如何看待特朗普的崛起 How great republics meet their end

What is one to make of the rise of Donald Trump? It is natural to think of comparisons with populist demagogues past and present. It is natural, too, to ask why the Republican party might choose a narcissistic bully as its candidate for president. This, though, is not just about a party, but about a great country. The US is the greatest republic since Rome, the bastion of democracy, the guarantor of the liberal global order. It would be a global disaster if Mr Trump were to become president. Even if he fails, he has rendered the unthinkable sayable.

怎么看唐纳德•特朗普(Donald Trump)的崛起？人们自然会将他与古往今来善于煽动人心的民粹主义政客做番对比。人们也自然会问，为何共和党会选择一个盛气凌人的自恋狂作为其总统候选人。然而，这不仅仅与一个政党有关，而且还与一个伟大的国家有关。美国是自罗马以来最伟大的共和国，是民主体制的堡垒，还是全球自由秩序的保障。如果特朗普最终成为美国总统，那将是一场全球灾难。即便失败，他也让不可思议之事成为了人们的谈资。

Mr Trump is a promoter of paranoid fantasies, a xenophobe and an ignoramus. His business consists of the erection of ugly monuments to his own vanity. He has no experience of political office. Some compare him to Latin American populists. He might also be considered an American Silvio Berlusconi, albeit without the charm or business acumen. But Mr Berlusconi, unlike Mr Trump, never threatened to round up and expel millions of people. Mr Trump is grossly unqualified for the world’s most important political office.

特朗普宣扬偏执性的妄想，排外而且无知。他的生意包括为了自己的虚荣建造丑陋的地标建筑物。他没有任何从政经历。一些人将他比作拉美的民粹主义者。或许还有人认为他是美国的西尔维奥•贝卢斯科尼(Silvio Berlusconi)，尽管他缺乏魅力和商业头脑。但是与特朗普不一样的是，贝卢斯科尼从来不会威胁要抓捕并驱逐数百万人。特朗普完全不够格担任全球最重要的政治职位。

Yet, as Robert Kagan, a neoconservative intellectual, argues in a powerful column in The Washington Post, Mr Trump is also “the GOP’s Frankenstein monster”. He is, says Mr Kagan, the monstrous result of the party’s “wild obstructionism”, its demonisation of political institutions, its flirtation with bigotry and its “racially tinged derangement syndrome” over President Obama. He adds: “We are supposed to believe that Trump’s legion of ‘angry’ people are angry about wage stagnation. No, they are angry about all the things Republicans have told them to be angry about these past seven-and-a-half years”.

然而，正如新保守主义学者罗伯特•卡根(Robert Kagan)在《华盛顿邮报》(The Washington Post)上颇具影响力的专栏中所说的那样，特朗普也是“共和党造就的弗兰肯斯坦怪物”。卡根表示，他是共和党“野蛮阻扰主义”、政治机构妖魔化、偏执心态以及对奥巴马总统患上“种族色彩紊乱综合症”的怪异产物。他补充称：“我们本来会认为，支持特朗普的‘愤怒’民众对薪资停滞感到不满。实际上并非如此，他们对过去7年半共和党告诉他们要愤怒的所有事情都感到不满。”

Mr Kagan is right but does not go far enough. This is not about the past seven-and-a-half years. These attitudes were to be seen in the 1990s, with the impeachment of President Clinton. Indeed, they go back to the party’s opportunistic response to the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Alas, they have become worse, not better, with time.

卡根说得没错，但还说得不够透彻。这与过去7年半无关。这些态度在上世纪90年代就已显现，当时克林顿总统遭到弹劾。实际上，它们可以追溯至上世纪60年代共和党对公民权运动的机会主义回应。唉，随着时间的推移，这些态度日益恶化而非改善。

Why has this happened? The answer is that this is how a wealthy donor class, dedicated to the aims of slashing taxes and shrinking the state, obtained the footsoldiers and voters it required. This, then, is “pluto-populism”: the marriage of plutocracy with rightwing populism. Mr Trump embodies this union but he has done this by partially dumping the free-market, low tax, shrunken government aims of the party establishment, to which his financially dependent rivals remain wedded. That gives him an apparently insuperable advantage. Trump is no conservative, elite conservatives complain. Precisely. That is also true of the party’s base.

为何会出现这种情况？答案在于，这是一个致力于减税和缩减政府规模的富裕捐赠阶层获得其所需的群众基础和选民支持的方式。因而这是“富豪民粹主义”：财阀统治与右翼民粹主义的结合。特朗普是这个联合体的象征，但他在一定程度上抛弃了共和党当权派的自由市场、低税和缩减政府规模的目标——他的财务上不独立的竞争对手依然致力于这些目标。这让他获得了显然无可比拟的优势。保守派精英人士抱怨称，特朗普并非保守派。确实如此。共和党的根基也不是保守派。

Mr Trump is egregious. Yet in some respects the policies of his two leading rivals, Senators Cruz and Rubio, are as bad. Both propose highly regressive tax cuts, just like Mr Trump. Mr Cruz even wishes to return to a gold standard. Mr Trump says that the sick should not die on the streets. Mr Cruz and Mr Rubio seem to be not quite so sure.

