民主无恙，自由遭殃，为什么？ | 卫报

Liberalism is suffering but democracy is doing just fine

Welcome to 2017. It will be just like 2016. Only more so. This will be the year in which Donald Trump formally enters the White House, and Theresa May (probably) begins Brexit negotiations. It will be the year in which elections in Germany, the Netherlands and France, and possibly Italy, are likely to see rightwing populists gain ground, even triumph.

欢迎来到2017年。2017年和2016年一样，甚至比2016还2016。唐纳德·特朗普正式入主白宫，特蕾莎·梅（兴许）开启退欧谈判。今年，右翼民粹主义在德国、荷兰、法国或许还有意大利可能有所斩获甚至获胜。

In the Netherlands, ’s anti-Muslim, anti-immigration Party for Freedom(PVV) leads the polls and may help form the government in March. In France, in May, Marine Le Pen of the far-right  should reach at least the second-round run-off in the presidential election and may even win. In Germany, Angela Merkel could hang on as chancellor after September’s vote, but the  will almost certainly have dozens of Bundestag seats.

在荷兰，海尔特·维尔德斯反穆斯林、反移民的自由党在民调中领先，有望在三月参与组建政府。在法国，极右翼国民阵线的玛丽娜·勒庞5月至少会进入总统选举第二轮选举，甚至获胜。在德国，安格拉·默克尔会留任总理，可极右翼德国选择党几乎肯定在联邦议院拿到数十个席位。

And, so, 2017 will also be the year when fears for the future of liberal democracy will reach a new pitch. Such fears will, however, be only half-justified. Democracy is in rude health. It is liberalism that is in trouble.

因此，对自由民主的未来感到担忧，也将在2017年达到空前。可是，这种担忧只对了一半。民主生机勃勃，遭遇麻烦的是自由主义。

Democracy does not require that the “right” result be delivered every time. The whole point of the democratic process is that it is unpredictable. The reason we need democracy is that the question of what are “right” policies or who is the “right” candidate is often fiercely contested. Donald Trump or Le Pen may be reactionary, and their policies may help unpick the threads of liberal tolerance, but their success reveals a problem with politics, not democracy.

民主并不要求每次都得到“正确”的结果。民主程序就是不可预测的。我们需要民主，因为什么是“正确的”政策，谁是“正确的”候选人，这常常要激烈讨论。特朗普或勒庞可能是反动派，他们的政策可能会撕毁自由宽容，可他们的成功暴露了政治出了问题，而并非民主。

We have become so accustomed to talking about “liberal democracy” that we often forget that there is an inherent tension between liberalism and democracy. At the heart of liberalism stands the individual. Classically, liberals held that any official restraint placed on an individual’s liberty had to be both justified and minimal.

我们太习惯于谈论“自由民主”，以至于经常忘记自由主义和民主之间存在固有的对立。自由主义的核心是个人。古典理论认为，自由主义者认为任何对个人自由的官方限制都要合情合理，并且越少越好。

Liberals, however, also fear the masses, worrying about “mob rule” and the “tyranny of the majority” as threats to the liberty of the individual. For all the distaste for state restraints, many liberals have increasingly looked to state institutions as means of checking the power of the many. This has inevitably led to ambivalence about the virtues of democracy.

然而，自由主义者还担心民众，担心“暴民统治”和“多数的专制”对个人自由造成威胁。尽管厌恶国家管制，许多自由主义者越来越指望国家体制制约多数人的权力。这不可避免导致对民主的好处产生矛盾心态。

With the end of the Cold War, many liberals expected the tension between liberalism and democracy to be resolved. Liberal institutions, they imagined, could concentrate on governance and the enactment of the “right” policies while, freed from dreams of socialism, the masses could simply become the electorate, exercising their democratic right at elections and enjoying the benefits of technocratically shaped governments.

