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政治學 – 開欄文
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相對於社會學和心理學，我對政治學的興趣開始得比較晚。一方面從14、15歲開始，我主要想了解的問題在倫理學；另一方面，我和大多數人一樣，性向上急功近利；對政治學的興趣始於軍事學。
大學一年級前後我讀了徐訏先生的《回到個人主義與自由主義》，印象深刻。35歲以前，我在聖荷西大學附近舊書攤上，買了常常被其他學者介紹和引用的《君王論》和《政府論》，但大概都只讀了1/4或1/3。不過，馬克思的《政治經濟學批判》我倒是讀得非常仔細，此書也構成我對政治的基本理解。當然，之後偶而也會涉獵一些政治學方面的書籍，但為數不多。
在2002年以前，除了以上四本經典名著之外，我對政治/政治學的了解，大部分來自新聞報導和報紙/期刊上的政治評論。2001年我退休以後開使在網上漫遊；由於在不同論壇上經常和其他網友就政治理論與實際議題進行討論，我不時有「書到用時方恨少」的感慨。於是我開始花較多時間閱讀「政治學」領域的書籍。
我對「政治」的「定義」以及對「民主政治」的詮釋，都是根據以往30多年對政治實務的觀察，以及這段時間對政治理論的領悟，綜合兩者而形成。
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《歐洲的民族主義源於自由主義》短評
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休漢默教授是一位政治學家；只是此文思路的嚴謹度很低(請見本欄上一篇文章)。我沒有時間和精力詳細討論，略舉四點於下：
1) 他把「民族主義」和「民族國家」混為一談。
2) 他宣稱「自由主義」跟「民族主義」兩者間有淵源；但他沒有說清楚這個「淵源」的來龍去脈。事件A和事件B同時發生或先後發生，並不蘊含事件A和事件B之間有任何關係。
3) 鼓吹「民族主義」無法讓新移民「同化」或「融合」到移入國。
4) 「認同」是一個有意識的「抉擇」/「決策」行為；但推動此行為的因素在「意識型態」之外，還有其它「客觀因素」。如休漢默教授指出：第二、三代阿拉伯移民有「回歸」自己的宗教和文化傳統這個趨勢，我可以想到兩個無法藉宣揚「民族主義」來突破的「融合」障礙：
a. 由於膚色、口音、行為模式的「不同」，移民很難進入移入國原有國民的「生活圈圈」；也就不得不走上「同類相聚」的老路。當過留學生和高教育水準兩岸三地移民都能體會我這個觀察。
b. 在被歧視/霸凌/排擠的情況下，第二、三代阿拉伯移民只能尋找「同類」來得到「同類感」；並從而結合起來，對抗歧視/霸凌/排擠她/他們的人或一群人。
新移民教育水準導致的「社會階層」和「經濟收入」兩個議題，對新移民能否「同化」或「融合」到移入國有高度的相關性。新移民的社會地位與經濟條件，一定會驅使這些人在移入國家引發衝突或反擊。休漢默教授卻未就此類議題著墨；它們需要專業學者來研究，我就不予深論了。
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歐洲的民族主義源於自由主義 - Ralph Schoellhammer
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索引：
conditio sine qua non：必要條件
cosmopolitanism：大同主義
tutelage：監護; 託管；輔導; 指導
European nationalism’s roots are found in nineteenth century liberalism – if the EU sweeps away the nation-state it will prove a victory for the forces of reaction
Ralph Schoellhammer, 02/09/24
The upcoming elections in Europe are often described as a competition between the reactionary forces of a resurgent nationalism and the cosmopolitanism of liberal progressive. Such a description, however, obscures the important role the idea of the nation played in the emergence of European liberalism.
Historically, the idea of the nation state reached its apex during the second half of the nineteenth century, yet already after 1945 it became heavily discredited due to two world wars, genocides and ethnic cleansings of the twentieth century.
In much contemporary debate, nationalism and racism appear to be treated as identical concepts. History, however, begs to differ: Progressive movements between 1815 and the failed “Spring of Nations” that swept through Europe in 1848/49 had considered nationalism the twin sister of liberalism, both victimised by the Reaction of the monarchical European elites.
An eminent contemporary and the founding father of Italian unification, Giuseppe Mazzini, regarded the creation of nation states a conditio sine qua non for a peacefully united and socially just Europe. Nationalism was not aimed against universalism, but viewed as a first step in its direction.
Certainly, the nation state was always more an agreed upon myth than reality – as Eric Hobsbawm points out, during the French Revolution modern French was used by a maximum of 15 per cent of the population, and as late as 1860 only about 2.5 per cent Italians used High Italian as everyday language.
But the idea proved to be immensely powerful and became a replacement for religion as the societal glue in an ever more secularizing Europe.
This emotional attachment to the nation state has been promoted culturally and institutionally by state authorities since the late eighteenth century. Education systems, military service, and the arts served to create a national consciousness.
The project of nation state building was ubiquitous, from liberal societies like Great Britain to autocratic systems like Russia. In other words, the nation built the state as much as the state built the nation.
In many respects, the early nation states were supporting the emancipation of formerly suppressed groups – equal legal status for Jews spread throughout Western Europe between 1791 and 1890, allowing for a deepening participation in the political and legal life of their home countries. Also the status of women gradually improved, with the outlawing of wife beating at the same time.
The key difference between the absolutist monarchical state and the nation state was that the claim to be legitimised by the “nation” increasingly required popular approval, and successively expanded the political rights of the masses to unprecedented dimensions.
Max Weber’s ideal type of a state that treats all citizens equally was significantly easier to realise in a nation state than in other state-forms that existed before.
It constituted a fundamental counter-project to tribally, religiously or dynastically defined medieval societies. This is why it was welcomed by the Left and Right after 1789, since they hoped that it would free mankind from feudal vices such as clerical and monarchic tutelage or a rigidly impermeable social order.
Many also expected that this was just the first step towards a new cosmopolitan world order, resting, as proposed by Immanuel Kant, on free nation states, since neither a supranational empire nor subnational small-statism would satisfy the ideals of enlightened cosmopolitanism.
The question is if an end of the nation state would create a more or less unified world. Far from being perfect, national myths have proven to be powerful forces, and national identities – in contrast to European or global ones – are a reality. If national identities were abolished, will people fill this vacuum with cosmopolitanism or more particularistic and potentially conflicting identities?
All over Europe and increasingly in the United States there is a conflict over collective identities, highlighted by the recent decision of the Bavarian government to place crucifixes in all public offices.
Similarly, the reassertion of Islam in the second and third generation of immigrants is pitching communities all over the continent against each other.
With ongoing immigration from predominantly Muslim countries such identity conflicts will deepen, yet without the integrative power of the nation state the European future will not be the United States of Europe, but the balkanisation of the continent.
One must not support or even agree with the aggressive new nationalism of a Le Pen in France or a Viktor Orban in Hungary, but to deny the historical role of patriotism and nationalism as the fundament of societal solidarity bears its own risks.
The problem is not so much the sentiment of nationalism than a very dangerous brand of illiberal nationalism that is spreading especially in Western and Eastern Europe, but increasingly also in the United States.
The answer to this problem, however, is not anti-nationalism but possibly a form of liberal nationalism that takes the question of solidarity among individuals seriously enough to concede that solidarity needs to be built on a shared emotional fundament.
It is questionable if the alternatives to an enlightened nationalism are desirable. A resurgence of religion or fervent local loyalties as can be seen in Scotland and Catalonia will not only weaken Europe politically, but it will breed emotional hostilities that make it unlikely that people who cannot stand the thought of living together in one country will happily join hands under the umbrella of the European Union.
