Zhu Wenli: The End of the World: The United States and the Beginning of the Progressive Era in the 21st Century
Author: Zhu Wenli is a special researcher at the Institute for International and Strategic Studies, Peking University, and a professor at the School of International Relations, Peking University
Source: Originally published in Wang Jisi, ed., China International Strategic Review 2020 (Part 2), World Knowledge Press, December 2021 edition; Institute for International and Strategic Studies, Peking University
WeChat platform editor: Zhou Yue
Executive Summary
In the early stages of the 2020 U.S. election, American progressive figures and policy ideas suffered setbacks. Unlike the progressive era of the early 20th century, progressive politics in the United States today is confronted head-on by its reformees and fails to persuade lower- and middle-class whites in inland townships to join. While the idea of progress has received enthusiastic responses from two generations of young people and is widely supported by the suburban middle class and minorities, subtle differences in the reform agenda have prevented the progressives from forming an effective synergy. The innate inadequacies of the US political system in responding to the challenges of globalization, the fragmentation of the space of public opinion by the development of new technologies, and the growth of the Mentality of the United States from the outside world political trend are also hindering the advancement of progressive policies. It is easy for the United States to recreate the political refresh of more than a hundred years ago.
keyword
- Progressive politics
- U.S. election
- World political trends
The 2020 U.S. election is in the spotlight, but the real policy battle ended long before the bipartisan showdown phase arrived. The dramatic game between Trump and Biden is more like appealing to the American psyche than to theirs. In the November 2020 vote, American voters will decide whether to continue to divide, strife, and confront each other, or to reflect, communicate, and reconcile. So the best result of this election is to stop the loss and return to normal from the political field in the context of the chaos caused by the new crown pneumonia epidemic in social and economic life. While Americans waited with trepidation for this minimum requirement to become a reality, real policy innovation and political progress were shelved.
More than a century ago, the U.S. political machinery showed sufficient resilience and stability in the face of the challenges of economic modernization and the shock of large-scale migration waves. From the Progressive Era to the New Deal, the United States has laid a reliable foundation for sustained growth in national power through bold and practical reform measures to alleviate socioeconomic inequality, and thus dominate the game of shaping the world order. Today, on the other hand, the internal and external challenges encountered by the United States are similar to those of more than a hundred years ago, but the political process cannot focus on real problems, nor can it effectively deal with them, and in many cases even plays a role in worsening contradictions. In the course of political debate in the United States, the voice of the new progressives has not only arrived late, but has never been able to take center stage, and once again lost the opportunity to lead change in the 2020 election. This paper attempts to make a preliminary retrospective and analysis of this, observe the factors that promote and hinder the political trend of american progress, and discuss the world political significance of American political choices.
First, the progressives lost the general election
Looking back, the formation of the social foundation of progressives in the United States in the 21st century can be marked by the Occupy Wall Street movement (hereinafter referred to as the Occupy movement) that began in 2011, and its political representatives appeared in the election cycle of 2016-2020. The "Occupy" movement put forward a tit-for-tat explanation of the root causes of the global financial crisis in contrast to the right-wing "Tea Party" in the United States, and regarded the economic and social inequalities caused by the process of globalization as a topic of the times. The subsequent "Black Lives Matter" (BLM) movement, the "Me Too" movement, and the March for Our Lives expanded the camp for its "friendly" progressives, adding more socio-cultural issues to the demands, but the core logic was consistent with the "Occupy" movement's claims that economic inequality caused tension and conflict in social relations, and traditional political avoidance masked contradictions. Politics must be refreshed with comprehensive and progressive reforms.
In 2016, Bernie Sanders gave up her independence status to join the Democratic presidential primary and comprehensively and systematically put forward progressive political policy demands, which received a warm response and posed a substantial challenge to Hillary Clinton. Although he ultimately failed to win the Democratic presidential nomination, he emerged as a symbol of political reform and shook american politics. Trump's unexpected election has dealt a heavy blow to the two-party building faction in the United States, but at the same time, it has stimulated and inspired the reform demands of the progressive faction, and objectively provided an opportunity for the growth of its representatives. In the 2018 midterm elections, a new group of lawmakers stood out with various social, cultural and economic reform ideas, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 29-year-old from New York State, who attracted national attention and quickly became active in the discussion of hot issues. By the primary stage of the 2020 election, not only will Sanders be in the game again, but Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren will also join the competition with a steady and improved appearance, with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, known for his early support for the Me Too movement, and Andrew Yang, a Chinese businessman who advocates raising the national minimum income Yang) and others have made various reform issues the main content of their campaigns. At least in the democratic party, political representatives and grass-roots social movements have formed a clear mutual resonance.
