【兼听则明】AMERICA, AMERICA part 1

原文转载自Los Angeles Review of books

Jonathan Kirshner is a professor in the department of government, Cornell University

Everything ends. I know some of you have reservations about America — a Republic founded on the bloodstained hands of ethnic cleansing and the monstrous crime of slavery (the enduring legacies of which it has not yet escaped); invariably imperfect, occasionally murderous, often disappointing — but I’ve always been quite fond of it, despite the fact that I have spent most of my life in pitched opposition to its leadership. 

Ours was an audacious experiment in self-government forged by an extraordinary (if flawed, as we all are) cohort of founding fathers — an attempt to build a land of unprecedented freedom and opportunity which, especially in its best moments proved much better than anything else going. And even though the arc of history does not bend in any particular direction — it wobbles rather indifferently to the dignity of mankind — measured by the scores of years, until very recently, at any given moment America was better at that time than it had been 20 years previously.

To mourn for America is not my style. In fact, I have rarely mustered much enthusiasm even for my own team. Johnson (before my time), I could never forgive; Carter was not the kind of guy who inspired; Clinton, who I voted for over and over again, always struck me as a shallow opportunist — a view his undignified post-Presidency has only reinforced. And those were the wins. Then consider Nixon, a paranoid schemer whose self-appointed enemies were my heroes; Reagan had more substance than his detractors like to think, but he played the race card, and his policies were not my policies. As for Bush the younger — he quite irritated me. At least Nixon and Reagan were self-made, whereas “W,” an undistinguished fellow, emerged from the halls of privilege.

The point is, what we have here is quite a different thing. This is not about partisanship — I have lost more than my share of elections. And if a conservative Republican like John Kasich, or, help us all, Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, had won the Presidency, I would have been terribly disappointed. My side would have lost, my policies would have been abandoned. But such things happen in the normal course of events. Nor is this about politics more generally, which on a good day is an exercise in imperfection and compromise. Truman and Eisenhower each presided over shameful acts, more than once. It’s hard to be a saint in the city.

No, this is about our very capacity for self-governance, which is a fundamentally different beast, and no small thing. Perhaps you are inclined to tell yourself stories about Trump’s huge loss in the popular vote, how but for a few thousand ballots here or there and the quirks of the Electoral College, he would not be President. But you’d be wrong. Even if he lost, that he could get so close exposed the ruin of our political parish. From day one of the election campaign — that Mussolini on-an-escalator gesticulating incoherently about Mexican rapists — Trump ought to have been booed off the stage 20 times over. The list of should-have-been disqualifying moments is too long and too familiar to rehearse, but some of the highest crimes still linger: mocking heroes, banning Muslims, gleefully consorting with white-supremacists and anti-Semites (you name them, he retweeted them), more generally parading dangerous ignorance (about things like nuclear weapons) as if it was a virtue, showering praise on murderous authoritarian enemies of America, and conducting his affairs more broadly as if he was an incurious, spoiled game-show host surrounded by sycophants — this is the man that has been chosen by the people to lead us.

One of the most alarming aspects of the rise of Trump is (or should have been) his embrace of the Orwellian lie. This also cannot be normalized with a comforting “all politicians lie.” Of course they do. Lying is not telling the truth, or shaping a version of events with the intent to deceive. These things happen. Jimmy Carter promised he would “never lie to us.” Great. Nixon told so many lies it’s amazing he could keep track of them. But we are not talking about garden variety lying here — we are talking about the totalitarian lie: lies told, repeatedly, loudly and insistently, in direct confrontation with the indisputable truth. Lies purposefully designed to undermine the very capacity to make truth claims. Orwell was right to warn of this. But here we are.

Having spent three-quarters of a century fretting about enemies abroad, we have never fully processed a lesson of history: that great civilizations almost invariably collapse from within. We are Athens, we are Rome — we are, more than anything, Paris in the 1930s, another society divided against itself, living in what one historian described as “the age of unreason.” France then boasted the mightiest army on the continent, but the country was so hollowed out it simply collapsed when placed under stress, leading to defeat, occupation, humiliation. “Better Hitler than Blum,” many on the French right muttered, faced with the prospect of a Jewish Prime Minister — is “better Putin than Hillary” the 21st century equivalent?