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川普無免責權裁定分析 -- Alan Feuer/Charlie Savage
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本文要點已經見於《聯邦上訴法院裁定：川普無免責權》(該欄2024/02/07)。三位法官裁定意見書中，對「三權分立」與「權力制衡」兩個原則有所闡述，可資借鏡；故轉載於此欄。此外，三位法官駁回川普律師主張「免責權」論述的詳細理由，則請參考此文。
Federal Appeals Court Rejects Trump’s Claim of Absolute Immunity
The ruling answered a question that an appeals court had never addressed: Can former presidents escape being held accountable by the criminal justice system for things they did while in office?
Alan Feuer/Charlie Savage, 02/06/24
A federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected former President Donald J. Trump’s claim that he was immune from prosecution on charges of plotting to subvert the results of the 2020 election, ruling that he must go to trial on a criminal indictment accusing him of seeking to overturn his loss to President Biden.
The unanimous ruling, by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, handed Mr. Trump a significant defeat. But it was unlikely to be the final word on his claims of executive immunity: Mr. Trump, who is on a path to locking up the Republican presidential nomination, is expected to continue his appeal to the Supreme Court.
Still, the panel’s 57-page ruling signaled an important moment in American jurisprudence, answering a question that had never been addressed by an appeals court: Can former presidents escape being held accountable by the criminal justice system for things they did while in office?
PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY
The Times analyzed and annotated the ruling by a federal appeals panel rejecting former President Donald J. Trump’s claim of absolute immunity.
The question is novel because no former president until Mr. Trump had been indicted, so there was never an opportunity for a defendant to make — and courts to consider — the sweeping claim of executive immunity that he put forward.
The panel, composed of two judges appointed by Democrats and one Republican appointee, said in its decision that, despite the privileges of the office he once held, Mr. Trump was subject to federal criminal law like any other American.
“For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant,” the panel wrote. “But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as president no longer protects him against this prosecution.”
The three judges cast Mr. Trump’s immunity claims as a danger to the nation’s constitutional system.
“At bottom, former President Trump’s stance would collapse our system of separated powers by placing the president beyond the reach of all three branches,” they wrote. “Presidential immunity against federal indictment would mean that, as to the president, the Congress could not legislate, the executive could not prosecute and the judiciary could not review. We cannot accept that the office of the presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter.”
A spokesman for Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought the case against Mr. Trump, declined to comment on the decision.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said the former president “respectfully disagrees” with the decision and would appeal it.
“If immunity is not granted to a president, every future president who leaves office will be immediately indicted by the opposing party,” Mr. Cheung said. “Without complete immunity, a president of the United States would not be able to properly function.”
The panel’s ruling came nearly a month after it heard arguments on the immunity issue from Mr. Trump’s legal team and from prosecutors working for Mr. Smith. While the decision was quick by the standards of a normal appeal, what happens next will be arguably more important in determining not only when a trial on the election subversion charges will take place, but also on the timing of Mr. Trump’s three other criminal trials.
In addition to the federal indictment charging him with seeking to overturn his election loss in 2020, he faces similar charges brought by a district attorney in Georgia. In a footnote, the panel stressed that its decision did not address the separate question of whether state prosecutors could charge a former president over official actions.
Mr. Smith, the special counsel appointed to oversee the federal prosecutions, has also brought a case in Florida accusing Mr. Trump of mishandling highly sensitive classified documents after leaving office and obstructing efforts to retrieve them. And Mr. Trump is scheduled to go on trial next month in Manhattan on charges related to hush-money payments to a porn star during the 2016 campaign.
When Mr. Trump first sought to have the federal election case dismissed on grounds of immunity, it was an attempt to expand the protections the Supreme Court had already granted to sitting and former presidents against civil lawsuits concerning their official actions.
While not accepting that Mr. Trump’s actions were official — the panel noted that presidents have no constitutionally prescribed role in counting electoral college votes — the judges rejected his arguments about being immune from criminal charges.
“We cannot accept former President Trump’s claim that a president has unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralize the most fundamental check on executive power — the recognition and implementation of election results,” the judges wrote. “Nor can we sanction his apparent contention that the executive has carte blanche to violate the rights of individual citizens to vote and to have their votes count.”
The unsigned decision was issued by all three judges: Karen L. Henderson, an appointee of former President George H.W. Bush, and two appointees of President Biden, Judges Florence Y. Pan and J. Michelle Childs.
During the arguments last month, the judges signaled particular concern after Mr. Trump’s lawyer argued that a former president could avoid criminal prosecution even for ordering SEAL Team 6, an elite group of Navy commandos, to assassinate one of his political rivals unless the Senate had first convicted him at an impeachment trial.
The panel rejected the Trump legal team’s arguments about the necessity of an impeachment conviction before bringing criminal charges.
And in another significant part of their decision, the three appellate judges also circumscribed Mr. Trump’s ability to use further appeals to waste more time and delay the election case from going to trial — a strategy the former president has pursued since the indictment against him was filed in August in Federal District Court in Washington.
The panel said that Mr. Trump had until Monday to ask the Supreme Court to get involved in the case and continue a stay of all the underlying proceedings. The case was initially put on hold by the trial judge in December.
But the panel imposed a rule designed to discourage Mr. Trump from making an intermediate challenge to the full court of appeals. It said that if Mr. Trump instead took that route, trial preparations could begin again after Feb. 12.
If the question does reach the Supreme Court, the justices will first have to decide whether to accept the case or to reject it and allow the appeals court’s ruling against Mr. Trump to stand.
If they decline to hear the issue, the case would be sent directly back to the trial judge, Tanya S. Chutkan. She scrapped her initial March 4 date for the trial last week, but has otherwise shown every sign of wanting to move the charges toward trial as quickly as possible.
If, however, the Supreme Court does accept the case, the crucial question will become how quickly the justices act in asking for briefs and in scheduling arguments. Should they move rapidly to hear the case and issue a decision, there remains the chance that a trial on the election charges will occur before the general election in November.
But if the justices take their time, it is possible a trial could be delayed until after the election. If that were to happen and Mr. Trump were to win, he would be in a position to ask his Justice Department to dismiss the case or even seek to pardon himself.
Even though Mr. Trump put three of the justices on the bench, the Supreme Court has not shown much of an appetite for wading into issues related to his efforts to tinker with the mechanics of American democracy.
But the question of how to handle Mr. Trump’s immunity claim is heading the Supreme Court’s way as it prepares for arguments on Thursday about another momentous question related to the former president: whether he can be disqualified from the ballot for having engaged in an act of insurrection by encouraging his supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump. More about Alan Feuer
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy. More about Charlie Savage
相關閱讀：
Four charges for the former president. Former President Donald Trump was charged with four counts in connection with his widespread efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The indictment was filed by the special counsel Jack Smith in Federal District Court in Washington. Here are some key takeaways:
The indictment portrayed an attack on American democracy. Smith framed his case against Trump as one that cuts to a key function of democracy: the peaceful transfer of power. By underscoring this theme, Smith cast his effort as an effort not just to hold Trump accountable but also to defend the very core of democracy.
Trump was placed at the center of the conspiracy charges. Smith put Trump at the heart of three conspiracies that culminated on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to obstruct Congress’s role in ratifying the Electoral College outcome. The special counsel argued that Trump knew that his claims about a stolen election were false, a point that, if proved, could be important to convincing a jury to convict him.
Trump didn’t do it alone. The indictment lists six co-conspirators without naming or indicting them. Based on the descriptions provided, they match the profiles of Trump lawyers and advisers who were willing to argue increasingly outlandish conspiracy and legal theories to keep him in power. It’s unclear whether these co-conspirators will be indicted.
Trump’s political power remains strong. Trump may be on trial in 2024 in three or four separate criminal cases, but so far the indictments appear not to have affected his standing with Republican voters. By a large margin, he remains his party’s front-runner in the presidential primaries.
A Guide to the Various Trump Investigations
Confused about the inquiries and legal cases involving former President Donald Trump? We’re here to help.