Several televised debates from the second half of 2019 to the beginning of 2020 can be seen as the first phase of the Democratic primary, and competitors on the progressive side have been strong during this time. Their policy innovations, such as universal health insurance, free university education, raising the minimum wage guarantee, and the green new policy for environmental protection, have successively become hot topics of discussion. Sanders and Warren attracted a large number of supporters because of their clear views, understanding of people's livelihood and advocacy for change, and took turns leading in the polls. In contrast, former VICE President Biden of the United States, who was originally the most well-known and strongest in the call for victory, appeared conservative, vague policies, and could not mobilize the enthusiasm of grassroots voters, so that the approval rating gradually declined, and Biden could only rank fourth at the worst time in the debate.
But after progressive figures took the lead in the primaries, skepticism and criticism of them inside and outside the Democratic Party gathered and expanded. Their policy proposals were seen as too ambitious to be in line with the existing system and to bear the fiscal burden. Some fierce critics have even accused them of expanding the power of the federal government or bringing down the U.S. economy. Amid headwinds, Senator Warren, who once led the polls, suffered a Waterloo. Her Medicare for All plan has been tortured for details, with prominent U.S. media claiming that the actual spending of the plan will far exceed the figures released by her team. Warren then lost the lead and momentum.
In the spring of 2020, as the Democratic primary entered the second phase of the state vote, Sanders was in fact the only hope for progressives to win. Sanders won in the first two small states to vote, but Biden won the state with the open support of local black leaders before the vote in the next South Carolina primary. In the "Super Tuesday" multi-state vote that followed, Biden swept through the powerful Southern states of the Black Caucus, while the moderate candidates who fell behind announced their withdrawal from the election and called on supporters to switch to Biden. The democratic establishment took the lead in achieving a grand alliance. In mid-March, Sanders and Biden faced off against the vital Rust Belt states of the Great Lakes region, and Biden won an overwhelming victory. At this time, the new crown pneumonia outbreak in the United States, Sanders can no longer use the large-scale grassroots rallies he is best at to save the election, so he is forced to announce the suspension of the campaign. Looking back at his losing primary election, his failure to gain recognition from the black community and his failure to establish an advantage in traditional manufacturing areas are sanders' two fatal injuries. The former reflects the complex challenges of cultural identity issues, as Sanders, who is popular among Hispanic Democratic voters, has been criticized by black leaders for not being focused enough on fighting discrimination and saving poor neighborhoods. The progressive weaknesses shown by the latter are more subtle. Sanders advocates improving human capital through universal higher education, driving economic transformation with environmental protection and new energy industries, and enabling old industrial belts such as the Great Lakes region to smoothly integrate into the service boom, but the blue-collar class represented by manufacturing unions does not seem to be persuaded by this line of thinking. In contrast, Biden emphasized his pennish small-town origins, expressed his personal experience of industrial and regional dilemmas, and successfully impressed grassroots voters with simple and straightforward slogans such as stopping outsourcing, expanding employment, and buying American goods. The lesson of the 2016 presidential election defeat was a huge pain for the Democratic Party, and if the progressive platform could not penetrate deep into the inland towns and be accepted by key voter groups in the battlefield states, it would lose the opportunity to represent the Democratic Party in the election.
Soon after Biden secured his party nomination, his campaign began to engage closely with sanders' team, and the Democratic primary entered the third phase from party competition to party cooperation. In May 2020, Biden and Sanders formally announced the formation of a joint task forces to coordinate their positions on six key home issues, with the participation of prominent figures such as Ocasio Cortez and former Secretary of State John Forbes Kerry. The results of the negotiations between the two sides were submitted to the Democratic Congress as unanimous proposals and became the basic content of the Democratic Party program. In the final party program, the focus of the progressives – building a fair economy, promoting environmental and climate policies, improving the health care system, etc. – was reflected, but in the specific implementation plan, the steady rhythm of the establishment faction overwhelmed the progressives' active pursuit of change. As a result of the run-in and compromise between the two sides, the substantive policy demands of the progressives have been diluted and weakened, and there is little chance of implementation in the short term. As Biden made clear in the first bipartisan presidential debate in the 2020 election: "Right now, I'm the Democrats." "It can be said that progressives have lost the opportunity to use the 2020 election to initiate political change.