冷战结束后，许多自由主义者期待自由主义和民主之间的对立得到解决。他们想象，自由主义的体制应着力于治理并制定“正确的”政策，而摆脱社会主义梦的民众可以只做选民，在选举时行使民主权，平时受益于技术专家型政府。

In fact, the opposite has happened. The tension between liberalism and democracy has become far sharper. Many liberals insist that the only way of defending liberal values is by insulating them from the democratic process. Many who feel politically voiceless in this new world believe they can only assert their democratic voice by challenging liberal values. It is this polarisation between liberalism and democracy that created the tumult of 2016 and will create the even greater tumult of 2017.

可实际上事与愿违，自由主义和民主之间的对立更加尖锐。许多自由主义者坚称捍卫自由价值的唯一方式是使之与民主程序隔离开来。在这种新世界中，许多人感到自己没有政治话语权，他们只有通过挑战自由主义价值观，才能捍卫自己的民主话语权。自由主义和民主之间的两极分化导致了2016年的乱象，在2017年会造成更大的动荡。

Democracy is not just about placing a cross on a ballot paper. It is fundamentally about the contestation of power. We might vote as individuals in the privacy of the polling booth, but we can only defend democracy and assert our political voice by acting collectively. 

民主不仅是在选票上划勾，从本质上来说那是权力的争夺。我们可能在各自的投票站秘密投票，可只有共同行动，才能捍卫民主和保卫政治话语权。

This requires a robust public sphere and a democracy that is contested as much in the streets and the workplace as in the polling station. The erosion of the power of labour organisations and social movements has helped undermine democracy in this broader sense.

这需要一个健全的公共空间和民主体制，在街头和工作场所能像在投票站一样展开争夺。在这种更广泛的意义上，劳工组织和社会运动权力的丧失削弱了民主。

At the same time, the decline of these organisations has encouraged a shift in power away from democratic institutions, such as national parliaments, to non-political institutions such as international courts and central banks. 

同时，这些组织的衰落导致权力从国民议会等民主机构转移到国际法庭和中央银行等非政治机构。

Many liberals view this as ensuring good governance and protecting important policies from the vagaries of the democratic process. Many on the left, no longer rooted in old-style class politics, have welcomed this shift, seeing transnational organisations, such as the EU, as key vehicles for social change. Many sections of the public, however, have been left feeling that they have no political voice.

许多自由主义者认为这保证了善政，保护重要的政策避免受到民主异想天开的殃及。不再植根于老式阶级政治的左翼对这种转移表示欢迎，认为欧盟这样的跨国机构是推动社会变革的重要工具。然而，各行各业的人感觉被抛弃，无处表达政治。

Having lost their traditional means of venting disaffection, and in an age in which class politics has little meaning, many working-class voters have come to express themselves through the language of identity politics; not the identity politics of the left, but that of the right, the politics of nationalism and xenophobia, that provides the fuel for many populist movements.

失去了发泄不满情绪的传统途径，又处在一个阶级斗争没有什么意义的时代，许多工人阶级选民最终通过身份认同政治的语言来自我表达。不是左翼的身份认同政治，而是右翼的、民族主义的政治和仇外情绪，这位众多民粹主义运动提供养料。

Critics of liberalism have long recognised that its fundamental flaw is that humans do not live merely as individuals. We are social beings and find our individuality and discover meaning only through others. Hence the importance to political life not just of individuals but also of communities and collectives.

自由主义的批判者一致认为，自由主义的根本缺陷在于，人并非只作为个体活着。我们是社会动物，我们只有通过别人才能找到我们的个性并发现意义。因此，政治生活的重要性不仅是个人的，也是社区和集体的。

Politically, the sense of the collective has been expressed in two broad forms: the politics of identity and the politics of solidarity. The former stresses attachment to common identities based on such categories as race, nation, gender or culture. The latter draws people into a collective, not because of a given identity but to further a political or social goal.

政治上，集体表达有两种形式：身份认同政治和团结政治。前者强调忠于种族、民族、性别或文化等共同身份特征。后者把人民融入一个集团，而不是因特定的身份去追求一个政治或社会目标。

Where the politics of identity divides, the politics of solidarity finds collective purpose across the fissures of race or gender, culture or nation. But it is the politics of solidarity that has crumbled over the past two decades as the left has declined. For many, the only form of collective politics left is that rooted in identity. 

