2024 11/7 一个自命不凡、自以为是的政党遭遇惨败

A Party of Prigs and Pontificators Suffers a Humiliating Defeat

BRET STEPHENS

2024年11月7日

A story in chess lore involves the great Danish-Jewish player Aron Nimzowitsch, who, at a tournament in the mid-1920s, found himself struggling against the German master Friedrich Sämisch. Infuriated at the thought of losing to an opponent he considered inferior, Nimzowitsch jumped on the table and shouted, “To this idiot I must lose?”

国际象棋界有个传说，在上世纪20年代中期的一场锦标赛上，伟大的丹麦犹太棋手阿伦·尼姆佐维奇在对阵德国大师弗里德里希·萨米施时发现自己很被动。一想到要输给一个在他看来水平不如自己的对手，尼姆佐维奇就怒不可遏，他跳到桌子上大喊：“我竟然要输给这个白痴？”

It’s a thought that must have crossed the minds of more than a few liberal pundits and Democratic eminences late Tuesday night, as Kamala Harris’s hopes for winning the presidency began suddenly to fade.

周二深夜，随着贺锦丽赢得总统大选的希望突然开始变得渺茫，这个想法一定在不少自由派专家和民主党知名人士的脑海中闪过。

How, indeed, did Democrats lose so badly, considering how they saw Donald Trump — a twice-impeached former president, a felon, a fascist, a bigot, a buffoon, a demented old man, an object of nonstop late-night mockery and incessant moral condemnation? The theory that many Democrats will be tempted to adopt is that a nation prone to racism, sexism, xenophobia and rank stupidity fell prey to the type of demagoguery that once beguiled Germany into electing Adolf Hitler.

是啊，考虑到民主党人是如何看待特朗普的——一个两次遭弹劾的前总统、一个重罪犯、一个法西斯主义者、一个偏执狂、一个小丑、一个精神错乱的老家伙、一个不断被深夜脱口秀嘲讽和道德谴责的对象，他们怎么会输这么惨？许多民主党人倾向于采用的理论是，一个容易受到种族主义、性别歧视、排外主义和极度愚蠢影响的国家会被那种曾经诱惑德国选出希特勒的煽动行为所蛊惑。

It’s a theory that has a lot of explanatory power — though only of an unwitting sort. The broad inability of liberals to understand Trump’s political appeal except in terms flattering to their beliefs is itself part of the explanation for his historic, and entirely avoidable, comeback.

这个理论具有很强的解释力——尽管只是歪打正着。自由派人士普遍无法理解特朗普的政治吸引力——他们想当然的原因除外——这本身就在一定程度上解释了他何以做到历史性的、本来完全可以避免的卷土重来。

Why did Harris lose? There were many tactical missteps: her choice of a progressive running mate who would not help deliver a must-win state like Pennsylvania or Michigan; her inability to separate herself from President Biden; her foolish designation of Trump as a fascist, which, by implication, suggested his supporters were themselves quasi-fascist; her overreliance on celebrity surrogates as she struggled to articulate a compelling rationale for her candidacy; her failure to forthrightly repudiate some of the more radical positions she took as a candidate in 2019, other than by relying on stock expressions like “My values haven’t changed.”

贺锦丽为什么会输？从策略层面说，存在很多失误：她选择了一位进步派的竞选搭档，这无助于她拿下宾夕法尼亚州或密歇根州等必须拿下的州；她无法将自己与拜登总统做切割；她愚蠢地将特朗普称为法西斯主义者，这等于是在暗示他的支持者差不多也是法西斯主义者；她在吃力地为自己的参选提供令人信服的理由时过度依赖名人代言；她没有坦率否定自己在2019年作为候选人时采取的一些更为激进的立场，而是依赖于“我的价值观没有变”这种陈词滥调。

There was also the larger error of anointing Harris without political competition — an insult to the democratic process that handed the nomination to a candidate who, as some of us warned at the time, was exceptionally weak. That, in turn, came about because Democrats failed to take Biden’s obvious mental decline seriously until June’s debate debacle (and then allowed him to cling to the nomination for a few weeks more), making it difficult to hold even a truncated mini-primary.

还有一个更大的错误是，在没有政治竞争的情况下直接任命贺锦丽为候选人——这是对民主程序的侮辱，而且正如我们中的一些人当时所警告的那样，任命了一个非常弱的候选人。反过来，这又是因为民主党人没有认真对待拜登明显的神智衰退，直到6月的辩论灾难（之后又让他多坚持几周），使得哪怕一个时间缩短的迷你初选都不太可能。

But these mistakes of calculation lived within three larger mistakes of worldview. First, the conviction among many liberals that things were pretty much fine, if not downright great, in Biden’s America — and that anyone who didn’t think that way was either a right-wing misinformer or a dupe. Second, the refusal to see how profoundly distasteful so much of modern liberalism has become to so much of America. Third, the insistence that the only appropriate form of politics when it comes to Trump is the politics of Resistance — capital R.

但这些算计上的失误存在于三个更大的世界观错误之中。首先，许多自由派人士坚信，在拜登领导下的美国情况相当不错，甚至可以说非常好，任何与此观点相左的人要么是散布右翼不实信息，要么是傻瓜。其次，不愿正视现代自由主义对如此多的美国人来说是多么令人厌恶。第三，坚信在面对特朗普时，唯一合适的政治形式是抵抗(Resistance)的政治——大写的R。

Regarding the first, I’ve lost track of the number of times liberal pundits have attempted to steer readers to arcane data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve to explain why Americans should stop freaking out over sharply higher prices of consumer goods or the rising financing costs on their homes and cars. Or insisted there was no migration crisis at the southern border. Or averred that Biden was sharp as a tack and that anyone who suggested otherwise was a jerk.