Second, the driving force of progressive politics in the United States
According to the political cycle described by samuel P. Huntington, a famous American political scientist, 2020 would have been very promising to become a historic node in the pursuit of innovation and change in American politics. From the perspective of the development of realpolitik, the progressive politics of the 21st century began to sprout from the "Occupy" movement, and then after years of accumulated strength, it did form an impact force that could change the political situation.
The core groups driving the progressive movement in America today are the millennials (born 1982-2000) and Generation Z (born after 2000) generations of young people. 2020 is the first general election for all millennials to exceed the legal voting age threshold. The total population of this generation exceeds 100 million, of which the number of qualified voters reaches 90 million, accounting for nearly 40% of the current total number of American voters. According to the previous youth population turnout, the actual number of millennials who actually voted in 2020 is likely to exceed 50 million, which is estimated to account for about 36% of the actual voters. Most of the Generation Z after them have not yet been voted, but they have been active in social action such as recent demonstrations demanding attention to climate change and nationwide gun control demonstrations triggered by the Parkland High School shooting in Florida. And according to US media reports, The Willingness of Gen Z to vote in the 2020 election is 10 percentage points higher than that of its 18-20-year-old peers in previous years, and their enthusiasm for active participation in politics is surprising.
Various social surveys and media reports have repeatedly shown that the most prominent political tendencies of the younger generation are to focus on socio-economic inequalities and to support policy innovation and institutional change. The experience of birth and growth after the civil rights movement made pluralism and equality the basic norms they generally agreed with, and they sincerely agreed with various social and cultural equality reforms. In the 2008 election, millennials who were voted on the bench supported Obama with an overwhelming 64% to 32%, a key boost to the birth of the first president of color in U.S. history. After the outbreak of the global financial crisis, the focus of young people began to shift from cultural issues to economic issues. Many of them bear heavy college tuition loans, enter the job market in the economic downturn, work stability, salary, and growth space are obviously inferior to their predecessors, and the quality of life is far from meeting expectations. Personal setbacks have made them suspicious of the market's ability to distribute wealth, and government intervention is welcome, calling for public policies to correct inequalities. The right-wing conservative narrative of big government that has been created since the Reagan Revolution has paled in on the younger generation, seeing more of an over-deregulation that has led to greed and hubris spreading among management and the very rich to the point of triggering a financial tsunami that forces the lower middle class, including the young, to bear the consequences. Progressive leaders such as Sanders' advocacy of system-improvement policies such as waiving the burden of tuition loans, raising the minimum wage, and achieving universal health care have inspired strong support for them by targeting their primary livelihood concerns. Activists, represented by Ocasio-Cortés, thus entered politics and boldly sought policy innovation. These newcomers to progressive politics followed Sanders and unabashedly called themselves "democratic socialists," and the taboos left over from the Ideological Strife of the Cold War were a thing of the past for them. What they think of as socialism is "Canada's health care plus Sweden's welfare system." The 2019 Summer Gallup poll showed that their attitudes represented the majority of their peers, with 58 percent of young people surveyed (between the ages of 18 and 34) believing such socialist policies might benefit the United States. When some scholars advocate calling these reform policies "progressive capitalism", it is estimated that these young people will not object, because for them the outdated ideological label is far less important than the substance and effect of the policy.