We will now find out. The social experiment on which we are embarking is a treacherous one, from which it will not prove easy to recover. Trump promises a revolution — empty rhetoric of course — the promise actually on offer is what inter-war French reactionaries also dreamt of, a restoration of the 19th century order, when the mighty industrial trusts raped the poor and raped the land, and kept workers in line by convincing them that dirty foreigners (then Irish, Italians, and hordes from East Asia) were stealing their jobs — and when that wasn’t enough, the iron fist of strike-breaking, storm-trooping law-and-order would do. Still, even the rhetorical invocation of “revolution” is yet another in an overflowing field of red flags about the danger to our democracy. Americans can have a soft spot for “revolution,” since our war of independence from the British Empire was so nifty. But most revolutions are not. They are usually overtaken by their most extreme elements, spiral beyond the control of the principled, and lead to the collapse of social order and gratuitous and senseless bloodletting. “Reckless audacity came to be understood as the courage of a loyal supporter; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice,” Thucydides described, recounting conditions on the eve of the corpse-strewn Corcyraean Revolution. “In this contest the blunter wits were most successful.” Thucydides, in his commentary regarding the deterioration (and ultimate collapse) of Athenian democracy, hits too close to home: “Men now did just what they pleased, coolly venturing on what they had formerly done only in a corner” — this, more than anything, seems like the hallmark of the emerging Trump regime, replete with norm-trampling transgressions. We are in the hands of an ignorant, amoral, petulant authoritarian who has been handed the keys to the most powerful office on the country, and the world.

How did it come to this? To begin with, two things Trump (and many others) have observed are correct. It has indeed been a dispiriting few decades for the middle class and the poor, and especially so for the less-educated working class. By no fault of their own and due to no lack of effort or diligence, globalization, technological change, and automation have tilted the playing field against them. Middle class wages have been long-stagnant at best, opportunities for advancement increasingly slipping out of reach, and the idea that one’s hard-working children will find a better life rings increasingly hollow. Moreover, those who have prospered slip between their satin sheets each night, telling themselves sweet lies that everybody gets what they deserve because the “invisible hand” of market efficiency assures that factors of production are rewarded according to their marginal benefit to society. But how many of them have read The Wealth of Nations, the magisterial treatise where Adam Smith coined that phrase? (It’s more than a thousand pages long — that’s a lot of tweets.) They ought to, because they might learn that a hedge-fund manager who makes a billion dollars a year is not really 10 times more productive or socially beneficial than the less clever duffer who only takes in $100 million annually. Similarly, increased productivity, genius, or scarcity simply cannot account for the extent to which the pay-packets of CEOs have soared, in both an absolute sense and relative to their employees, over the past few decades. Those rewards have more to do with the pathologies of the executive compensation process and the socialized risk and dysfunctional incentive structures found in the financial sector. Adam Smith and the classical economists would have recognized these as “market failures” — a technical term applied for those exceptional circumstances where the magic of the market does not apply. In Wealth of Nations, for example, Smith favored things like public education and called for regulation of the financial sector, which, he thought, if left to its own devices would encourage ruinous speculation. But in today’s America, the glaring market failures that make the rich richer are not much fretted about — better to save such concerns, it seems, for the potential inefficiencies attendant to making the minimum wage a living wage.

Second, not only is contemporary American capitalism indifferent to its injustices, the system is, indeed, rigged. The wealthy have access to power; our representatives are beholden to the special interests they are supposed to protect us from. It is a plain fact that our political system is compromised. Nowhere is this more evident than in the financial sector and its (non-) oversight, a bipartisan catastrophe two decades in the making, when Bill Clinton’s New Democrats joined the Republican Party in their full-on embrace of Wall Street. Revolving door, crony-capitalism, fox guarding the henhouse — these old tropes, all accurate, fail to capture the full extent of the intimate ideological and financial enmeshment of the Wall Street-Washington axis. Friend-of-finance Phil Gramm, Senator from Texas, spent years shepherding conflict-of-interest riddled legislation from his perch as Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee before flying off to join banking giant UBS. Alan Greenspan spent his entire career in the company of bankers, and, when dispensing his public obligations as the nation’s chief financial regulator, could not possibly have been finance’s more faithful servant. But it was not just our Republican friends who fed lustily at this trough. Larry Summers (he who saved derivatives traders from oversight and regulation) subsequently raked in millions a year as compensation for his part time job at a hedge fund, and was paid $135,000 for a speech he delivered to Goldman Sachs (not Hillary money, but still, that must have been a hell of a speech) just a few months before joining the Obama Administration, where he would be an influential voice in decisions about how best to deal with the financial sector. And let’s not forget Robert Rubin, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, who oversaw the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, something that made it possible for Citibank to become Citigroup — an outfit Rubin joined immediately upon leaving the Clinton Administration. Handed the title “Chairman of the Executive Committee” (a position the responsibilities for which the Wall Street Journal could not quite ascertain), Rubin was paid over $125 million for his efforts — and he must have been worth every penny, or the free market would never have so compensated him. Curiously, he did urge Citi to bet heavily on Collateralized Debt Obligations, a reckless gamble that came within an eyelash of ruining the venerable 200-year-old firm during the financial crisis.

编辑：艾邦霖（海图国智研究院院长助理）