关于第一点，我已经记不清自由派专家有多少次试图引导读者阅读圣路易斯联邦储备银行的晦涩数据，来解释为什么美国人应该停止对消费品价格的急剧上涨或房屋和汽车融资成本的上升感到恐惧。或者坚称南部边境不存在移民危机。或者声称拜登头脑清晰，任何提出不同意见的人都是混蛋。

Yet when Americans saw and experienced things otherwise (as extensive survey data showed they did) the characteristic liberal response was to treat the complaints not only as baseless but also as immoral. The effect was to insult voters while leaving Democrats blind to the legitimacy of the issues. You could see this every time Harris mentioned, in answer to questions about the border, that she had prosecuted transnational criminal gangs: Her answer was nonresponsive to the central complaint that there was a migration crisis straining hundreds of communities, irrespective of whether the migrants committed crimes.

然而，当美国人看到的和经历的并非如此时（正如大量调查数据显示的那样），典型的自由派反应是——不仅认为这些抱怨毫无根据，而且是不道德的。其结果是在侮辱选民的同时让民主党人对这些问题的存在视而不见。每当贺锦丽在回答有关边境问题时，她都会提到自己起诉了跨国犯罪团伙，由此你可以看到这一点：她没有对人们的核心抱怨作出回应，即移民危机给数百个社区带来了压力，无论移民是否犯罪。

The dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes. Concerned about gender transitions for children or about biological males playing on girls’ sports teams? You’re a transphobe. Dismayed by tedious, mandatory and frequently counterproductive D.E.I. seminars that treat white skin as almost inherently problematic? You’re racist. Irritated by new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive but feels as if it’s borrowing a page from “1984”? That’s doubleplusungood.

自由派对这些忧虑的漠视是另一种现象的一部分：轻视许多美国人对各种进步事业在道德上的反对意见。担心儿童的性别转换或是生理男性参加女子体育比赛？那你就是个跨性别恐惧者。对那些几乎视白皮肤为原罪的、乏味、强制且往往适得其反的多样性、公平性和包容性研讨会感到不满？那你就是个种族主义者。对那些本应更具包容性、但却感觉像是取自《1984》的新术语感到恼火？那你就是“双加不好”（doubleplusungood，《1984》中使用的“新话”词语，意为“非常坏”。——译注）。

The Democratic Party at its best stands for fairness and freedom. But the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity. It also, increasingly, stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms on hundreds of millions of Americans who want to live and let live but don’t like being told how to speak or what to think. Too many liberals forgot this, which explains how a figure like Trump, with his boisterous and transgressive disdain for liberal pieties, could be re-elected to the presidency.

最好的民主党代表着公平和自由。但是，当今左派政治却强调根据群体认同进行社会工程。它还越来越多地支持将奇怪的文化规范强加于数亿美国人，这些美国人希望大家都能按照自己的生活方式生活，不喜欢在如何说话、如何思考上遭人指手画脚。太多的自由派人士忘记了这一点，这就解释了为什么像特朗普这样对自由主义的虔诚信念极为蔑视的人可以再次当选总统。

Last, liberals thought that the best way to stop Trump was to treat him not as a normal, if obnoxious, political figure with bad policy ideas but as a mortal threat to democracy itself. Whether or not he is such a threat, this style of opposition led Democrats astray. It goaded them into their own form of antidemocratic politics — using the courts to try to get Trump’s name struck from the ballot in Colorado or trying to put him in prison on hard-to-follow charges. It distracted them from the task of developing and articulating superior policy responses to the valid public concerns he was addressing. And it made liberals seem hyperbolic, if not hysterical, particularly since the country had already survived one Trump presidency more or less intact.

最后，自由派认为，阻止特朗普的最好方法不是把他当作一个政策理念糟糕的正常政客——尽管令人讨厌，而是把他当作对民主本身的致命威胁。无论他是否构成这样的威胁，这种反对做派都使民主党人误入歧途。这促使他们采取自己的反民主政治形式——利用法院试图将特朗普的名字从科罗拉多州的选票上删除，或试图以难以理解的罪名将他送入监狱。这分散了他们的注意力，使他们无法为特朗普正在解决的公众合理关切制定和阐明卓越的政策回应。而且，这也让自由派显得夸张甚至是歇斯底里，尤其考虑到，这个国家已经或多或少完好无损地挺过了一次特朗普总统任期。

Today, the Democrats have become the party of priggishness, pontification and pomposity. It may make them feel righteous, but how’s that ever going to be a winning electoral look?

今天，民主党已经变成了一个自以为是、爱说教和自命不凡的政党。这可能让他们感到自己正义凛然，但这样的形象怎么可能赢得选举呢？

I voted reluctantly for Harris because of my fears for what a second Trump term might bring — in Ukraine, our trade policy, civic life, the moral health of the conservative movement writ large. Right now, my larger fear is that liberals lack the introspection to see where they went wrong, the discipline to do better next time and the humility to change.

由于特朗普第二个任期可能带来的担忧显而易见——在乌克兰的战争、我们的贸易政策、公民生活，以及保守派运动的道德健康，我勉强把票投给了贺锦丽。眼下，我更担心的是，自由派人士缺乏自省能力，不知道自己错在了哪里，缺乏在下次做得更好的自制力，也没有做出改变的谦逊。

Bret Stephens是《纽约时报》观点版专栏作家，撰写有关外交政策、国内政治和文化问题的文章。欢迎在Facebook关注他。

翻译：杜然