In addition to young people, proponents of progressive politics in the New Century include two key groups. The first is ethnic minorities eager to seek social and economic security. Whether in the aftermath of the financial crisis or in the economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, minority communities have disproportionately suffered the hardest blows. The long-standing racial prejudices of American society have solidified their plight, and the culture of disregard and even contempt for their basic civil rights in the police system has been repeatedly prohibited, which has continuously intensified their resentment of unfair treatment. Since the Trump administration took office, it has repeatedly tightened immigration policies, taken ambiguous attitudes on racial issues, ignored the causes when racial discrimination triggered social protests, blindly advocated strong repression, and even favored white supremacists who took advantage of the opportunity to cause trouble. Such attitudes and policies have further stimulated the mood of ethnic minorities and their fighting spirit to advance institutional change. A representative case is Arizona's shift in recent elections. The state, a staunch republican state that has long been pro-Republican, has only turned to Democrats in presidential elections since 1952, but spurred on by state bills rounding up illegal immigrants, the Hispanic community has organized a network of positive action from the bottom up, defeating prominent Republican lawmakers and inspectors in the 2018 midterm elections and helping Biden build a poll lead in the 2020 election race.
Another group of concern is the suburban middle class. More than 40 years ago, the suburbs were synonymous with conservatives, nixon's ideal place to mobilize a "silent majority," and Reagan's social base for launching a conservative cultural backlash. But since then, economic and social development has gradually changed the sources of wealth, demographic composition, education and cultural tendencies in the suburbs. Especially after the advent of the global era, the suburban middle class has joined the expansion of high-end service industries and become accustomed to social pluralism and cultural tolerance and exchanges. But in the process of globalizing the distribution of benefits, they have developed a strong sense of relative deprivation. Economic wealth, especially capital income, is highly concentrated in the hands of the top 1%, and the gap between the middle class and the high income class has gradually evolved into an insurmountable gap. The so-called weakening of social mobility and the end of the "American Dream" are not only nightmares for the bottom of the United States, but also increasingly plague the middle class. As the well-known political commentator Chris Hayes put it, the explosion of the Occupy movement provided a new cultural criterion for social stratification, accurately distinguishing the highly educated but relatively powerless middle class from the extremely rich top. Even upper-class middle-class families have begun to criticize institutional favoritism, questioning the top groups for distorting rules with the slogan of deregulation and relying on the power monopoly of government and business collusion to undermine fair competition. Trump's loudly call for "draining the swamp" and breaking the establishment monopoly once attracted the middle class. But instead of ending corruption in Washington after he took office, he made the deal of power and money more popular. Trump himself has refused to entrust family assets to independent fund management, and his family has not shyed away from managing the White House policy and family business at the same time, and various doubts and even scandals have been continuously exposed, and the political officials he appointed have risen and fallen, simply without revolving doors, directly taking into account public and private or even public power and private use, causing strong dissatisfaction among the suburban middle class. At the same time, Trump's emphasis on the return of manufacturing is not in line with the economic rationality of the middle class, and they have experienced the necessity and possibility of industrial upgrading from their own experience, and it is difficult to accept the Trump administration's approach of disrupting the global economic order. In the 2018 midterm elections, the trend of the suburban middle class to break away from the Trump camp and support progressives was widely concerned. 1 The most dramatic example is Orange County, California, once praised by Reagan as the conservative stronghold where Republicans could grow old. In 2016, 4 of the 6 U.S. house seats in Orange County belonged to the Republican Party, and by 2018, all 6 seats were occupied by democrats.
It should be pointed out that due to the different criteria for division, there is certainly an overlap between the three major groups that support the progressive politics of the United States in the new century. In addition to the main groups, there are also secondary communities from highly educated people, cultural and intellectual classes, and vulnerable groups of social rights, who together form a camp to promote political reform and progress in the United States in the new century.
Third, the obstruction of progressive politics in the United States
Despite the broad base of the progressive movement and the growing momentum of recent years, it has so far been unable to define the subject of political discussion in the United States, and the 2020 election has virtually lost the opportunity to initiate progressive change. The reasons behind this are intriguing.
First, within the pluralistic progressive camp, there are subtle and important differences in the views of various groups on whether economic issues and socio-cultural issues come first. One side believes that equal economic opportunity is the foundation of equal rights in society, and that after rebuilding the economic prosperity shared by the masses, there is room for sustained advancement of various culturally diverse policies; the other side is concerned about the protection of social rights of vulnerable groups, especially African-American communities, and believes that the elimination of systemic repression and discrimination should be a priority in cases where basic personal security cannot be effectively protected. Biden's choice of Kamala D. Harris as his running mate effectively appealed to some progressives, but was also criticized for retracing the old path of identity symbol politics and avoiding economic and social substance. In the end, it is the differences in opinion among the progressives themselves that give the establishment the opportunity to continue to take control of the voice.
