Disparity in National Goals Is Tearing the US Apart

Although Joe Biden has already been declared the president-elect, the incumbent president, Donald Trump, is still asserting on social media that he received 75 million votes (a new record for an incumbent president) and is urging Republican Party members to declare it is “too soon to give up” and that they must “finally learn how to fight.” In comparison, Biden received a record 80 million votes. This is a clear illustration of the enormous divide within the United States.

The outside world is already watching closely to see how U.S. domestic and foreign policy will change. These changes hinge on two questions. First, what will Biden recognize as the primary challenges facing the U.S. today? Second, what kinds of national goals will he choose to pursue in response to these issues and challenges?

One argument says that Biden will follow the path of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, moving again toward multilateralism and rejoining the various international organizations that Trump has abandoned. Biden himself has reiterated several times that the U.S. will return to its leadership position on the world stage. This decision obviously differs wildly from the Trump administration’s position over the past four years. Is this because Biden and Trump have seen two different Americas? Perhaps not. Whether Republican or Democrat, it should be clear to every politician in America that social divisiveness and political polarization within the U.S. is growing continually worse. However, their opinions on how these problems arose and how to solve them differ; they have made different diagnoses and written different prescriptions.

America’s 2 Major Pursuits after It Was Founded

Current issues have fully exposed several natural flaws in the U.S. political system. The U.S. lacks foundational unity, which has caused issues of sovereignty to reemerge once again in American political life.

From the Revolutionary War to the 19th century, the U.S. primarily dealt with problems of state-building. The problem of national identity, that is, the problem of constructing a political identity and sense of belonging, plagued the U.S. for a long time; this issue was not fully resolved even into the late 19th century. However, with the Protestant population occupying an absolute majority of the U.S. population, the identity issue was less conspicuous than it had been previously.

At the same time, following the end of the 19th century, the country made the establishment of international influence its new goal. Especially after its transition to globalism into the middle and end of the 20th century, constructing and maintaining a global hegemonic system was of the utmost importance to the U.S. During the past century or so, the United States’ economic, scientific, and military superiority, and its transformation into a hegemonic state has brought the U.S. immeasurable glory, yet as a result, the existence of foundational problems within the country has been largely obscured. Not only that, but international achievement was also used as proof that the American system was superior, which meant that improvement of domestic American political institutions was frequently overlooked in the last half of the 20th century.

Many American scholars have examined this insightfully for quite some time, such as the late Harvard professor, Samuel P. Huntington. He proposed that America is a new society, but an old country. This is because the consolidation of sovereignty is a key signal differentiating modern politics from traditional politics, but the three branch system within the U.S. creates a sovereign separation of powers.

The political reality of contemporary America is that two sets of goals exist side-by-side: the pursuit of hegemony that began in the 20th century, as well as the foundational goals that have persisted since the late 18th and 19th centuries. Since the second half of the 20th century, the United States’ domestic and international aims have simultaneously governed the formulation and implementation of its national policy. If either of these two major objectives suffered a setback, it would result in huge losses to the United States’ national interests. Yet comparatively speaking, the creation of political harmony and promotion of national identity at home is far more important to the U.S.; to a large extent, its foreign aims (namely, the expansion and maintenance of hegemony) is a means of supporting its domestic aims, as it helps to enhance Americans’ sense of national pride, and further strengthen their national identity.

For the greater part of the past century, there was sufficient support and resources to achieve these two aims, largely because the U.S. was the world’s most industrialized country. Therefore, domestically, it was able to provide generous employment opportunities for its citizens, while simultaneously using tax revenue to promote many welfare programs, creating the conditions to resolve domestic issues. John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier programs and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society concept in the ’60s are a few examples of this.

The Nation’s Aims Control Its Future

The growing social divide and political conflict in the U.S. today reflect and magnify the discord between these two major aims, which date to the founding of the United States. This discord is also represented in the differing policy demands of Biden and Trump.

Based on his campaign platform, to an extent, Biden will continue the 20th century’s new American tradition, which is intended to tie the accomplishment of domestic aims to the achievement of foreign aims, something which is entirely different from the America First tack that Trump pursued. The latter represents the United States’ transition from its 20th century imperial agenda back to the agenda focused on the foundation of the state of the 19th century, and the shedding of the belief that imperialism is beneficial to maintaining order in the U.S.

Trump’s about-face here was a response to several new realities within the U.S.: The first is an unprecedented transformation of the American population and the makeup of its religious beliefs. In the near future, the traditionally white population and Protestant belief system will cease to occupy the mainstream of society. The second reality is that as its economy became more globalized, something which the U.S. itself has been pushing forward since the end of the 20th century, the United States gradually lost the absolute dominance it once held in economic and technological fields, among others. This not only made it difficult for the U.S. to preserve its hegemonic system, but the effects of this shift also flowed back into the U.S. raising domestic political issues as the changes to the United States’ domestic economy and social structure engendered severe challenges to domestic governance and national identity.

In the past four years, the Trump administration has undone much of the groundwork of the already beleaguered system of global American hegemony, raising a difficult and unanswered question: How should the U.S. choose between its two major aims? In considering the long-term impact that Trumpism could have on the U.S., we must make use of two differing scales: The first is the resolution of U.S. domestic issues and the promotion of domestic harmony, and the second is the preservation of the United States’ international influence, that is, the preservation of what is usually called the American hegemonic system.

Simultaneously pursuing these two aims is an already impossible burden for the U.S. If Trump had remained in office for the next four years, one could imagine that American hegemony would further dissolve, and if the U.S. never again held a global leadership role, it could fail. However, the U.S. most importantly needs to solve its domestic political issues. If, in the future, it can reverse its descent into societal disintegration, and repair its sharply divided political identity, that would be a success for the United States.

Whether the U.S. moves toward success or toward failure rests on how the U.S. orients itself in the future. If the Biden administration devotes itself to the development of domestic institutions by means of international cooperation, it will help the American political system mature. In contrast, the Trump administration’s decision to promote domestic policy reform by creating international conflict has damaged relations between the U.S. and other countries while simultaneously heightening political polarization at home.

Now that Trumpism has proven to bring more harm than good, the U.S. needs to seek out a new path for solving its domestic issues. It should not pursue goals of hegemony. However, if it continues to share a leadership role alongside many other countries and provide necessary public goods for the international community, it could be beneficial for both the world and the U.S.

The author is a professor at the Shanghai International Studies University School of International Relations and Public Affairs.