Key Cases and Inquiries: The former president faces several investigations at both the state and the federal levels, into matters related to his business and political careers. Here is a close look at each.
* Case Tracker: Trump is at the center of four criminal investigations. Keep track of the developments in each here.
* What if Trump Is Convicted?: Will any of the proceedings hinder Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign? Can a convicted felon even run for office? Here is what we know, and what we don’t know.
* Receive a Weekly Update: Sign up for the Trump on Trial newsletter to get the latest news and analysis on the cases in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C.
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永久戰爭：古已有之的地緣政治和衝突 -- 《展望》
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(請參閱本欄上一篇)
The Forever Wars: Geopolitics And Conflicts Are As Ancient As History
From the ancient conflicts over hunting grounds to the ongoing wars in the Gaza Strip and Ukraine, land has continued to drive humans into warfare. The combination of geography and politics —geopolitics— is key to understanding the timeless human proclivity for wars and conflicts.
Outlook Web Desk, 01/02/24
In the ancient Indian strategic treatise ‘Arthashastra’, Chanakya wrote that your immediate neighbour is your natural enemy as they covet your territory and resources.
While it might appear to be a generalisation, and critiques of Chanakya have been written, the core of the idea has survived the test of time. From the ancient conflicts of early humans over hunting grounds to the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, the idea of land remains central to wars and conflicts.
When geography combines with politics, geopolitics is born. From the Great Game in Afghanistan to India’s confrontations with its belligerent neighbours, the politics of geography has often led to wars. The basic cause —geopolitics— is as old as time. In its simplest sense, the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict is also one over land: Who gets how much of a chunk of land in the Middle East for their nation? The conflict in the region is also not new. It’s the conflict’s latest iteration.
For centuries, the Christians and the Muslims fought over the Holy Land of Jerusalem where the three Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have their holiest sites at a stone’s throw from each other. Before that, the Babylonians expelled the Jews and destroyed their Temple of Solomon on Temple Mount, which was rebuilt and was again destroyed later by the Romans. Thus, the conflict in the Holy Land runs much deeper than one might realise at first.
In his piece on Jewish-Muslim relations, Iftikhar Gilani writes that the Jews and Muslims lived relatively peacefully in the region before the 20th century. Thus, the framing of the conflict in religious terms is an incorrect interpretation of history.
In his piece, Dilip Simeon traces the Zionist movement for Jewish nationhood and writes about the cycle of violence in the region.
The Outlook’s year-end issue on Palestine also features an extract from Palestinian-American public intellectual Edward Said’s book ‘On Palestine’, in which he indicted the Israelis for their campaign against Palestinians. “In sum, Palestinians must die a slow death so that Israel can have its security, which is just around the corner but cannot be realised because of the special Israeli ‘insecurity’. The whole world must sympathise, while the cries of Palestinian orphans, sick old women, bereaved communities and tortured prisoners simply go unheard and unrecorded,” writes Said.
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《永久戰爭：古已有之的地緣政治和衝突》讀後
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《展望》是印度人辦的刊物，在以巴議題上的立場相對公允。這篇文章可能是「編者引言」(請見本欄下一篇)。它雖然以「地緣政治」為標題，但其主旨在闡述「戰爭」和導致「戰爭」的動力。例如，該文第1段和倒數第3段的最後一句分別是：
Chanakya wrote that your immediate neighbour is your natural enemy as they covet your territory and resources.
“Thus, the framing of the conflict in religious terms is an incorrect interpretation of history.“
它印證了我反覆說明的：
政治是爭奪資源分配權的活動；而戰爭是政治的另一種形式。所以，只要「資源」不足以分配得皆大歡喜；在人類社會中，「戰爭」永遠會發生。
這是該文主標題用了「永久戰爭」一詞的背景。
同理，將國際間的任何暴力相向事件視為「文明衝突」，也是一種對歷史或政治的錯誤「詮釋」。
該文最後一段引述另一篇文章所引用撒伊德博士對「以巴紛爭」的評論；讓人相當痛心。
“…, while the cries of Palestinian orphans, sick old women, bereaved communities and tortured prisoners simply go unheard and unrecorded,” writes Said.
相關閱讀：
Tracing The Unholy War On Palestine
索引：
belligerent：好鬥的、好戰的(該文用法)；交戰國(多數)
covet：覬覦、垂涎、貪圖
Great Game in Afghanista：阿富汗爭奪史
proclivity：傾向(該文用法)；癖好
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群眾取向路線走紅是對當前政治趨勢必須做的修正 - Jonathan Tobin
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這篇分析可以跟本欄《群眾取向政治路線淪為花招》一文合看。兩文作者都同意：荷蘭與阿根廷新領導人的成敗將由他們兩位的治理能力來決定；但對兩位新領導人勝出的原因，則有不同的看法。
索引：
pearl-clutching：自以為站在道德高度，對不以為然的事或行為故作震撼狀。A very shocked reaction, especially one in which you show more shock than you really feel in order to show that you think something is morally wrong.
The Populist Wave in Argentina and the Netherlands Is a Necessary Course Correction
Jonathan Tobin, Editor in chief, JNS.org, 11/27/23
One of the laziest tropes of political analysis is the impulse to link political results from different nations in order to produce a narrative about international affairs. The point of such efforts usually has little to do with events on the ground in these disparate places and everything to do with the politics of the United States.
That's why pundits label the victors of recent elections in Argentina and The Netherlands as the "Donald Trumps" of their respective nations and treat their victories as calamities. It has a lot more to do with the political establishment's alarm about the possibility of the original Trump winning a second term in the White House in 2024 than it does about what has happened in Western Europe or South America.
The main issues that drove the victories of Javier Milei in Argentina and Geert Wilders in The Netherlands have little to do with each other. It was the hyper-inflation destroying the Argentine economy that lifted the eccentric libertarian economist and political novice Milei to victory. Meanwhile, the opening that gave Wilders his win was the sense that Dutch society and its liberal values are being subverted by out-of-control immigration from Muslim countries; Wilders has been campaigning on this issue for decades amidst constant death threats from Islamists.
And like other supposed "Trumps"—Brazil's Javier Bolsonaro or Hungary's Viktor Orban—Wilders' and Milei's ability to govern and to stay in office will hinge on local issues and their ability to represent more than a protest vote in a single election cycle.
Still, the loose talk about the existence of a populist wave sweeping the globe is rooted in more than liberal pearl-clutching about Trump leading President Joe Biden in the polls. As much as the voters in these two countries were primarily motivated by unrelated issues, the successes of both Milei and Wilders do have something in common. They reflect a willingness on the part of voters to listen to those who are treated as dangerous outliers by the political establishments in those countries and to elect them to high office.
But far from that signifying a new era of fascism driven by uncouth rabble-rousing hatemongers, as the punditry class would have it, these victories actually demonstrate the awakening of voters in very different places to the idea that they need to re-evaluate the conventional wisdom that ruling elites have been peddling. Whether you call it populism or anti-globalism or, in the case of Trump, "America First," the success of these candidates and parties is part of a necessary course correction that is happening across the board as ordinary citizens in democracies begin to pick up on the fact that the governing classes are disinterested in what concerns them.
The Dutch election, in which Wilders and his Party for Freedom won an unexpected plurality, was decided by the growing concerns across Western Europe about the impact of unlimited immigration. Wilders is routinely categorized as being on the far Right, but while he is extreme in his rhetoric about Islam and Muslims, he actually a liberal. He speaks for those who rightly understand that a society that restricts freedom in order to cater to the demands of Islamists is one that is doomed.
Others who led on this issue were either assassinated, like Pym Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh, or driven from the country, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali. But while Wilders is damned as an Islamophobe, decades of efforts by the Dutch political establishment to ignore the way their country is changing for the worse as a result of the refusal of immigrants to assimilate have only bolstered his standing.
