通俄門事件值得美國人和中國人共同反省_風聞

難得看到紐約時報如此深刻的反省文章。

把美國本身的內部問題歸於外國操縱美國選舉，真是天大的笑話。

中國也應當反思，為什麼特朗普這樣一個思維方式倒退的人物，竟然對中國媒體產生巨大沖擊。

特朗普在中國被敬畏的程度，遠大於特朗普在美國和歐洲被批評的程度。這是為什麼？

包括中國一批崇美恐美的知識精英，似乎喪失觀察國際形勢的常識。抗拒特朗普張牙舞爪的能力，還不如朝鮮、敍利亞、伊朗這樣的小國和弱國，更別説俄國了。

中國一批人，富了家產，失了骨氣。君子之澤，二代就蒸發了。

我們究竟需要什麼樣的教育和什麼樣的現代化？中國人應當和美國人一起反思。

當然兩國的發展趨勢完全不同，中國不能模仿美國模式的現代化。

——————————————————————————————

文章：“通俄”讓我們忽視了美國根本的弱點

作者：Farhad Manjoo

來源：紐約時報中文網

On a bitter night nearly two-and-a-half squandered years ago, Donald Trump was duly elected the 45th president of the United States of America. His victory was a political scandal, a democratic emergency and a moral shame — but as Robert Mueller seems to have concluded after a definitive investigation, Mr. Trump’s win was not the illegitimate product of a treasonous conspiracy.

光陰蹉跎，在近兩年半前一個令人痛苦的夜晚，唐納德·特朗普(Donald Trump)如期當選為美利堅合眾國第45任總統。他的獲勝是一場政治醜聞，是民主告急，是道德上的蒙羞——但羅伯特·穆勒(Robert Mueller)經過權威調查後似已得出結論，特朗普的獲勝並非叛國陰謀的非法產物。

There was no collusion. The president was not a Manchurian candidate. And we can’t lay the blame for this whole thing on Vladimir Putin.

其中沒有串謀。總統不是滿洲候選人(Manchurian candidate)。我們也不能把一切都歸咎於弗拉基米爾·普京(Vladimir Putin)。

Indeed, the truest horror in Mr. Mueller’s finding is that we did not need Mr. Putin to be pulling the strings. We know now that under our shambolic democracy, a man as unfit as Mr. Trump really can legitimately acquire all the terrifying powers of the presidency without being controlled by a foreign puppet master.

的確，穆勒調查結果真正的駭人之處莫過於我們不需要普京來操縱局勢。我們如今知道，在我們混亂的民主制度下，一個如特朗普般不稱職的人，真的可以合法取得總統一職的所有驚人權力，而無需外國傀儡大佬所左右。

The second true horror concerns a historically wasted opportunity. In the years we’ve spent chasing the fantastical ghosts of collusion, we have all but ignored the structural weaknesses plaguing every corner of the American establishment, from its political parties to its news media to its tilted economic landscape and, most important, the unfair machinery of its democracy.

第二個真正的駭人之處是，一個歷史機遇的浪費。在忙於追逐幻想中的“串謀”幽靈的年頭裏，我們全都忽視了美國製度無所不在的結構性弱點，從它的政黨到新聞媒體到傾斜的經濟格局，以及最為重要的，其不公正的民主機制。

Mr. Mueller’s indictments show that Russian agents interfered with the 2016 election by sowing discord on social media and hacking and disseminating Democrats’ emails. Yet it now seems wiser to point to our intrinsically American shortcomings, more than Russian interference, for Mr. Trump’s victory. And in rushing to blame Russian collusion, we have wasted time and political opportunity that we might better have spent reckoning with how to prevent a Trump-like catastrophe from happening again.

穆勒的起訴書表明，俄羅斯特工曾通過在社交媒體上挑撥離間、黑客攻擊並散播民主黨人郵件的方式插手2016年大選。但現在，指出特朗普獲勝主要不在於俄方插手，而在於美國所固有的不足之處，似乎是更為明智的做法。匆忙指責通俄的過程中，我們浪費了時間，浪費了政治機遇，我們本可以藉此反思一下如何防止特朗普式的災難再度發生。

I’m spelling all this out starkly, because in the spinning to come, it will be all too easy to lose yourself in misdirection. If you are a liberal, you might be especially tempted to give in to the aggrieved and embarrassed #resistance-tweeting punditocracy now throwing up endless reasons for downplaying Mr. Mueller’s finding: We still haven’t seen the whole report! The attorney general is a toady! Don’t forget about all those other investigations of all those other crimes!

我是在將這一切和盤托出，因為在接下來的亂局中，最最容易的莫過於在誤導中迷失自我。如果你是自由主義者，你可能尤其忍不住會順從那些不斷髮抗議推文、憤懣又尷尬的時政專家們，他們如今正拋出無數理由淡化穆勒的調查結論：我們還沒看到整篇報道！司法部長是個馬屁精！別忘了還有針對其他罪行的調查！

These are all important points. But don’t overlook the headline finding. Like the Trump victory itself, Mr. Mueller’s no-collusion conclusion should leave a mark. It lands like a rotten egg on a political and media establishment that had gone all-in on its own self-serving — and wrong — theory of the case. Before we embark on yet more investigations, it is worth examining, now, why the collusion fantasy proved so irresistible to so many of us — and what we all might have done with our time instead.