Second, the target of progressive reform, the large bourgeoisie in the United States, is small in number but amazingly energetic, and its arrangement of using the system to safeguard vested interests can be described as intricately intertwined, and the counterattack against progressive politics is swift and efficient. The deep cultivation of right-wing conservative forces in the past half century has enabled the big bourgeoisie in the United States to navigate the social and cultural debates with ease and take full advantage in social and economic issues. Despite President Trump's habitual claim that the U.S. media is pervasive of liberal biases, the truth is that pro-market, pro-capital, anti-government regulation, and questioning the logic of social redistribution clearly dominate economic policy discussions. In this climate, the policy ideas of progressive political leaders are disproportionately criticized and even tortured. Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal has been described as a utopia to stifle economic growth; Sanders' health for all has been found to be bankrupt for the federal economy; and warren, with a scholarly temperament, has been questioned the most about the details of his attempts to come up with various pragmatic solutions, and has been accused of failing to guarantee the cost of the health insurance plan. In contrast, as pointed out in the US online review, Trump was not asked about the details of economic gains and losses when trying to protect old energy and snub the new energy industry, he tried to repeal Obamacare without an alternative plan and was not accused of disrupting the economic order, Trump's tax cut bill led to the fiscal deficit returning to the annual trillion-dollar level in the so-called boom stage before the outbreak of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, to being forced to launch an emergency rescue to reach a historical high that has never been experienced in peacetime, but the US right only needs to repeat the tax cuts to promote growth. The hypothetical reasoning that growth expands the tax base and the deficit can gradually disappear, not many media hold him responsible for completely disrupting fiscal discipline.
Looking at history, the contrast is even stronger. After the progressive movement of the early 20th century put forward the slogan of antitrust and antitrust, the bourgeoisie was soon passive, monopolies in transportation, energy, and utilities were either split or restricted, government regulation was smoothly activated, and a progressive tax system promoting equal redistribution was written into the constitution in the form of amendments. In the new century progress policy discussions, Warren and Sanders's proposal to split large financial institutions and break up large technology companies was blocked head-on, and various industry unicorns insisted that they did not hinder competition, and in turn threw the hat of destroying the free market to government regulators. The energy of today's big capitalist class relies on the organizational, intellectual, and political networks cultivated for a long time since the Reagan Revolution on the one hand, and from the core position established in the American economic system since the financial industry entered the global economic era on the other hand. Long-term excessive financialization has changed the industry and corporate culture of the United States, with the evaluation criteria of capital returns as the axis to make the relationship between production and financing unbalanced, financial concepts replace economic rationality and dominate policy discussions, and the super-rich class dominates asset returns, forming a solid vested interest fortress. In the midst of the financial tsunami for which they are directly responsible, large asset owners were able to maintain wealth growth; in the unexpected crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, they once again became rich against the trend, and the Billionaire Bonanza 2020 report (Billionaire Bonanza 2020) completed the Report on Wealth Inequality (Billionaire Bonanza 2020) released a 29% increase in personal wealth from March to September 2020. Such staggering financial resources could support them to easily suppress progressive challenges. At a time when there will be a restriction on stock buybacks in the United States, Goldman Sachs has issued a public report warning that this will lead to a stock market crash. When Sanders led the Democratic primary, Wall Street consulting agencies launched the so-called "Sanders Panic Index", which was tantamount to threatening that if the Democratic Party chose Sanders, it would stand against capital.
Finally, the progressive ideas of the new century have failed to win the general support of the Bottom of the United States, and the white underclass has sided with a large number of opponents. This is a phenomenon that has been hotly discussed in academia and policy circles since Trump's 2016 election victory. The more popular explanation is that the cultural identity of the white people at the bottom trumps their economic rationality, and they are attracted to the social problems manipulated by the bourgeoisie and right-wing forces, especially the racial imagery that inflames their fear and hatred, making them a grassroots force that helps the ultra-high income group to fight against progressive reforms. If this judgment is further refined, it will be found that the positions of the white underclass are not entirely contrary to their economic interests, because their socio-economic situation in the progressive era of the 20th century is crucially different from that of today. Thanks to the social safety net established in the second decade of the 20th century and the 1930s, the white bottom has been guaranteed a basic life, even after the Reagan Revolution proposed to reform the "welfare politics", the responsibility for compulsory guarantees borne by governments at all levels according to law has not been touched, and the government regulatory system formed from progress to the New Deal can still effectively ensure the basic environment for the survival of small and medium-sized enterprises and ensure the basic supply of public goods. In the context of a worry-free bottom line for survival, the bottom of white people, especially those living in inland townships, lack personal experience of the economic inequality vigorously attacked by the progressives in the new century, and it is difficult to generate the sense of urgency to actively solve the problem of redistribution as it did a hundred years ago.
