Global Climate Change and”Variations” in American Politics

At the Copenhagen Climate Conference, the international community’s attention to global warming reached a new height. However, a large part of the northern hemisphere has been experiencing unusually prolonged and bitter-cold winters. Large areas of Europe and the U.K. experienced snowfall and lowered temperatures, causing traffic paralysis and plunging people’s lives into difficulty. Beijing has seen the lowest temperature in 38 years. A “White Christmas” has come and stayed in Texas, a southern U.S. state. Florida, the southernmost paradise for escaping the cold, has also seen a record low temperature for the last 80 years. Many jokes jabbing at global warming predictions appeared in Europe and the U.S. as a result of these phenomena.

More than 10 years ago, I was fortunate to be able to consult a senior climate expert about the evidence for global climate change. He admitted that a long-term trend requires many years of records to establish, but the most obvious short-term sign of the earth’s climate losing its original balance is the magnification of the system variation, which is the increase in frequency and intensity of extreme climates. Though the great number of climatic anomalies in recent years cannot be complete proof of global warming, they sufficiently indicate that the climate system has lost its original stability and balance.

This brings to mind American politics. The similarities are found not only while climate change has already become an important point of contention among the various American political parties, but, more importantly, there is an analogy of the “increase in system variation” in the American political world.

The U.S. is in the middle of a deep long-term transformation. From a national perspective, the dominant “Pax Americana” after the Cold War was severely challenged by the “clash of civilizations” and the rise of the Asian economies. From a social perspective, the U.S. is accelerating toward a post-industrialization transformation, where a large number of high-salaried blue-collared positions are being replaced by low-skilled service jobs. In terms of population, the “baby boom” generation that is starting to retire is being displaced by a new generation whose education level is comparatively backward. The rapid increase of immigrants has caused the percentage of white Americans to drop below 50% for the first time. The list goes on. Like global climate change, these long-term trends in the U.S. have weakened and damaged its stability and balance as well as the many rules that its political institutions have formed over a long period of time. This has intensified the short-term political situation’s variation and turbulence. The intensification of the struggles among American political parties along with ideological polarization are two pieces of evidence showing the increase in short-term variation. This has also caused unpredictable “climatic anomalies” within American internal affairs.

For example, when President Bush won a second term as president in 2004, his victory brought with it the Republicans’ majority control in both the House and Congress, thus becoming the pinnacle of the “Conservatism Revolution” and “the Republicans Permanent Majority.” The Democrats, however, took back the White House and Congress two years later and obtained the critical 60-seat majority in the Senate four years later. The entry into the White House of Barack Obama, who is half-black and whose father was of Muslim descent, was an unprecedented “climatic anomaly.”

Barely one year later, American politics again exhibited intense instability. The once-influential Obama’s popularity dropped below 50%, and the Senate seat of the late Edward Kennedy, who passed away in August last year, remained vacant. Today, the overwhelmingly “blue” Massachusetts, the “family treasure” of the Democrats for the past half a century, has been taken away by an unknown Republican candidate, according to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.

In addition, the announcement of the retirements of Connecticut’s Chris Dodd and North Dakota’s Byron Dorgon in the face of various difficulties, two senior Democrat senators who have been keeping low profiles in Washington for 30 years, and the uphill battle for consecutive appointments of majority of party leaders in the House almost certainly means that the Democrats are going to lose their “supermajority” status in the House after the 2010 mid-term elections.

With the defection of a large number of centrist voters, the mushrooming of opposition to “Big Government,” and the rise of the “Tea Party” (originating from Boston’s campaign against Britain’s tax on tea during the American Revolution), the pundits and leaders of the Right even believe chances are good that the Republicans will reclaim majority in Congress next year. If this comes true, the “Obama Revolution,” unlike President Roosevelt’s New Deal, would end up being ephemeral.

In the face of the continual increase in political variations, not only would the once-popular “post-party politics” become a thing of the past, extreme powers and discourses will overflow while increasing in an obvious manner. Fox TV Networks’ newscaster Glenn Beck is a typical example. Not only did he openly say that Obama had “a deep-set hatred for the whites,” he went on to liken Obama’s policies to those of Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Sadam Hussein. Beck’s popularity in the U.S., however, has surpassed that of religion. Together with the death of the idea that “politics stops at the water’s edge,” party conflicts have affected the whole world through foreign policies.

Like global climate change, it is hard to predict for sure where the various long-term changes in American society will end. However, the emergence of short-term rapid political changes motivated by these long-term trends affecting the country internally and externally is a predictable reality. With the intensification of American political “variations,” political commentators like New York Time’s premier columnist Thomas Friedman warned that there will be political violence.

With the continual acceleration of social stress and tension, such a risk cannot be underestimated. However, American democracy, formed and perfected over a long time, has obvious advantages in resolving and releasing social tensions. In comparison, Mainland China is experiencing a larger and deeper change, which would also result in intensifying social variations. The many “sudden” and “mass” incidents would especially threaten the society’s stability, but at the same time China lacks an open civic social institution and tradition through which to respond to them. The U.S. is thus a more worthy model to emulate than Beijing.