Original title: China-US competition and cooperation︱In power for a year, is Biden’s “Roosevelt dream” broken?
Biden has been in office for a year. By convention, the President of the United States will deliver a “State of the Union Address” at the end of January or early February every year, reporting his work achievements to the people. This year, Biden has decided to delay the report until March 1, which may indicate that the White House is not so confident in handing over its own report card.
According to multiple polls, Biden’s approval rate for governing is around 40%. A recent poll released by Quinnipiac University even showed that his approval rate was only 33%, which is the highest since Biden took office on January 20 last year. The lowest value (55% support at the time). Even more troubling for the White House is that Biden is 25% among independent voters and 24% among voters aged 18 to 34. This level is half as big as Trump’s back then.
Public opinion generally believes that Biden and the Democratic Party will be defeated in this year’s congressional midterm elections. The New York Times even called on Biden not to seek re-election in 2024.
Will Biden, who has the “Roosevelt Dream”, retreat in spite of difficulties?
Time magazine disclosed that Biden “has always followed Roosevelt as a model” when planning his governing strategy, with the goal of “responding in a way that can lift the country out of trouble and emerge stronger and more united.” The Multiple Crises America Faces”. Its ruling team believes that the state of crisis facing the United States is very similar to the situation when Roosevelt took office in March 1933. At that time, the United States suffered from the impact of the “Great Depression”, and a quarter of Americans were unemployed. Today, the United States On the other hand, it faces major crises that are interrelated, such as the new crown pneumonia epidemic, economic recession, and ethnic conflict.
In view of this, Biden originally intended to promote a “New Deal” larger than Roosevelt’s “New Deal” after taking office, or “New New Deal” – by increasing government spending for the middle class in the United States ( Mainly refers to the working class) to provide support to revive the American economy, deal with the inequality problems caused by the popularity of neoliberalism, and then strengthen the foundation of the American democratic system.
Although he is nearly eighty years old, Biden does have such an “old-fashioned and ambitious” energy. Some analysts believe that he even wants to follow the example of Alexander Hamilton, the founding father who led the United States on the road to prosperity, by investing in infrastructure and implementing new industrial policies to build a new system that can effectively meet the challenges of the 21st century. The “American System”.
However, the challenge is far more severe than Biden originally expected-under the multiple shocks of the rebound of the new crown epidemic, supply chain crisis, high inflation, rising oil and gas energy prices, and the immigration crisis at the US-Mexico border, Biden not only failed to “cure” the United States, Even himself was caught in a difficult and cramped political situation.
Alien Biden economics
In the past year, the White House has relied on the Democratic Party’s narrow advantage in Congress to pass the “America Rescue Act” and “Bipartisan Infrastructure Act” with a sharp shrinkage. As mentioned earlier, this is the core of Biden’s “Roosevelt dream”, trying to boost the economy and stimulate employment by increasing government fiscal spending.
In the 1980s, when the Republican Ronald Reagan entered the White House, “neoliberalism” became popular in the United States. It pursued the principle of laissez-faire market, opposed government intervention, and advocated “economic Darwinism” and “trickle-down” of survival of the fittest and survival of the fittest. economics”. In this regard, Biden clearly opposes – under neoliberalism, the government’s willingness and investment in providing public goods has decreased, resulting in a significant increase in people’s spending pressure on housing, medical care and education, employment stability, retirement security, and social welfare. The elements that make up the identity of the middle class are shrinking. Biden believes that “trickle-down economics” will never work, and he hopes to expand the federal government’s investment in infrastructure, care economy, clean energy and other aspects to promote the improvement of American competitiveness. To put it bluntly, he wants to carry out “structural reforms” in the United States.
But the truth is that the U.S. economy that Biden has taken over is not bad enough to desperately need a “structural reform.” The voices of opposition came not only from the Republican Party, but also from within the Democratic Party. For example, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin (Joe Manchin), who has publicly opposed the “Rebuild for a Better Future Act”, is more worrying about the “Biden bubble”.
The massive increase in government spending has overheated the economy and created high inflation. Data released by the US Department of Labor on January 12 showed that the US CPI rose 7% year-on-year in December, the highest level since June 1982. In the second half of last year, the U.S. economic performance tended to be sluggish, and the World Bank recently lowered its forecast for U.S. economic growth next year and the year after.
To be fair, the high inflation problem in 2021 is not entirely Biden’s fault – the supply chain crisis has also stimulated inflation in the United States, and its origin is the “trade war” launched by the Trump administration. But after Biden took office, he continued his predecessor’s “buy American, hire American” line and maintained punitive tariffs on goods from China and other countries. According to The Economist, the average tariff on U.S. imports from China has soared from 3% to 19% due to the “trade war.” Because of their high reliance on Chinese suppliers, U.S. importers actually bear more than 90% of the cost of the additional tariffs imposed by the U.S. government. And these will eventually be passed on to the American working families. The rise in consumer goods and energy prices is bound to weaken Biden’s approval rating in power and form a “backlash” on his economic performance.
The Biden administration has declared a “(US) worker-centred trade policy,” which is considered the Democratic version of “America First.” But in fact, it is also discriminatory for American workers, and only benefits workers in some traditional manufacturing industries such as steel and aluminum products. This will undoubtedly disappoint some voters who originally supported the Democratic Party.
At the same time, repeated epidemics have also given Biden a headache. Since the Omicron strain became popular, the number of new crown infections in the United States has risen unprecedentedly – 753,000 new cases and nearly 2,000 deaths on January 19 alone; at the same time, the vaccination rate has been slow to rise, only 62.6%, which is far from the goal proposed by Biden.