Similarly, the economic perceptions of some and lower middle-class people are quite complex. The reform of the American corporate system after the New Deal gave the middle class a channel for promotion and development within large enterprises. In the stage of the globalized economy, it may be difficult for small and medium-sized enterprises to grow to the scale of competing with industry monopolies, but at least in high-end service industries such as science and technology and culture, they can rely on the property rights protection system to maintain a place in the industrial chain, or expect to obtain wealth returns in the process of mergers and acquisitions. The anti-monopoly slogan of a hundred years ago can be echoed because it caters to the traditional pursuit of economic freedom and independent entrepreneurship, but now the diversification of upward channels makes the attitude of the middle and lower classes hesitant. Despite Sanders' repeated propaganda in the "Rust Belt" states, he failed to persuade the lower and middle classes to join him in launching a "revolution," reflecting the political passion of progressive leaders and the mentality of grassroots gains and losses.
In short, in the struggle around progressive politics in the new century in the United States, although the promoting party has a broad social base, it has hidden differences within it; the opposing party is a combination of the super-rich and the white middle and lower classes, which seems strange, but more mobilized and resourceful. Even within the Democratic Party, it is difficult for the former to form a winning momentum, and it is reasonable to be forced to make concessions under the overall consideration of replacing Trump.
Fourth, the different environments of the times in the past and present
If the environment of American progressive politics in the new century is evaluated from a longer-term historical perspective and a broader global perspective, the disadvantages it faces are more obvious, especially compared with the progressive movements of the early 20th century.
First, the historical characteristics and political system design of the United States are more conducive to meeting the challenges of modernization than it is easy to overcome the difficulties brought about by globalization. Economic and social modernization brings about temporal fractures; globalization is the creation of virtual time and space, resulting in the fragmentation of geographical space (or non-geographical reorganization), as described by Professor Dani Rodrik: the social and cultural distance between prosperous international metropolises and rural towns is constantly widening. As we all know, the United States was founded on the basis of relatively simple social stratification, and the historical and cultural baggage was obviously slighter than that of eurasian countries, so in the process of economic modernization in the late 19th century and the progressive political reform in the early 20th century, the United States could easily get rid of the shackles of the pre-modern historical path, boldly create innovations, and solve modernization problems more flexibly.
In today's global economic period, the federal system of separation of powers and checks and balances in the United States has become a major obstacle to its overcoming the fragmentation of space. The "Bible Belt" has long been controlled by Christian fundamentalists, and anti-science education is prevalent; the southern states have promoted local autonomy on issues of policing, education, and social equality in order to resist the civil rights movement, and denounced the end of apartheid as a "conspiracy of liberal intellectual elites", thus forming a distorted interpretation of history; during the Reagan administration, under the banner of "new Federalism", the conservative right was powerless to change the trend of equal rights nationwide. However, within the scope of local power that it can control, it uses controversial topics such as reproductive rights and equality of sexual minorities to exaggerate fear, thus forming an anti-intellectual discourse system. Because the U.S. federal government does not have the power to promote uniform educational standards from the top down, basic scientific knowledge, basic citizen common sense, and social consensus bottom line have been unable to penetrate deep into the inland conservative zone for nearly half a century. The backwardness of education and the lack of a human capital base make these regions unable to keep pace with the global economic era, and the resentment of being abandoned by the global era in turn reinforces their culturally conservative mentality, and the resulting "backwardness-resistance" closed loop is difficult to break. Therefore, it is difficult for the progressive politics of the United States in the new century to form a nationwide grassroots alliance as it did a hundred years ago.