特朗普是个糟糕透顶的人。然而在某些方面，他的两个主要竞争对手——两位参议员特德•克鲁兹(Ted Cruz)和马可•鲁比奥(Marco Rubio)也没拿出像样的政策。两人都提议高度递减的减税措施，和特朗普一样。克鲁兹甚至希望回归金本位制。特朗普表示，病人不应该死在街头。克鲁兹和鲁比奥似乎没有那么确定。

Yet the Trump phenomenon is not the story of just one party. It is about the country and so, inevitably, the world. In creating the American republic, the founding fathers were aware of the example of Rome. Alexander Hamilton argued in the Federalist Papers that the new republic would need an “energetic executive”. He noted that Rome itself, with its careful duplication of magistracies, depended in its hours of need on the grant of absolute, albeit temporary, power to one man, called a “dictator”.

然而，“特朗普现象”不只是一个政党的事情，它更是这个国家、因此不可避免也是整个世界的事情。在建立美利坚共和国时，开国元勋们是知道罗马这个榜样的。亚历山大•汉密尔顿(Alexander Hamilton)在《联邦党人文集》(Federalist Papers)中主张，新共和国需要一位“充满活力的行政首脑”。他指出，罗马精心地复制了“执政官”这个职位，但在要紧时期却依赖于将绝对（尽管是暂时的）权力赋予一人，即“独裁官”(dictator)。

The US would have no such office. Instead, it would have a unitary executive: the president as elected monarch. The president has limited, but great, authority. For Hamilton, the danger of overweening power would be contained by “first, a due dependence on the people, secondly, a due responsibility”. During the first century BC, the wealth of empire destabilised the Roman republic. In the end, Augustus, heir of the popular party, terminated the republic and installed himself as emperor. He did so by preserving all the forms of the republic, while he dispensed with their meaning.

美国不会设置这样的职位。相反，它要设的是一个统一的行政首脑：总统，作为经选举产生的最高统治者。总统拥有有限、但巨大的权力。在汉密尔顿来看，权力过大的危险将受制于两点“一是对人民应有的依赖，二是应负的责任”。在公元前1世纪，帝国的财富令共和政体陷入不稳。最后，平民党的继承人奥古斯都(Augustus)终结了共和政体，自立为皇帝。他保留了所有共和的形式，却废除了它们的所有内涵。

It is rash to assume constitutional constraints would survive the presidency of someone elected because he neither understands nor believes in them. Rounding up and deporting 11m people is an immense coercive enterprise. Would a president elected to achieve this be prevented and, if so, by whom? What are we to make of Mr Trump’s enthusiasm for the barbarities of torture? Would he find people willing to carry out his desires or not?

不要武断地以为宪法约束一定能比某个民选总统的任期更长久，因为他既不理解也不相信这些约束。抓捕并驱逐1100万人就是一种极其高压的做法。为了达到这个目标而选上的总统会被阻止吗？谁来阻止？怎么看特朗普对酷刑的热爱？他会看到人们愿意执行他的意思吗，还是不能？

It is not difficult for a determined leader to do the previously unthinkable by appealing to conditions of emergency. Both Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt did some extraordinary things in wartime, but these men knew limits. Would Mr Trump also know limits? Hamilton’s “energetic” executive is dangerous.

对于一位意志坚定的领导人而言，通过宣布进入紧急状态而做出以前不可想象之事并不难。亚伯拉罕•林肯(Abraham Lincoln)和富兰克林•德拉诺•罗斯福(Franklin Delano Roosevelt)都在战争时期做出了一些不同寻常的事情，但他们知道限度。特朗普也知道限度吗？汉密尔顿所谓的“充满活力”的行政首脑是危险的。

It was the ultra-conservative president Paul von Hindenburg who made Hitler chancellor of Germany in 1933. What made the new ruler so destructive was not only that he was a paranoid lunatic, but that he ruled a great power. Trump may be no Hitler. But the US is also no Weimar Germany. It is a vastly more important country even than that.

1933年，极端保守的德国总统保罗•冯•兴登堡(Paul von Hindenburg)让希特勒(Hitler)成为了总理。让这位新的统治者变得如此具有破坏力的不只是因为他是一个患有偏执妄想症的疯子，还在于他统治的是一个大国。特朗普或许不是希特勒。但美国也不是当时的魏玛德国。它要重要得多。

Mr Trump may still fail to win the Republican nomination. But, should he do so the Republican elite will have to ask themselves hard questions — not only how this happened, but how they should properly respond. Beyond that, the American people will have to decide what sort of human being they want to put in the White House. The implications for them and for the world of this choice will be profound. Above all, Mr Trump may not prove unique. An American “Caesarism” has now become flesh. It seems a worryingly real danger today. It could return again in future.

特朗普还是有可能输掉共和党总统候选人提名。但如果他获得提名，共和党精英们必须扪心自问：怎么会发生这种事？他们如何做出恰当的回应？除此之外，美国人民必须做出决定，他们希望让什么样的人入主白宫。这一选择对于他们以及整个世界的影响将是深远的。最重要的是，特朗普或许并非仅此一个。一种美国式的“凯撒主义”(Caesarism)如今已经如有实体。这似乎是当今一个令人担忧的真实危险。未来它还可能重现。