While the political and cultural elites may see open borders in Europe and the United States as part of their vision for a better world, the Dutch electorate has had no choice but to turn to populists like Wilders in order to try and put the brakes on the disintegration of their national identities.
Immigration isn't the problem in Argentina. Their worry is a corrupt governing class that has presided over a failing economy for decades because of the country's addiction to socialist ideas. The legacy of Peronism, a unique combination of a neo-fascist authoritarianism and collectivist economics with a populist base, still hangs over Argentina. Milei's platform opposing globalism, socialism, and the "siren song of social justice" and replacing it with one based on economic freedom provides an alternative that the elites fear and long-suffering Argentine voters welcome.
Both Wilders and Milei face formidable challenges implementing their ideas and, like Trump, could well be derailed by their own inexperience in office and a concerted campaign by the establishments in their countries to ensure that their victories are transitory.
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維護自由主義的歧路 -------- Alexander Stern
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史特恩博士在《公益》雜誌上這篇文章相當有料(請見本欄下一篇文章)。雖然文章有4,000多字，約一般論文的三到四倍；對美國政治、「自由主義」、和「自由主義」前景有興趣的朋友，不妨花點時間和腦力仔細讀讀。
How Not to Defend Liberalism
Embracing technocracy will only fuel the populist surge.
Alexander Stern, 09/14/23
Liberal democracy, we are told, is under attack. On op-ed pages and cable news panels, at university conferences and economic summits, and in politicians’ interviews and speeches, defenses of liberal democracy have proliferated in the face of threats from populist and authoritarian leaders around the world. Most of these defenses, whether they come from the center-right or the center-left, share a great deal in both their diagnosis of the crisis and their prescriptions for how to recover a liberal democratic polity that seems to be slipping away.
It is hard to deny their main premise. A movement has indeed arisen on the Right that disregards democratic norms and liberal assumptions with alarming nonchalance. It’s shown a willingness to undermine the integrity of our elections, barred discussion of certain ideas in classrooms, and even fomented a half-witted assault on the Congress itself. Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, an intolerance for dissent from progressive orthodoxy, as well as skepticism of the cultural value of free speech, have led to coercive conformity and “cancellation.”
However, the defenses of liberalism tend to dwell on, sometimes for good reason, the risks posed to liberal democracy by ordinary people and popular movements—i.e. “wokeness” and populism—while neglecting those posed by the people closer to the levers of power. These defenses also tend, implicitly or explicitly, to equate liberalism with technocracy, or rule by expertise. In the end, they suggest that we must settle for an undemocratic, technocratic form of liberalism that leaves power in the hands of the few in order to forestall the most illiberal outcomes. This line of argument threatens to exacerbate the crisis of liberalism, widen the fissures in our society, and provoke the very outcomes it seeks to prevent.
Although centrists tend to portray liberalism as besieged by both the woke Left and the populist Right, they usually acknowledge the obvious fact that the threats from the Right are much more serious and immediate, targeting political institutions and processes. The repudiation of liberal values on the Left remains for the most part limited to cultural institutions, journalism, education, and human-resources departments.
The explosion of identity politics on the woke Left is, according to George Packer’s Last Best Hope, a “rebellion from below,” driven by the youth. “Young people coming of age in the disillusioned 2000s,” Packer writes, picked up ideas from “critical theory,” which “upends the universal values of the Enlightenment.” In Liberalism and Its Discontents, Francis Fukuyama writes that the woke regard racism not as a personal or policy problem but as “a condition that is said to pervade all American institutions and consciousness.” Systemic injustice thus provides a rationale for the suspension of liberal values in reeducation programs that take cultural sensitivity to an illiberal extreme, in policy proposals that would try to distribute goods like vaccines on the basis of race, and in a culture of sanctimony, censorship, and cancellation.
Whereas the woke Left regards the establishment as a continuation of rule by straight white men, the populist Right conceives of it as a left-liberal, globalist elite that has seized power and decimated traditional white working- and middle-class communities. According to the right-wing narrative, this elite imposes its woke cultural values on everyone, unfairly distributes handouts to undeserving minority groups, and opens borders to new immigrants. In The People vs. Democracy, Yascha Mounk pins the worldwide rise of populism on “rising immigration, coupled with a deep, sustained stagnation of living standards,” along with a loss of establishment control of the means of communication. This combination provides the rationale for a suspension of liberal values that will hand the country back to its rightful heirs, who can forcibly reestablish nationalist, Christian values and bring industry back to the American interior. This kind of right-wing populism leads eventually to its own bizarre postmodern consequences: nationalist and “trad” LARPing, wild conspiracy theories, and the carnivalesque assault on the Capitol.
Centrist defenders of liberalism, such as Packer, Fukuyama, and Mounk, tend to see a common root in these two illiberal movements, despite their obvious differences. Packer writes:
In some ways Just America [Packer’s term for the woke Left] resembles Real America [his term for the populist Right] and has entered the same dubious conflict from the other side. The disillusionment with liberal capitalism that gave rise to identity politics has also produced a new authoritarianism among many young white men. Just and Real America share a skepticism, from opposing points of view, about the universal ideas of the founding documents and the promise of America as a multi-everything democracy.
In short, Packer sees both these movements against liberalism as misguided reactions to social and economic dislocation: a “new tribalism” that comes from the bottom up. Coupled with this tribalism is an assault on reason itself that started with “critical theory” and postmodernism, which, according to Fukuyama, undermined the objective, scientific standpoint intimately tied to liberalism. “Of late,” Fukuyama writes, “many of the arguments pioneered by the progressive left have drifted over to the populist right. When combined with modern communications technology, this critique lands us in a cognitive wasteland.”
There is good reason to doubt aspects of this centrist narrative. To begin with, it doesn’t go back far enough. The history of American politics from the 1960s shows that it is not “disillusionment” but satisfaction with liberal capitalism that has underwritten the rise of the cultural politics that undergird both the woke Left and populist Right. Both standpoints arise from the culture war that has increasingly gripped American politics since the 1980s and taken over from the more materialist political conflict that dominated the immediate postwar period. Indeed, the turn toward cultural politics depended on a period of relatively widespread prosperity in the West. As Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris have argued, this broad prosperity allowed baby boomers to focus their political energies on issues that were less obviously material, such as civil rights, gender equality, and gay marriage. But according to Inglehart and Norris, this kind of cultural politics eventually helped undermine the prosperity on which it was based. As traditional left-right disputes over economic issues were left behind, a technocratic, neoliberal consensus on economic policy set in. This consensus allowed the proceeds of growth to go to an increasingly small and wealthy minority while marginalizing the left-wing economic dissent that had made the relative equality of the postwar boom possible.
Instead of class conflict, politics became a battle between two cultural factions, neither of which represented the working class. On the left side of these politics are many professionals whose concerns for equality have narrowed to involuted and essentialized conceptions of race and gender detached from the real material needs of the marginalized groups they claim to support. Meanwhile, the reactionary Right is populated by many relatively high-earning but uneducated small-business owners and tradespeople who obsess over the excesses of the Left, indulge in fear-mongering about crime and immigration, and toy with—or outright embrace—racist tropes. While this right-wing identity politics likes to invoke the downtrodden white working class and sometimes borrows from the rhetoric of mid-century labor politics, it effectively serves the interests of another set of the elite through a standard business-oriented Republican playbook. Our fervid cultural politics do not emerge, bottom-up, from a public that channels its economic anxiety in misguided, illiberal directions; it originates with those at the top of the economic system, whose privileges it obscures.