這些固然都很重要。但也別忽視引發關注的結論。就像特朗普獲勝本身一樣，穆勒的無串謀結論應當留下印記。它就像一個臭雞蛋落在了政界和媒體身上，這一制度已把賭注全壓在它自己對這件事的利己——且是錯誤的——理論上。在我們着手開始更多調查之前，現在值得檢視一下為何串謀的幻想令我們如此多的人如此難以抵擋，以及我們本可以用這些時間做點什麼別的。

Here’s my theory: Collusion was a seductive and convenient delusion. For many Americans, the simple truth that Mr. Trump really had won was too terrible to bear. The ease with which a racist, misogynist, serial con man had slipped past every gatekeeper in American life suggested something deeply sick at the core of our society.

我的理論是：串謀是個誘人且方便的妄想。對於許多美國人，特朗普真的贏了這個簡單的事實可怖到令人難以承受。一個種族主義者、厭惡女性者、連環騙子如此輕易地溜過美國生活的每一道把關人，這表明我們生活的核心存在某種深層的病態。

In particular, Mr. Trump’s win pointed to tectonic failures within the mainstream news media, whose leading brands had fanned the showman’s rise with copious television coverage; indulged his every gimmick with yet more attention; and elevated his opponent’s trifling email-management kerfuffle into a scandal of world-historic import.

特別是，特朗普的獲勝表明，主流新聞媒體內部存在結構性失誤，這些主流媒體的領先品牌曾通過大量電視報道推動這位表演家的崛起；對他的每一個噱頭報以更多關注；並將他的對手微不足道的郵件管理混亂升級為具有世界歷史意義的醜聞。

Mr. Trump’s win also pointed to the failure of our political parties. After years of playing footsie with extremists, the Republicans created an environment in which a racist demagogue could swallow them whole.

特朗普的勝利也表明了我們政黨的失敗。在與極端分子眉來眼去多年後，共和黨人創造了這樣一種環境——一個種族主義的煽動政客就可以把他們整個吞下去。

Democrats, meanwhile, dismissed the economic and social unease roiling their ranks and nominated a deeply unpopular candidate who lacked any novel vision for American life. And then she forgot to campaign in Michigan.

與此同時，民主黨人完全無視攪亂他們陣營的經濟和社會不安情緒，提名了一位極不受歡迎的候選人，她對美國生活沒有任何新穎的願景。她還忘了在密歇根搞競選活動。

There were other minor factors in this American tragedy: Jim Comey’s grandstanding; the tech giants’ inability to appreciate or curb the chaotic powers of their new communications platforms; our collective innumeracy regarding polling; and a naïve failure to appreciate the profound fragility of our national enterprise.

在這場美國悲劇當中，還有其他一些次要因素：吉姆·科米(Jim Comey)的譁眾取寵；科技巨頭無法察覺或遏制其新通信平台的混亂力量；我們在選舉問題上的集體數學盲；以及對我們國家企業的脆弱性天真地缺乏認識。

Finally there was the plainer constitutional failure. You didn’t need a two-year federal investigation to determine the single most important lesson of the 2016 race: America does not treat all its voters, and all of its votes, equally. Across the country, the voices of thousands and possibly millions of people were suppressed. Millions more votes went essentially uncounted, because the perversities of the Electoral College elevate a few thousand votes in the Midwest over a few million in California.

最後還有一個明顯的憲法缺陷。無需兩年的聯邦調查就能得出2016年大選最重要的一個教訓：美國並不平等對待所有選民和所有選票。在全國範圍內，成千上萬，甚至可能上百萬人的聲音被壓制。數百萬張選票基本上沒有被統計，因為選舉人團制度的反常性，中西部地區幾千張選票的地位超過了加州的幾百萬張。

It’s true that we have begun, belatedly, to shine a spotlight on many of these deep-rooted problems. But the Mueller investigation sucked up all the political energy. For many in the political and media establishment, the possibility of collusion offered moral expiation for collective complicity. Rather than begin the hard work of addressing what had actually gone wrong, many of us were swept up in social-media-fueled feedback loops looking for an instant fix: The orgiastic pee tape would turn up and clear up the whole funny misunderstanding.

雖然有些姍姍來遲，但我們的確已經開始把聚光燈對準這些根深蒂固的問題。但穆勒的調查耗盡了所有的政治能量。對於政治和媒體機構中的許多人來説，特朗普共謀的可能性為他們的集體共謀提供了道義上的遮醜。我們中的許多人並沒有開始努力解決到底是什麼出了問題，而是陷入了社交媒體推動的反饋循環中，尋找一種即時的解決方案：關於小便的狂歡錄像會出現，消除所有可笑的誤會。

From here, the story of 2016 looks rather straightforward: Mr. Trump was the corrupt, misbegotten choice of a citizenry mired in partisan mistrust, seething with racial grievance, informed by a beleaguered and fracturing news media, and laboring under an economic and political system that had long ceased functioning for all but the wealthiest of its citizens.

這樣看來，2016年的故事看上去相當簡單：特朗普是腐敗的，是人民拙劣的選擇，他們深陷黨派不信任；對種族問題感到不滿；向他們提供信息的新聞媒體困境重重、支離破碎；他們還要在一個長久以來只對最富有的公民有利的經濟和政治系統中辛苦工作。

His victory pointed to a systemic failure. In the end the only golden shower that mattered was the one soaking American democracy — but it’s been raining so long and so hard that we’re just about content to ignore the storm.

特朗普的勝利意味着系統性的失敗。最後，唯一一場重要的“黃金雨”是浸透美國民主的那場雨——但它下了這樣長的時間、這樣猛烈，我們幾乎可以心安理得地忽視這場風暴。