In 2024, the Hollywood movie "American Civil War" will be released. This movie, which was released in an election year, has won the world's attention with the word "civil war", and it also reflects an aspect of contemporary American politics: that is, when the world is still concerned about whether American hegemony can continue to be maintained, the internal political elite of the United States has begun to enter the "leading version" and began to think about the possibility of American society being torn apart.
This focus on different issues in the United States and abroad reflects two things: first, within the United States, concerns about social divisions have risen to a new level; Second, regions outside the United States generally underestimate the possibility of civil war in the United States today.
This is not unexpected. After all, before Gorbachev gave the United States a "Christmas gift", few countries in the world predicted in advance that the Soviet Union would disappear into the long river of history. And now the United States seems to be repeating the mistakes of the Soviet Union.
Before the first debate of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the Spanish newspaper Confidential published a lengthy opinion piece pointing out that the United States is facing "similar tragedies" to the Soviet Union in the eighties and nineties of the last century: a huge fiscal deficit, an unprecedentedly expensive "heavenly army" that cannot achieve any victory, a dilapidated and rigid infrastructure, and a desperate "gerontocracy".
And the election debate on June 28 laid bare all the tragedies listed by the Western media in front of the outside world. The debates between the two candidates, who are collectively over 150 years old, are full of personal attacks like roadside hooligans arguing and scolding, and the deliberate avoidance of key policy issues by both sides, provide a tangible glimpse into the irreversible decay of American politics and the future of further tears.
The argument that American politics is irreversibly decaying is that the debate reflects the inability of either candidate to offer a tangible solution to the major dilemma facing the United States today. In this round of election debates, there is very little policy-based content, and the focus of the confrontation between the two sides is almost exclusively on "shifting the blame" to each other.
Trump, Biden
For example, Biden accused Trump of "conniving" with Russia too much during his tenure, which eventually led to the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict; And Trump quickly replied, saying that there was no conflict in Ukraine during his tenure, and that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict was Biden's full responsibility. The two accuse each other of incompetence, but neither can offer a clear plan on how to end the current predicament facing Ukraine and the United States.
The same situation happened on almost every issue, where Trump and Biden attacked each other for "incompetence" and "lying", but both avoided what policies to adopt and how to break through the dilemma in the face of the current situation.
To say that American politics is facing a torn future is because the flip side of decay is torn. During the Obama era, the United States began to face a growing problem of government dysfunction. Obama once said in a public speech that the U.S. system is designed to use the "separation of powers" to check power, not to paralyze the government.
Obama
The direct impact of this government failure is that the public policies that the government should have come up with and the public services it should have provided have come to a standstill. And this will lead to the most direct result, that there is no chance of easing social contradictions. The role of a normal government should be that of a "mediator".
When discussing the design of the political system in the modern West, it must be called ancient Greece, and its "spiritual originator" Plato proposed in the "Ideal Republic" that the anthropomorphic analogy of an ideal government is the "philosopher king", rich in rational wisdom. But the current leaders of the United States are moving further and further away from the word rational, both psychologically and physically.
The two parties are biting each other at all costs in order to consolidate power, the consensus between the political elites has been broken, and the dark background of "American-style democracy" has been increasingly exposed to the sun. Take, for example, the recent "battle between the Biden administration and the U.S. Supreme Court": the Trump administration nominated a number of justices to the Supreme Court, bringing the ratio of conservatives to liberals on the Supreme Court to 6:3.
U.S. Supreme Court
And the Supreme Court, where conservative judges hold an absolute majority, has become the biggest stumbling block in the Democrats' series of judicial sniping against Trump. In March, Colorado tried to launch a campaign to remove Trump from the ballot in the state's primaries for "sedition," but that attempt was later overturned by the Supreme Court.
In order to remove this stumbling block, Biden and the Democratic Party launched a liquidation of conservative justices, a large number of evidence of judges accepting bribes was exposed, and the voice calling for an end to the "tenure system" of the top judge in the United States is also getting louder. Then, in response, the Supreme Court passed a ruling in the past few days, ruling that the law enforcement agencies of the U.S. government cannot directly enforce civil penalties and need to provide a "jury trial" guarantee for those subject to execution.
This measure will greatly improve the rights of the judicial system, while at the same time greatly increasing the administrative costs of the administrative agencies, prompting a wail from the U.S. Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and other agencies. In this round, the Democratic Party and the Supreme Court fought happily, and only the signboard of "American-style democracy" was injured.
Trump
Trust in the government in the United States is declining year by year, and by 2024, only 23% will remain, and this situation is directly related to the bottomless struggle between the two parties in the United States. The American people do not trust the political elite, and the social contradictions have not been resolved for a long time, and falling into tears is almost an inevitable outcome. And the 2024 U.S. election is likely to be an important turning point in exacerbating this rift.
At the beginning of the election debate, Trump made it clear that he would not accept the results of the 2024 presidential election unconditionally, only if the election was "fair, legal, and good." And considering the causes and consequences of the storming of the Capitol in 2021, I am afraid that there is a question mark over what kind of election will meet the three criteria that Trump said.
After winning the primary, Trump's approval rating has been "equal" with Biden's. But after the first round of debates, the number of people who think Trump "is doing better" has more than doubled Biden, and there are constant complaints within the Democratic Party, and even discussions are about replacing Biden.
Capitol Hill riots
Under such circumstances, if Trump is blocked from the White House by the Democrats using some "off-the-market tricks", then the American public's trust in the government may have more room to fall.
Of course, it is unlikely that a civil war will break out in the United States in the next year or two. After all, although the United States is "dying", it is still at the top of the global industrial chain and can barely survive by harvesting other countries.
As long as the United States is still wielding its scythe, civil war is unlikely to break out. But in other words, when the US global financial and military hegemony system completely collapses because of a landmark event, the risk of US implosion will rise sharply. The generations of the post-80s and 90s generations may be able to witness the fall of the "Cold War Twins" in their lifetimes.
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