身份政治导致分裂，团结政治则超越种族、性别、文化或民族分歧，找到共同目标。可随着左翼衰落，团结政治在过去二十年瓦解。对许多人而言，集体政治的唯一形式只能根植于身份认同。

Hence the rise of identity-based populist movements. Such movements often link a reactionary politics of identity to economic and social policies that were once a staple of the left: defence of jobs, support for the welfare state, opposition to austerity. 

因此，基于身份认同的民粹主义兴起。这种鱼都弄旺旺将反动的身份政治与曾经是左翼主张的经济和社会政策联系起来：保就业、支持福利、反对紧缩。

Consider this year’s French presidential elections. The two candidates likely to make it through to the second round are the centre-right François Fillon and the far-right Marine Le Pen. Fillon is socially conservative and economically “liberal”. He wants to crush what remains of the French “social model”, cutting state expenditure and slashing workers’ rights. It is Le Pen who poses as the champion of the working class, hostile to austerity and supportive of the welfare state.

看看今年的法国总统大选，可能进入第二轮角逐的两位候选人是中间偏右的弗朗索瓦·菲永和极右翼玛丽娜·勒庞。菲永是社会保守派和经济“自由派”。他希望击碎法国“社会主义模式”的残余，削减政府开支和工人权利。勒庞反倒是工人阶级的捍卫者，反对紧缩，支持福利国家。

Populists pose, too, as champions of liberties and freedoms. by asking a crowd of supporters whether they want “more or fewer Moroccans” in the Netherlands. 

民粹主义这也做出捍卫自由的姿态。维尔德斯问他的支持者希望“摩洛哥人增多还是减少”，结果背叛犯了“煽动歧视罪”。

Rather than challenge his bigotry politically, liberals are content to damn it legally, allowing Wilders to promote himself as a martyr for free speech, despite his deeply illiberal views, including the demand that the Qur’an be banned.

自由主义者不对维尔德斯政治上的偏激提出挑战，满足于从法律上予以谴责，这让维尔德斯将自己塑造成支持言论自由的殉道者，尽管他的观点丝毫谈不上自由，他要求查禁《古兰经》。

Figures such as Le Pen and Wilders have marched on to the terrain, and speak to the constituencies, that the left has abandoned. 

勒庞和维尔德斯这样的人挺进到左翼放弃的地带，与选民直接交流。

The failure of the left to defend popular sovereignty has enabled the far-right to frame such sovereignty not in terms of the politics of solidarity, but in the language of nationalism and bigotry.

左翼未能守住人民主权，这让极右翼得以不用团结政治的方式塑造主权，相反去诉诸民族主义和偏狭的语言。

The polarisation of liberalism and democracy shows how the fundamental aspects of a progressive outlook have been ripped apart. Those who rightly bemoan the corrosion of collective movements and a sense of community often see the problem as too much immigration or too great a stress on individual freedoms. Those who take a liberal view on immigration, and on other social issues, are often happy with a more atomised society.

自由主义的民主的两极化表明，进步的前景基本宣告瓦解。有人哀悼集体运动和集体归属感消失，他们常常认为问题出在移民太多，太过强调个人自由。对移民和其他社会问题持自由派观点的人往往满足于更加原子化的社会。

Until we find a way of establishing a new politics of solidarity that links liberal ideas about individual rights and freedom, including freedom of movement, with progressive economic arguments and a belief in the community and the collective, we may welcome 2018 in the same fashion as we now welcome 2017, only more so.

除非我们找到办法，建立新的团结政治，将包括运动自由在内的有关个人权利和自由的自由派观点与进步的经济观点及社会和对集体的信仰结合起来，否则只好像迎接2017年一样迎接2018年，且有过之而无不及。

Kenan Malik’s most recent book is The Quest for a Moral Compass

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