Biden’s first year in office: From high hopes to setbacks

There are multiple factors interacting behind Biden’s turn to “weakness”, which to a considerable extent reflects the drawbacks of normalization in the fields of American politics and governance. Disadvantage 1: The situation of bipartisan political polarization in the United States will continue for a long time and will be difficult to change in the short term. One of the important reasons why the Biden administration cannot produce a strong report card is that it is trapped in the dilemma of unprecedented polarization of bipartisan politics. Biden’s weakness in advancing the legislative agenda first comes from the Democratic Party’s position as the “weakest majority party” in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, especially the Senate where the Democratic and Republican parties each hold 50 seats and are evenly matched, which makes Biden’s political room for maneuver extremely small. As long as one Democratic senator opposes, his legislative agenda cannot be advanced. This is a unique dilemma facing Biden, reflecting the new high point of political division in the United States. Disadvantage 2: Partisan politics penetrates into other fields and deepens social divisions. Over the past year, whether it is the investigation of the Capitol Hill riots led by House Democrats or the vaccine mandatory order issued by the White House, they have become tools of bipartisan political struggles at the first time. Even the phenomenon of voting by party camps in the Senate’s confirmation vote on Biden’s nominees for federal judges is far more serious than in the past. In the past, crises like the COVID-19 pandemic might have been an opportunity to promote national unity, but in an era of political polarization, they continue to be a hotbed for conspiracy theories. Polls show that American voters are more ideologically divided than ever before, making them less likely to swing between the two parties. In one poll, about half of Republican voters even believed that the Democratic Party poses a greater threat to the American way of life than Russia. The U.S. Supreme Court will also rule on abortion and gun rights lawsuits this year. These two topics that have long torn American society apart are bound to trigger a new round of left-right rifts.