These cultural politics may appear to “politicize” absolutely everything—from sports and music to gas stoves and canned beans—but in actuality the public sphere has been effectively depoliticized, to use Jürgen Habermas’s term. In his 1962 book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas already recognized that the liberal space in which ideas about how to organize society were once debated—however exclusionary that space may have been—had given way to a largely simulated public sphere captured by advertising and other forms of manipulation. He writes:
When the laws of the market governing the sphere of commodity exchange and of social labor also pervaded the sphere reserved for private people as a public, rational-critical debate had a tendency to be replaced by consumption, and the web of public communication unraveled into acts of individuated reception, however uniform in mode.
The commercialization of media, in other words, effectively turns the public sphere into the plaything of the interests that control it. Entertainment and information are mixed together to the point that “instead of doing justice to reality,” the media tends “to present a substitute more palatable for consumption.” Radio and television tend to replace critical public debate with manipulable preferences and tastes. Finally, the public and private spheres become inextricably tangled together. On the one hand, public matters “are garbed in private dress and through personalization distorted to the point of unrecognizability.” And, on the other, private life is “pried open” to the point that not just individual lives but “the problems of life” themselves become media fodder and “political” matters.
The embrace of neoliberalism in the decades since Habermas’s book was published has only further advanced commercial control over the public sphere, including on the internet. Depoliticized culture-war content monopolizes attention, drives subscriptions, and pleases advertisers, while catalyzing anger and further confusing private and public—culture and politics—through partisan sensationalism. The political conflict that plays out in the media is not the negotiation of conflicting material interests and ideas about the common good, but a dramatized escalation of personal grievance and cultural antagonism.
It is this manipulation, far more than the adoption of little-read postmodern texts, that has placed us in a “post-truth” moment. And it is this manipulation, far more than any spontaneous discontent emerging from the youth or the hoi polloi, that has produced our illiberal, “depoliticized” politics. The tribalism that so concerns centrist liberals is not just a misguided expression of discontent, but the predictable and increasingly uncontrollable escalation of the pseudo-politics that our elites have favored for decades. As Nancy Isenberg memorably put it in her book White Trash, “When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win.”
In the face of ubiquitous culture war, we should actually be heartened by the relatively material—and, in their way, liberal—concerns of the general public. Take the line of critique that united the surprisingly popular Trump and Sanders campaigns in 2016. Both candidates emphasized a rigged economic and political system where decisions were made by an entrenched elite. Both candidates claimed, albeit with wildly different degrees of sophistication and credibility, that the costs of elite failure were borne by the middle and working classes, and that the priorities of global corporations had been allowed to take precedence over the interests and desires of the American people. But cultural politics either completely overwhelmed these critiques from the start (in the case of Trump) or were deployed against them (in the case of Sanders).
To their credit, many centrist liberal authors acknowledge the fact that inequality is a principal cause of our political crisis. However, their construal of the problem suggests solutions that would neither distribute economic power more evenly nor promote democracy. This starts with how they conceive of the relationship between democracy and liberalism.
Both Mounk and Fukuyama treat liberalism and democracy as completely separable categories: they may be historically intertwined but they are, according to this view, logically unrelated. As Mounk and Fukuyama rightly point out, there can be illiberal democracies—like those of the ancient world—and undemocratic liberalism—Hong Kong under British rule, for example. For Mounk, this is evidence against the claim that liberal rights and democratic sovereignty are naturally complementary; they were not always associated in the past and need not be in the future.
Mounk admits that the technocratic rule of developed nations today amounts to its own form of “undemocratic liberalism,” but he seems to find this trend inevitable—and preferable to the alternatives. Fukuyama, meanwhile, contends that “the present-day crisis of liberal democracy revolves in the first instances less around democracy strictly understood than around liberal institutions.” The implication is that we can combat the crisis in liberalism without combatting the crisis in democracy. The important thing is preserving individual rights; genuine democracy is a luxury at best and a threat to liberalism at worst.
But as Marc Plattner puts it in an article for Foreign Affairs, “overstating the disjunction between liberalism and democracy can easily lead to new misunderstanding.” The illiberality of ancient democracies—which heavily restricted voting rights—also made them, by today’s standards at least, undemocratic. Similarly, illiberal restrictions on freedom of speech in nations like Russia and Turkey put the democratic nature of their elections in serious doubt. Meanwhile, undemocratic liberalism tends—because of its restrictions on voting rights—to restrict other freedoms as well. Without access to the ballot in the United States, for example, women and Black people were also denied other basic rights. Democratization made the country more liberal, and liberalization made it more democratic.
The intertwining of liberalism and democracy is not just historical contingency, but the result of the fact that, as Plattner writes, “the political doctrine at the source of liberalism also contains a deeply egalitarian and majoritarian dimension.” Classical forms of liberalism have emphasized that, in addition to a balance of powers within government, liberal democracies require a “wide dispersion of power in both the private economy and civil society,” as Paul Starr explains in his book Freedom’s Power.
Early- and mid-twentieth-century American liberalism made advances by recognizing that, under industrial capitalism, supporting individual liberty and economic freedom required democratizing workplaces through support for unions, preventing undue concentrations of market power through antitrust lawsuits, regulating financial institutions to prevent unfair and destabilizing speculation, and maintaining a robust welfare state to provide aid to those left behind by the market. This liberalism recognized that liberty needed to be protected not just from governments or the masses, but also from an economic order that, for example, colludes to raise prices on consumers, extracts burdensome rents from small producers by monopolizing distribution, and undermines worker power by intimidation and, sometimes, coercion. As Edmund E. Jacobitti puts it, “[T]oday wealth is as powerful a threat to liberty as the masses ever were.”
Separating liberalism from democracy allows centrist liberals to sideline the egalitarian implications of liberalism and associate it with anti-democratic technocracy. While expressing some regret that deference to expert decision-making may be undemocratic, Mounk doesn’t even seem to consider the possibility that it might also be illiberal. Given the “considerable technical expertise” required to understand an “increasingly complex” world, he writes, “it seems we must choose between achieving international cooperation on key issues by a troublingly undemocratic path—and not achieving it at all.”
Fukuyama, for his part, presents a narrow account of the origins of liberalism that focuses exclusively on its protection of individual and cultural freedom. Liberalism arose, Fukuyama writes, in the religious wars following the Protestant Reformation, where various “Christian sects” sought “to impose their religious dogma on their populations.”
Classical liberalism can therefore be understood as an institutional solution to the problem of governing over diversity, or, to put it in slightly different terms, of peacefully managing diversity in pluralistic societies [my italics]. The most fundamental principle enshrined in liberalism is one of tolerance: you do not have to agree with your fellow citizens about the most important things, but only that each individual should get to decide what they are without interference from you or from the state.
Liberalism, in other words, is little more than an antidote to culture war. Its guarantees of individual rights, a private sphere of autonomy, and limited state power are emphasized at the cost of its prescriptions for how private and political power should be distributed and exercised in society. Liberal governance, meanwhile, is conceived of as a form of apolitical management that balances diverse interests according to its own calculations rather than allowing them a measure of genuine political power.
A conception of governance as a technical matter for experts, as Habermas writes in his 1970 book Toward a Rational Society, obfuscates its fundamentally value-laden nature and takes deliberation about the best way to organize society out of the hands of the citizenry. Technocracy is the natural partner of mass media’s reduction of information to entertainment, which places the real work of governance behind an emotionally charged screen. For Habermas, this system amounts to a form of domination, since the arena for rational deliberation by an informed populace is both degraded in itself and detached from the actual levers of power.
A narrow focus on individual liberty allows centrist authors to ignore these substantive threats to liberalism. The only important danger, they believe, is that one side of the culture war or the other will take control of the government and impose its beliefs on the public at large. Other dangers get short shrift. Even when these authors are critical of policies that have led to the upward redistribution of wealth and power, they tend to construe them as examples not of elite capture of the economic system, but rather of “too much” philosophical liberalism in economic policy—an error of management that requires a managerial fix, rather than the predictable result of too much concentration of political and economic power in the hands of too few people.
