America's Presidential Election Unlikely to Bring the World New Hope

Romney and Obama’s presidential election campaigns are now reaching fever pitch. The bilateral television debates comprise discussions of whether or not we ought to give Big Bird, of PBS’s veteran television show Sesame Street, the axe. This sounds a little ridiculous, but it in fact illustrates a very real problem: the reduction of the fiscal deficit, which has become a crucial topic in the U.S. presidential election.

As usual, the quadrennial U.S. election is drawing worldwide attention. In addition to studying and analyzing what sort of foreign policy the next U.S. president plans to implement, the U.S. election is of interest to the world because America is the world’s model for capitalism. Its policies are taken as examples across the globe; the manner in which the newly appointed president will lead America out of the current economic difficulties will be of great importance worldwide.

The banking and economic crisis, which originated in America before spreading across the Western world and persisting for four to five years, brought about profound global change. Indeed, it required every country to put aside many important issues and reforms just so that they might survive the crisis. Broadly speaking, there were two causes of the current crisis: the lack of oversight of the financial industry and Western nations’ long-term maintenance of high welfare policies.

The flame of this crisis was sparked by America, and so some adjustments and reforms were clearly necessary. Four years ago, Obama successfully made it into the White House under the banner of reform. During the past four years, America has advanced somewhat along the path of reform — through the Dodd-Frank Act, which strengthened regulation of the Wall Street financial community, and through the Affordable Care Act, which intends to offer more people medical insurance. But realistically speaking, the reforms were not only insufficient, but also unclear in direction. This has been the true focus of the fierce bilateral debates of this election campaign.

According to Obama and the Democratic Party, if the United States wants to break free from the economic difficulties that it is currently facing, it must still rely on the strength of the government. It must increase its investment in the economy, strengthen the administration of its institutions and improve through order and power. But according to Romney and the Republican Party, after four years with Obama in office, America has still not broken free of economic difficulty. So, they argue, the United States must completely reverse Obama’s policies, give decision-making power to businesses and the free market, let government intervention in the economy drop to a minimum and allow society to develop autonomously according to survival of the fittest. When it comes to these two philosophies, the former is essentially the continuation of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Keynesianism, while the latter embodies the American political tradition of opposition to government authority and emphasizes the role of society and individuals as carriers of new ideas. It can be said that these two diametrically opposed parties in fact hold wholly consistent viewpoints.

As they say, when America sneezes, the whole world catches a cold, but when the U.S. is in good health, there is hope for the rest of the world as well. Regardless of whether Romney or Obama is elected, whether they have a plan to lead the U.S. back up the path of economic prosperity or will push the U.S. further into the abyss of crisis is of interest not only to American voters, but also to the rest of the world, which is waiting to see and to learn. In this regard, the influence and impact of this year’s U.S. presidential election is quite substantial. However, when it comes to the contrast between Obama and Romney’s viewpoints, neither has yet been able to overcome America’s decades-long tradition of political partisanship. Old methods are facing new situations; they don’t seem to be coping very well. Moreover, new theories and ideas capable of effectively responding to real-world problems are developing slowly, if at all. Just as Francis Fukuyama lamented, first there was the right-wing ideological crisis and failure, and now left-wing ideology appears to be equally ineffective and powerless. Perhaps American and Western reform can only reach breakthroughs and find its true direction on a theoretical level. And in this sense, the American presidential election has yet to bring anyone much new hope.

The author is the deputy director of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations Institute for American Studies.