightly to China — our iron ore, our agriculture, our universities, our critical minerals and half our supply chain resilience depend on a single authoritarian buyer. Different century, same vulnerability: a middle-sized nation hitching its fortunes to a great power and hoping the umbilical cord doesn’t snap. Just as the 1920s relied on Britain, the 2020s lean heavily on the United States, assuming its power will always be available and always be sufficient. Both generations placed blind faith in distant capitals precisely when the global order was shifting beneath their feet. Different era, same strategic delusion: hoping diplomacy and paperwork will deter adversaries while the globe drifts towards World War 3.
Every decade has its signature technology. In the 1920s it was radio waves with ownership of radios in the United States exploding from 60,000 sets in 1922 to almost 10 million by 1929, transforming how people consumed news, culture and politics. The 2020s, by contrast, belong to the algorithm. Artificial intelligence — generative, predictive, industrial — has become the decisive technology of the decade, with tools like ChatGPT emerging as the defining game-changers of the Turbulent Twenties.
The 1920s delivered one of the first great housing manias, with Sydney house prices rising an unheard of 30 per cent across the decade and land speculation surging around every major capital as cheap credit and post-war optimism drove buyers into the suburbs. Homebuilding expanded rapidly, state governments pushed ambitious urban plans, and newspapers filled with breathless ads for “sure-thing” subdivisions from Parramatta to Perth. It was the country’s first taste of a modern property boom — rising prices fuelled by population growth, easy money and the belief that land values only ever go one way.
A century later, the 2020s are living the sequel. From 2020 to 2025, Australian house prices have surged dramatically. A recent report shows the national median dwelling value is up nearly 47 per cent since the onset of COVID-19 in 2020. Regional and capital-city pressures reflect that jump — for example, combined regional home values rose about 56.3 per cent since March 2020, while capital-city values climbed roughly 33.6 per cent. In Perth, the increase has been especially steep: dwelling prices have soared by more than 75 per cent since 2020. As of late 2025, Perth’s median house price sits at approximately A$926,000.
Different triggers, same outcome: cheap money, pandemic-era migration shifts, constrained supply and labour shortages have combined to load enormous inflationary pressure onto Australian roofs — much like the land-value bubble of the 1920s.
Commodity cycles have followed the same eerie rhythm. The 1920s delivered booms in oil, coal and copper as mechanisation and electrification rewired global industry. The 2020s echo the pattern with lithium, copper and rare earths, this time driven by decarbonisation and yet another electrification wave. Each decade ran on its own grand narrative — electricity then, “net zero” now — but both created the same result: asset prices inflating at speed. Lithium’s 900 per cent surge followed by a 70 per cent crash would have looked entirely familiar to any broker on Wall Street in 1928.
The stock market has traced roughly the same arc of exuberance. The Roaring Twenties saw the Dow Jones triple as credit expanded, technology dazzled and retail investors piled into investment trusts they barely understood. The 2020s have replayed the script — with a few stutters. After the COVID-19 drop, the S&P 500 has returned more than 100 per cent over the five-year span from 2020 to 2025. Even in 2025 alone the S&P 500 is up roughly 17 per cent to date. Meanwhile the NASDAQ Composite — the poster child of tech-led speculation — continues to outperform, led by high-flying AI and software companies.
Protectionism is another shared theme. The 1920s opened with rising tariffs and ended in the disaster of Smoot–Hawley in 1930, where tariffs as high as 60 per cent were imposed on 20,000 imported goods, dramatically deepening the Great Depression. The rhetoric of that era — protecting jobs, punishing unfair competition — is indistinguishable from Trump today.
The collapse of the trans-Atlantic live cattle trade has eerie parallels to the end of Australia’s live sheep trade. The United States once shipped thousands of live cattle to British ports, but by the 1920s the trade had collapsed under pressure from welfare activists, protectionist meat lobbies and opportunistic politicians. It was a casualty of the same forces that are now bearing down on Australia’s live sheep sector.
Mass celebrity culture began in the 1920s — Lindbergh, Valentino, Chaplin. Today, influencer empires, tech billionaires and algorithmic fame shape public consciousness, from Kim Kardashian and MrBeast to Elon Musk and Taylor Swift’s globalised fan-machine. Different tools, same impulses.
Standing in 2025, with the Turbulent Twenties halfway spent, it is tempting to ask whether the analogy should inspire optimism or fear. The Roaring Twenties ended disastrously — with a stock market crash, a global depression and the march to war. The true lesson of the 1920s is not that collapse is inevitable, but that complacency is lethal. Speculative manias, protectionist reflexes, political polarisation and technological upheaval are combustible materials. When they accumulate simultaneously, the system becomes vulnerable to shocks — economic, political or military.
As a student of modern history and someone steeped in politics and international relations, I’ve long believed there is much to be learned from the past; yet when my own adult children, schooled in the vapid info-entertainment of TikTok, confidently lecture me on the world’s ills, I can only shake my head at how little historical memory their generation carries — proof that every generation thinks it is living through unprecedented times, when in reality it is simply proof that “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