Fukuyama cites Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek as among the liberal thinkers who “sharply denigrated the role of the state in the economy and emphasized free markets as spurs to growth and efficient allocators of resources.” Beginning in the 1970s, neoliberal policymakers and economists freed corporations from what they regarded as counterproductive and inefficient regulation and held individuals more responsible for their well-being by cutting welfare spending.
But it is misleading to characterize neoliberalism as simply “anti-regulation” and “pro-market.” As Quinn Slobodian shows in his book Globalists, proponents of neoliberalism conceived of it from the first as a movement to develop and shape a new super-national regulatory structure for a global economy. It was not primarily an anti-government movement in favor of an unfettered market, but rather an effort to insulate the global economy from what neoliberals regarded as the irrational behavior of democratic nation-states. Hayek himself rejected the idea of a “minimal state” and made explicit that he was after a “dethronement of politics,” not of government as such. The goal, Slobodian writes, was a new form of empire with “an invisible government of the economy first, and a visible government of neutered nations second.” The government of the economy was designed not to protect individual rights, nor to constrain government per se, but to create institutions that would “override national legislation that might disrupt the global rights of capital.”
The global economic order created by neoliberals has not merely dethroned democratic politics; it has established a new kind of political power. As governments turned from containing to facilitating the excesses of big business, the lines between national governments and private banks and corporations have blurred. Our technocracy involves the alignment of private and public bureaucracies, facilitated by revolving doors between them. Consider the U.S. bank bailouts of 2008. The bailouts and favorable terms given to reckless banks—however necessary they may have been to rescue the larger economy—involved a state of exception where sovereignty itself was difficult to locate, as Adam Tooze points out in his book on financial crises, Crashed. “If this was an act of sovereignty, whose sovereignty was it? The American state’s, or that of the ‘new Wall Street’—the network personified by figures like [Henry] Paulson and [Timothy] Geithner who tied the Treasury and the Fed to America’s globalized financial sector?”
For centrist authors, part of liberalism’s role of “peacefully managing diversity” involves correcting the mistaken policies that have led to the populist surge. Here, they reflexively take on the perspective of the managers without seeming to realize that technocratic management is a significant part of the problem. Their proposed reforms leave untouched the existing private-public power structure, the tendency toward policymaking by compromised, if not outright corrupted, actors, and the insulation of economic power from democratic accountability.
Mounk, for example, proposes reforms like more progressive taxation, better job training, and expansions of the welfare state. Tellingly, he does not mention reforms to make collective bargaining easier or to enforce antitrust laws more vigorously. Nor does he have anything to say about the way neoliberals themselves dismantled liberal regulatory structures and liberal democratic institutions like trade unions. He rightly condemns the folly of extremists who would simply tear down existing liberal institutions. But not everyone who supports radical changes in pursuit of fairer economic conditions is bent on nihilistic destruction.
In lieu of such changes, centrist liberals tend to recommend cultural solutions like individual self-restraint and moderation (Fukuyama), or being “willing to criticize your own” and resist vilification of the other side (Mounk). Packer places more emphasis on the ills of corruption and concentrated economic power than Mounk and Fukuyama do. Still, because he focuses on cultural threats to liberal democracy, he also relies heavily on personal prescriptions: he asks Americans to ditch social media and spend more time with those “who don’t look or talk or think like them.” “Creating the conditions of equality requires new structures and policies,” he writes. “Acquiring the art of self-government needs something else—new ways of thinking and living.” Such platitudes gloss over the fact that our polarization and democratic incompetence are the consequence of material disempowerment. Fixing the former requires fixing the latter. Policy tweaks and cultural exhortations will not do.
Real solutions to our political crisis would reverse the concentration of power caused by neoliberal policies. Reducing inequality by technocratic means—an unlikely prospect in any case—wouldn’t be enough. Thanks in large part to pressure from the Left, the Biden administration has taken some initial steps: Biden appointees to the National Labor Relations Board have begun to enforce labor law against companies used to interfering with their employees’ right to collective bargaining; the administration’s Department of Justice has more aggressively tackled corporate concentration; and its Federal Trade Commission has proposed rules to stop unfair hiring practices and anti-competitive mergers and acquisitions.
But, as the administration’s foiling of a rail strike and its bailout of Silicon Valley Bank show, there is still a long way to go. Alternative forms of worker representation should be pursued, such as sectoral bargaining—where a federation of all the firms in a given economic sector is forced by the government to negotiate wages with representatives of that sector’s entire labor force. A comprehensive anti-corruption program, such as the one Elizabeth Warren has outlined, is needed to combat the influence of the financial industry. Absent such a program, it is difficult to see how the hyper-financialization of so much of our economy can be checked.
Finally, experiments with other, more local forms of economic and political power must be encouraged. Some contemporary authors, like Branko Milanović, have proposed programs remarkably akin to the distributism championed in the early twentieth century by Catholics writers such as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. These would distribute capital ownership downward through cooperatives and other common ownership structures. Others, like Michael Lind, have called for a form of “democratic pluralism” that would delegate rulemaking power in particular areas to small institutions like wage boards, with mandated representation of various stakeholder groups. Without access to new forms of power like these, the resentment and cynicism that brought us Trump will continue to grow, as will interest in a “post-liberal” future.
Centrist liberal authors are rightly troubled by exponents of post-liberalism like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, who have argued that liberalism’s hands-off attitude toward morality deprives liberal democracies of the virtues needed to sustain a healthy political community. For Deneen, liberalism is behind a drift toward atomism that will ultimately doom the whole project to collapse, since the virtues on which liberalism depends—self-restraint, civic-mindedness, democratic competence—are systematically degraded by the logic of liberalism itself. Liberalism, on Deneen’s view, can’t help but produce technocracy and a nationalized, sensationalized politics. To the extent that the people do have a say, Deneen writes in Why Liberalism Failed, it is not surprising that an isolated, powerless electorate will opt for a strongman who claims to be capable of “reining in the power of a distant and ungovernable state and market.”
Despite their distaste for Deneen, the arguments of centrists like Mounk and Fukuyama unwittingly lend force to his critique. They propose to contain the populist threat by means of the same technocratic mechanisms that generated it. Deneen writes, “Today’s liberal critics of democracy...condemn the deformed and truncated demotic actions of a degraded citizenry that liberalism itself has created.” He is right that “their cure is the source of the ills they would redress,” but wrong to call this “liberalism.” Technocratic neoliberalism is not the rightful heir of the liberal tradition, but an anti-democratic distortion of it.
Published in the September 2023 issue: View Contents
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左派在加薩議題和「解除殖民統治」上的思考盲點 ----- Slavoj Žižek
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齊椰克教授是當代頗有功力和名氣的左翼學者。我看過他兩本書和幾篇論文；對他的思想說不上熟悉。
他在大作中展現了他「務實現實主義者」的睿智和深邃洞察力(下文倒數第5段)；以及他挑戰短視左派的勇氣(1)。由於我也自認為是個「務實現實主義者」(該文第2節)，希望以後能擠出時間進一步申論他這篇文章。
附註：
1. 「短視左派」其實是我一種客氣的說法。「彈腿反應式的」或「不經過大腦的」庶幾近之。
What the left gets wrong about Gaza and “decolonisation”
The West needs to remember that not all freedom movements are progressive or democratic.
Slavoj Žižek, 12/20/23
When left-wing critics of Israel characterise what it is doing in Gaza as genocide, they are often accused of inverting the true relationship: Israel is just defending itself while Hamas plans an actual genocide of Jews.
But genocidal rhetoric is increasingly present in the public speeches of Israeli politicians themselves. When the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip after the Hamas attack, he said: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed… We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly. ” More recently, in October, when Benjamin Netanyahu referred to the Palestinian people in the besieged Gaza Strip, he invoked the Amalek, a nation in the Hebrew Bible that the Israelites were ordered to wipe out in an act of revenge. “You must remember what Amalek has done to you,” he said in a speech announcing the start of a ground invasion in Gaza, and added that Israeli soldiers were part of a chain that goes back 3,000 years. Genocide justified by religious fundamentalism.