Second, with the popularization of network applications, the era of information technology has shifted from the first stage of equal empowerment to the second stage of the long-tail effect, and its demarcation point can be roughly set in 2008-2012. During these years, smartphones have rapidly become popular and social networks have changed the channels of communication for the masses. If the technological changes in the previous stage encourage social and political exchanges, dialogues, and collisions across borders, the aggregation and autism of various minority marginal groups in the latter stage have become a common phenomenon, and the resulting problems such as information isolation, community mutual exclusion, and difficulty in promoting mainstream consensus have fragmented the public opinion field and changed the rules of political dialogue. As Franklin Foer, an American media personality, pointed out that the algorithms upheld by technology unicorns such as Facebook replace causal relationship arguments with simple correlations, excluding real ideas and logic from the process of curiosity, and its impact can be described as immediate. The influence of discernment and insight has been weakened, and self-styled populist leaders have been able to incite minority fanaticism with simple words and maintain their strong imaginations by relying on the closed space of public opinion shaped by technology. The thinkers who led America's grassroots populace in the progressive era a hundred years ago are likely to lose out in today's environment of public opinion with William Sumner's social Darwinian slogans. When Zuckerberg and Bezos undermine the authority of the mainstream media on the one hand, and refuse to share the responsibility of news gatekeepers on the other hand, "alternative facts" can flood the field of public opinion, and today's progressive leaders cannot convey their true information and mature ideas to the grassroots, and it is difficult to gain an advantage in political debate. Third, the dramatic changes in the relations between the United States and the world over the past hundred years are equally unfavorable to its internal progressive forces, and progressive figures have fallen from the tide of the era of standing a hundred years ago to the current situation of severance of foreign aid and the reversal of the trend at home. From the second half of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, the United States regarded itself as a part of world politics, a latecomer in the process of industrialization and modernization, full of curiosity about the simultaneous exploration of political reform, economic management, and municipal innovation in Europe, and humbly learned from scholars from other countries in ideological and philosophical discussions. As the famous historian Richard Hofstadter commented, the first-class scholars in the United States at that time pursued cosmopolitan intellect, and their spiritual formation was deeply shaped by the major European social theorists, so they were keenly aware of the position and responsibility of the United States in the new global environment. The progressive reforms they later began in the United States not only responded to the trend of world politics, but also led to changes in world politics because of their practicality and creativity.
After the United States gained dominance of the international system in the second half of the 20th century, the mentality of its leadership changed significantly. On the one hand, self-satisfaction and complacency are pervasive, accustomed to acting as a guide in world politics, neglecting to understand the changes in other countries, and it is more difficult to adopt a learning posture; on the other hand, it is affected by the ideological confrontation of the Cold War, and it is full of doubts and even hostility to the ideological and social exploration of "non-American". Ironically, the conservatives in the United States have thus become the main force in provoking confrontation in the ideological and cultural fields. At the height of the Cold War from the 1950s to the 1960s,
They succeeded in stigmatizing the liberal mainstream by investigating "dubious relations with the European left"; by the new Cold War phase of the '80s, they had advocated a "historic confrontation with the Soviet Empire" to gain political superiority; and they had taken advantage of the post-Cold War public opinion field, and they had taken advantage of the war on terror to launch a neoconservative offensive. The conservative right has interpreted traditional American exceptionalism as American meritocracy as the best shield for refusing to learn from the lessons of other countries. In this situation, if the American progressives continue to quote foreign experiences or talk about the tide of change in the world as they did a hundred years ago, they will seem out of place, and even attract suspicion and ridicule. In the clamor of self-proclaimed greatness, efforts to admit inadequacies and try to improve are easily suppressed.
5. Conclusion
Progressive politics is not necessarily a panacea for today's Socioeconomic Problems in the United States, nor is it necessarily the only way out of its political impasse. But the progressive politics of the new century has suffered repeated setbacks in the United States, especially by significantly worse policy ideas, which have exposed surprisingly ills of American institutions and culture. In the global context, the unfavorable situation of progressive improvement is even more thought-provoking. If world politics loses its sense of direction or falls in the wrong direction, the search for a peaceful and prosperous international order can be imagined. In this sense, the challenges facing American politics are universal, its response is of reference value to other countries, and its final choice will affect the future of the world.
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