The epidemic forced the Biden administration to have additional economic relief, as well as investment in vaccines and public health care. And that would further exacerbate pressure on government debt and inflation, to the point that Larry Summers, an economist who has always leaned toward deficit spending, warned: “When the pandemic passes, we’ll find that the economy is on fire.” In order to increase the vaccination rate, the White House also tried to promote the “vaccination order” of mandatory vaccination, but it met with strong resistance unsurprisingly, and was denounced by the Republican Party as “infringement of personal liberties”.
Divided America and Political Violence
On January 20 last year, Biden said in his presidential inaugural speech that the epidemic challenge, economic recession, climate change and racial inequality are historic crises facing the United States, and the United States must also deal with “political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terror. Threats posed by “ism”. To address these crises, “we must end the rude battle between the two parties, between rural and urban, between conservatives and liberals,” Biden promised to “heal” an increasingly divided America and restore “the nation’s soul” (soul of the nation).
A year later, however, America seems more divided. In a blistering speech on Jan. 6, Biden rarely took aim directly at his predecessor, Trump. Biden characterized the “Occupy Capitol Hill” incident a year ago as an “armed rebellion”, accusing Trump of inciting his supporters to storm Capitol Hill in order to save face. He alleges that Republicans are still spreading lies about the 2020 election being “stolen” by Democrats.
This is clearly not a “cure” speech. Trump was quick to dismiss it as a tactic for Biden to cover up his failure to govern – despite losing the 2020 election, the former president remains dominant within the GOP, not ruling out a comeback in 2024, again Run for president. In fact, more than two-thirds of Republican voters still refuse to recognize the legitimacy of Biden’s victory.
Not only that, but the cracks are still spreading. Right now, the Democratic and Republican parties are engaged in a fierce battle over the issue of “voting rights”. States where Republicans are governors or where Republicans are dominant in state legislatures are stepping up efforts to revise the rules about voting in elections – such as voting time and the setting of polling stations, etc., hoping to prevent Democrats from “stealing” the election again. In this year’s Congress The midterm elections and the 2024 presidential election hit each other hard. In this regard, Biden and the Democratic Party have resolutely fought back. Recently, Biden accused Georgia of a new law “depriving” 5 million Georgians of their right to vote; and for 34 “infringement votes” enacted by the legislatures of 19 states in 2021 Democrats are pushing for a “Freedom to Vote Act” in Congress to deal with it, and they even promised to revise the relevant rules of procedure in the Senate.
Deep down, the bipartisan dispute over voting rights reflects the challenges facing the American democratic system. In an increasingly polarized political ecology, not only voting rights, but also any issue, such as “whether to wear a mask during the epidemic”, may evolve into a situation of “red and blue opposition” and stalemate. For this division, about 40% of Americans believe that violence is necessary to resolve politics, and the proportion is rising.
In an article in The Washington Post last month, three retired U.S. generals, including Paul Eaton, wrote: The issue of political polarization has deeply affected the U.S. military, and there are signs of internal turmoil in the U.S. military to participate in 2021. More than 1 in 10 of those involved in the Capitol Hill riots served in the U.S. military. They fear the 2024 election will detonate “deadly unrest” that will put “all Americans in a serious crisis.”
In her new book, How the Civil War Began, Professor Barbara F Walter of the University of California, San Diego, warns that the United States is at risk of another civil war. The end of the Cold War has made this democratic country with a history of more than 200 years too proud, unable to see or have enough motivation to solve the shortcomings of its own political system. Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio predicts a 30 percent chance of a civil war in the U.S. in the next 10 years.
A world that cannot be re-led
Biden has declared that he wants the United States to “re-lead the world“. However, the internal divisions in the United States and his own governing dilemma have fundamentally limited his ambitions – leading the world requires both a strong consensus within the United States and a huge cost.
Due to the constraints of domestic politics, the Biden administration has little incentive to push for any “free trade” agreement, nor can it get the United States to join the “Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership” (CPTPP). The “Indo-Pacific Economic Architecture” and “Rebuilding a Better World Initiative” he has proposed in the past year are too much and too little. It is difficult to expect the United States to spend real money to support the infrastructure construction of other countries.
The Biden administration pursues a policy of “serving the (U.S.) middle class” foreign policy, which also carries the meaning of Trump’s “America First”, which is doomed to inevitable competition between the United States and its allies and partners over economic interests. As Johns Hopkins professor Hal Brands puts it, the Biden administration’s “middle-class diplomacy” and the goal of restoring American global leadership are at odds.
Specific to the relationship between the United States and Europe, the Biden administration has made some clumsy operations in the past year-for example, disregarding the safety of NATO allies, withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in a hurry; another example is to save the “Triple Alliance” (AUKUS), and prying France’s hundreds of Billion submarine orders. These actions, in the eyes of Europeans, especially the French, violated the Biden administration’s commitment to return to multilateralism and work closely with allies, and also made them realize that Trumpism may not be an accidental phenomenon, and that in the future Europe needs to further Seek “strategic autonomy”.
It is worth mentioning that Sino-US relations have also been adversely affected by the predicament of Biden’s administration, and the pressure on Sino-US relations from the internal affairs of the United States has become more and more prominent. Used by Biden to bridge the gap with the Republican Party and advance his domestic policy agenda. In the past year, the social and public opinion base of Sino-US relations in the United States has further weakened. According to a poll released last month by the Ronald Reagan Institute, a US think tank, more than half of the respondents believed that China is the biggest threat to the United States.
But perhaps, after a year in office, Biden also understands that the biggest enemy of the United States is not China, but itself. In the era of great power competition, internal affairs competition is fundamental. Whoever can “do his own affairs well” can “let the wind and waves rise and sit firmly on the Diaoyutai.”
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The author Zhao Minghao is a special writer for The Paper.