There is no place for peace treaties here. Tzipi Hotovely, the Israeli ambassador to the UK, insisted in an interview with Sky News on 16 October that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza: “Israel is in charge of the safety of Israelis; Hamas is in charge of the safety of the Palestinians.” Of course, there is no humanitarian crisis among the Palestinians, since the Israeli high command apparently consider them to be not fully human. No wonder that, together with Netanyahu and other leading Israeli politicians, Hotovely resolutely rejects the two-state solution: “human animals” don’t deserve a state.
A day before three Jewish hostages were mistakenly killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza on 15 December, Netanyahu said: “I say this in the face of great pain but also in the face of international pressures. Nothing will stop us.” The addressees of this message are not only the relatives of the remaining hostages, who accuse the government of not doing enough to release the estimated 129 that remain in the Strip; the main addressees are perhaps foreign governments, including the US, that are exerting pressure on Israel to show more restraint. Netanyahu’s ultimate message is: even without the support of its Western allies, nothing will stop Israel in achieving its goals (total annihilation of Hamas; rejection of the two-state solution).
The problem with this radical stance is that, as Hani al-Masri, the director-general of the Palestinian Centre for Policy Research and Strategic Studies, pointed out correctly, in pursuing them, Israel is “a prisoner of its own unreachable goals”. Why? Because, to use another quotation, as the anarchist and pacifist president of the Palestine branch of the War Resisters’ International, Natan Hofshi, wrote back in 1946: “Without an understanding with our Arab neighbours, we are building on a volcano and our whole work is in jeopardy.”
Peace will only emerge when Palestinians are allowed to organise themselves as a strong independent political force, broadly democratic and rejecting all forms of religious fundamentalism – something Israel is doing everything possible to prevent by giving Palestinians one choice: to accept Hamas as the only voice that is fighting for them. The latest opinion polls show that anger over the war is boosting Palestinian support for Hamas, particularly in the West Bank, where the IDF is not conducting an all-out offensive and where Hamas does not have control. Throughout the Arab world, hundreds of thousands are protesting against Israel, and tensions are reaching a point of explosion. Some on the left may see in such an explosion a moment of truth, when liberal-pacifist illusions about the occupation are upended – I see in it a catastrophe, not only for Jews and Palestinians but for the world.
Netanyahu’s “nothing will stop us” speech echoes Vladimir Putin’s statement the day before, on 14 December, in which the Russian president vowed to fight on in Ukraine until Moscow secures the country’s “demilitarisation”, “denazification” and neutrality – unless Kyiv accepts a deal that achieves those goals. “There will be peace when we achieve our goals,” Putin declared. “As for demilitarisation, if they [the Ukrainians] don’t want to come to an agreement – well, then we are forced to take other measures, including military ones.” Putin couldn’t restrain himself from cynically remarking that Russia is demilitarising Ukraine by way of destroying hundreds of its tanks and guns – war is thus presented as the ultimate act of demilitarisation. But did some Western heads of state not make a similar point when, reacting to the desperate calls for a ceasefire in the Gaza conflict, they advocated a “sustainable ceasefire”? Though their idea was a ceasefire that would lead to permanent peace, it ultimately amounts to the claim that the only “sustainable” peace is that which follows a (military) victory.
The parallel between Israel-Palestine and Ukraine is imperfect: in the case of the Palestinians and their Israeli neighbours, a compromise between the two peoples is the only way out, while Ukraine is a victim of brutal aggression and has the full right to persevere until victory. Ukraine is now paying the price for exclusively choosing the side of the Western powers, ignoring the link between its struggle for independence with the developing world’s decolonisation process, as well as suppressing its own political left as suspect, somehow associated with Russia. Now that Western states are sceptical about the extent to which they can continue to help Volodymyr Zelensky’s government, Ukraine may find itself in a desperate position.
We have to engage with the topic of decolonisation. The scholars Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang are right when they insist that “decolonisation” should not be used as a universal metaphor: “Decolonisation brings about the repatriation of indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonising discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to ‘decolonise our schools’, or use ‘decolonising methods’, or ‘decolonise student thinking’, turns decolonisation into a metaphor.” Such a metaphoric universalisation blurs the actual violence of decolonisation. “Decolonised thinking” (done in a safe academic environment) is a poor substitute for the real and brutal struggle of the oppressed against their masters.
What now overshadows this is the violence of Hamas, which was perceived by many as an attempt at actual decolonisation. However, this is where things get more problematic. First, it is all too easy to dismiss the state of Israel as a result of the colonisation of the Palestinian territory – I agree with Edward Said who thought that both Palestinians and Jews have a right to live there, and that they are condemned to live there together.
I don’t consider Hamas’s stance “leftist” in any meaningful sense of the term, and I don’t envisage a military defeat of Israel as a solution to the Middle East crisis. In a recent piece for Al Jazeera, Jamil Khader, a professor at Bethlehem University, condemns my “lofty aspirational vision” as “completely disconnected from the realities on the ground”. What he finds “incomprehensible” is my insistence on “some liberal politics of hope in this catastrophic context”, like when I see a possible change coming through “the slow rise of solidarity between the Palestinian citizens of Israel and the Jews opposing the all-destructive war”. As a pragmatic realist, I am well aware that such a solidarity is difficult to imagine today. But it is here that we should resuscitate the famous motto of the May 1968 protests in Paris: Soyons réalistes, demandons l’impossible. Be realistic, demand the impossible. The truly dangerous utopia is the idea that the solution to the Middle East crisis can only be achieved through military force.
The second point to address on the subject of decolonisation is that the reality of it often is a metaphor for another process. Recall numerous African countries, from Angola to Zimbabwe, where the overthrow of Western imperial control ended up with corrupted social orders in which the gap between the new masters and the poor has become greater than it was before independence. “Decolonisation” was thus a metaphor for (or one aspect of) the emergence of a new class society.
South Africa today has the biggest gap between the poor and the rich – no wonder that a very depressing thing happened to me in July 2023. In a public debate at Birkbeck Summer School in London, a black woman from South Africa, a veteran activist for the African National Congress, which has ruled the country since 1994, said that the predominant stance among the poor black majority is now increasingly a nostalgia for apartheid. Back then, she said, that demographic’s standard of living was, if anything, a little higher than it is today, and there was safety and security (South Africa was a police state, after all). While today, the woman explained, poverty is supplemented by violence and insecurity.
If a white person were to say this, they would be, of course, immediately accused of racism – but we should nonetheless think about it. If we don’t do it, the new right will do it for us (as they are already doing, lambasting what they regard as the inability of South Africa’s black citizens to run a country properly). The temptation to risk brutal “decolonisation” irrespective of what follows should be resisted. Mao said: “Revolution is not a dinner party.” But what if the reality is that after the revolution there is nothing to eat?
The question we should raise with respect to Hamas is not just what will happen after it loses this war – it is what would happen if Hamas was to survive and continue to rule Gaza? What would be the reality in the Strip, after the waning of enthusiasm for liberation?
[See also: The fightback against US anti-Semitism has begun]
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中國、美國、和蘇西迪底斯難局 -- Richard Allen Hyde
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這篇文章屬於「勸和不全分」一型。由於作者是牧師，他全文沒有一絲火氣或一般美國政論家的偏頗。先行轉載，有空再討論。
他顯然對「政治現實主義」不甚以為然，提出了「基於基督教教義的『現實主義』」這個概念，但沒有詳細闡述。
China, America, and Thucydides’ Trap
Richard Allen Hyde, 12/01/23
While Destined for War (2017), a study of Sino-America rivalry through the lens of Athenian-Spartan competition by Graham Allison, professor at Harvard Kennedy School, is particularly about how to manage a relationship between reigning world powers and their emerging rivals, the lessons in it are relevant not just for foreign policy experts; anyone interested in the art of balancing powers and maintaining relationships across complicated histories and competing interests will have something to learn. A marriage, family, and child therapist might find the book as useful as an ambassador or secretary of state.
If you know nothing about China, the United States or world history, Destined for War will shore up your education. The book includes: an account of how the two behemoths see the world and each other, a brief history of major conflicts in world history, and, of course, a good study of Thucydides and the devastating Peloponnesian War.
Professor Larry Radway of Dartmouth first acquainted me with the greatness of Thucydides, particularly his account of the Athenian ambassadors’ cynical abrogation of the right of self-determination for Melos, a Greek island in the Aegean that had remained neutral between Sparta and Athens until that point. One might think that pure national self-interest, the dog-like attention to defending your own turf, might work well in a dog-eat-dog world. Yet, despite the claims of so-called “realists,” such a strategy works neither in a family nor international relations, or at least not for very long. So Christian Realism advises.
According to Thucydides, the Greek father of history, Athens and Sparta went to war after decades of rivalry punctuated by occasional cooperation. Sparta, the traditional land power and stronger of the two, feared being outflanked and outspent by the rising naval power, Athens. Each had built up a network of allies designed to strengthen and protect them from one another, but the network ended up embroiling the whole of the Greek peninsula in a war that was disastrous for all concerned, rather like mountain climbers linked up for protection who occasionally go over the brink together.
Not long after this Greek civil war, Phillip of Macedon invaded and took over the whole Greek peninsula by 336 BC. This marked the end of what’s typically thought of as Classical Greece, often described as having begun after the Greco-Persian Wars at the dawn of the 5th century BC. Did famed historian and author of The Guns of August Barbara Tuchman read Thucydides? I’m sure she did.
The conflict most on Professor Allison’s mind back in 2017 was the one between the US and China. Of course, China was a great economic and military power long before the United States ratified our Constitution. Their relationship began only some 250 years ago when an American privateer, retrofitted and renamed The Empress of China (船名), arrived in Canton in 1784. It returned to New York with a cargo of porcelain, from which George Washington purchased several fine pieces. Although diplomatic relations were not formalized with an exchange of ambassadors until 1935, the United States sent official representatives beginning in 1844. China has undergone a very difficult period from about the time of the arrival of that ship, and thousands of ships like her, until fairly recently. While the US was at the beginning of its rapid rise, China simultaneously continued a steep decline.
Aside from the Korean War, during which American and Chinese troops were de facto at war, relations between the two countries have been peaceful and mostly amicable, with the US being a defender of Chinese independence both during late 19th Century European colonialism and during the Japanese invasion in the 1930s. It was this support of China that caused America to impose an oil and steel embargo on Japan when its government refused to withdraw from China. When the Japanese realized it would be impossible to sustain their empire without securing natural resources from across East Asia, they attacked Pearl Harbor, hoping to cripple the US Navy long enough to seize and fortify a vast swathe of the Western Pacific. After World War II and the triumph of Mao’s Communist Party in China’s Civil War, the wheel of fortune turned remarkably quickly. No one on earth in 1950 expected China to become a superpower within such a short period of time, if ever.
Thus, these two powers have already traded places, come into armed conflict once, and are now in a position of relative parity. One would think that their chances of avoiding the Thucydidean Trap are pretty good. Both countries are at the top of the world’s economic heap and very risk-averse. Both have much to gain from their relationship and much to lose if it breaks down, as does the rest of the world.
A major shooting war between the two countries would be a disaster for both and for the world at large, an even greater disaster now than it would have been a few years ago because of the major shooting war in Ukraine. China (rather quietly) backs the Russian invasion. The US and most of Europe are sending military aid to Ukraine. The conflict is leading to a major upset of the world economy. China can certainly weather this storm, but it cannot be happy about the effect on the world economy and is apparently in no mood to bail out Russia with substantial aid. This brutal and clumsy invasion will certainly not make China’s intended digestion of Taiwan any easier. The chance of the Taiwanese voting to become part of China now looks more remote than ever.
Professor Allison details how conflict between smaller allies tripped off the Peloponnesian War, so two small countries, one ally of the US, one ally of China, seem the likeliest places for this conflict to get out of control.
Taiwan is an island of only 23 million people, whose GDP amounts to a rather minor drop in the bucket of the Chinese or American GDP. There is no material reason to go to war over this island. Yet the Beijing government considers Taiwan an integral part of China. The island is likewise important to China’s neighbors, many of whom are aligned with the US because they do not wish to be dominated by China. Some, like Vietnam, have a long and bitter history with China. China has never controlled Japan, but it is not for lack of trying; though, given Japan’s history of exploiting China in the 20th century, the Chinese may suffer from recency bias.
In this situation, what is a realist, Christian or otherwise, to do? What does Professor Allison (certainly a realist) recommend? Drawing especially on his study of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev reached an accommodation, Professor Allison’s many ideas and recommendations come down to four:
1. Clarify your vital interests. Keep the list short. You cannot have 100 vital interests. Three or four will do.
2. Understand what your counterpart is trying to do. What are your adversary’s vital interests? Do your best to work around them.
3. Have a strategy. Rank order your favored procedures. Keep this list short also.
4. Keep your own house in order.
Especially in light of the past five years since this book came out, this last recommendation seems the most important for both the US and China. Neither country is in a full-blown domestic crisis at this point, but both countries, as most countries at this point, are highly stressed by the after-shocks of Covid, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the recent outbreak of violence in the Middle East. Hopefully, somewhere in Washington or Beijing, some Chinese and American diplomats are meeting informally, over drinks perhaps, to ask each other what they can do to end the war in Ukraine; what they can do to rein in the leader of North Korea; how to manage the Taiwan Strait; what they can do to keep the world economy going. A worldwide recession leading to further domestic unrest is not in either country’s interest.
The Rev. Dr. Richard Allen Hyde began his ministry as the associate chaplain of Dartmouth College. Since then he has pastored churches in Vermont, Massachusetts, California, Maine, and now California, where he is the pastor of the Community United Church of San Carlos. He tries to live up to the civic and theological commitments of the founders of New England Congregationalism.
Along the way, he earned an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School and a PhD from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. He has been a lecturer at Dartmouth College, the School for Advanced International Studies, and the State Department. He also leads tours of the nation’s capital for university Washington programs, alumni clubs and other groups.
China | The Latest
China | Chinese Communist Party (CCP) | Christian Realism | Cuban Missile Crisis | Graham Allison | Greeks | Harvard University | Korean War | Russia-Ukraine War | Taiwan
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《群眾取向政治路線淪為花招》讀後
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林德教授這篇簡短的分析指出：過去十多年來「群眾取向政治路線」走紅的原因(本欄上一篇文章)：
1) 「決策權力」從民選的議會及政府旁落到人民監督不到的專業機構(與官僚)手中。
2) 政黨的機制和功能消失。
兩者導致政府無法推動和落實人民需要的政策。
他拿「販賣機」來比喻政府：
當民眾投了鈔票進機器，但不論按那個按鈕都拿不到飲料或食物時，也難怪有人要踢「販賣機」。
同樣的，當某政客以「群眾取向路線」為競選招術取得權力後，因為政府機關已經失效，不論這位政客按辦公桌上那個按鈕，她/他都無法推動自己拿來號召(欺騙？)選民的政策。
索引：
群眾取向政治路線：Populism
entities：個別而獨立存在的事物、機構等等(此處為複數形式)
gimmick：花招，把戲
Milei：阿根廷新當選總統
pantomime：啞劇(比手劃腳來傳達意思)、獨腳戲
Wilders：荷蘭新多數黨領袖
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