The Thing That Determines a Country’s Resistance to the Coronavirus
决定一个国家对冠状病毒的抵抗力的因素
原文：The Atlantic https://tinyurl.com/ruqx524
译文：法意读书
刊登： https://www.guancha.cn/FuLangXiSi-FuShan/2020_04_03_545248_s.shtml
作者：Francis Fukuyama
译者：朵悦
[导读] 新冠病毒肆虐全球，围绕各国不同的疫情治理现状，弗朗西斯‧福山（Francis
Fukuyama）明确拒绝了以体制论高低的简单二分法，并延续他自己的思想脉络，回到了“
国家能力”的议题上。福山认为，在疫情治理的行动中，评价政府绩效的关键不是政体的
类型，而是国家的能力，尤其是对政府的信任。对美国而言，紧急状态下行政权的扩张是
从美国建国以来持续推进的政治实践，但川普政府持续一贯的草率行动可能会让这种有序
的传统面临严重的信任危机。本文于2020年3月30日发表于“大西洋月刊”（the
Atlantic）官方网站。
When the coronavirus pandemic now sweeping the world was localized in China
in January, many people argued that China’s authoritarian system was
blocking the flow of information about the seriousness of the situation. The
case of Li Wenliang, a physician who was punished for blowing the whistle
early on and who subsequently died from the disease, was seen as emblematic
of authoritarian dysfunction.
今年1月，当席卷全球的新型冠状病毒流感在中国爆发时，许多人认为中国的体制阻碍了
关于疫情严重性的信息传播。但现在的情况对民主政府来说不那么乐观了。欧洲现在面临
著比中国更大的疾病负担，仅意大利一国的死亡人数就超过了中国官方报告的死亡人数，
然而意大利人口只有中国的二十分之一。
The situation now looks less rosy for democratic government. Europe faces a
larger disease burden than China, with Italy alone exceeding the number of
deaths officially reported in China, despite having one-twentieth the
population. It turns out that the leaders of many democracies felt similar
pressures to downplay the dangers of the epidemic, whether to avoid injuring
the economy or to protect their personal interests. This was true not just of
Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro or Mexico’s Lopez Obrador, but also of President
Donald Trump, who until mid-March kept insisting that the U.S. had the
disease under control and that the epidemic would disappear shortly. This
explains why the U.S. lost two months in preparing for the onslaught,
creating persistent shortages of testing kits and medical supplies. China,
meanwhile, is reporting a leveling-off of new cases. Chinese students in
Britain have reportedly been astonished at the lax approach taken by Boris
Johnson’s government.
事实证明，许多民主国家的领导人也感受到类似的压力，他们想要淡化疫情的危险，无论
是为了避免损害经济，还是为了保护自己的个人利益。巴西总统博尔索纳罗和墨西哥总统
洛佩斯‧奥夫拉多尔是这样，美国总统唐纳德‧川普也是如此。这就解释了为什么美国在
准备应对疫情冲击的过程中损失了两个月的时间，造成了测试设备和医疗用品的持续短缺
。与此同时，中国官方报告的新病例数量正在趋于平稳。据报导，在英国的中国学生对鲍
里斯‧约翰逊政府采取的宽松政策感到震惊。
When the pandemic subsides, I suspect that we will have to discard simple
dichotomies. The major dividing line in effective crisis response will not
place autocracies on one side and democracies on the other. Rather, there
will be some high-performing autocracies, and some with disastrous outcomes.
There will be a similar, though likely smaller, variance in outcomes among
democracies. The crucial determinant in performance will not be the type of
regime, but the state’s capacity and, above all, trust in government.
大流行消退后，也许我们将不得不放弃简单的二分法。判断国家是否有效应对危机的分割
线，不应简单地将集权政体置于一边，而将民主政体置于另一边。相反，将会出现一些高
效的集权政体，与另外一些带来灾难性后果的集权政体。民主国家之间也会面临类似的差
异（尽管可能较小）。政府绩效的关键决定因素将不是政体的类型，而是国家的能力，尤
其是对政府的信任。
All political systems need to delegate discretionary authority to executive
branches, especially during times of crisis. No set of preexisting laws or
rules can ever anticipate all of the novel and rapidly changing situations
that countries will face. The capacity of people at the top, and their
judgment, determine whether outcomes are good or bad.
所有的政治制度都需要将自由裁量权下放给行政部门，尤其是在危机时期。任何一套现有
的法律或规则都不可能预见到各国将面临的一切快速变化的新情况。在这样的情况下，上
层人士的能力和他们的判断，将决定最终的结果。
And in making that delegation of authority to the executive, trust is the
single most important commodity that will determine the fate of a society. In
a democracy no less than in a dictatorship, citizens have to believe that the
executive knows what it is doing. And trust, unfortunately, is exactly what
is missing in America today.
在将权力下放给行政部门的过程中，信任是决定一个社会命运的最重要的因素。在民主体
制下，公民必须相信行政部门知道自己在做什么。但不幸的是，这种信任正是美国今天所
缺少的。
It is a popular misconception that liberal democracies necessarily have weak
governments because they have to respect popular choice and legal procedure.
All modern governments have developed a powerful executive branch, because no
society can survive without one. They need a strong, effective, modern state
that can concentrate and deploy power when necessary to protect the
community, keep public order, and provide essential public services.
存在一种普遍的误解，认为自由民主国家必然有弱势的政府，因为它们必须尊重民众的选
择和法律程序。但是，所有现代政府都有一个强大的行政部门，因为它们需要一个强大、
有效的现代化国家，在必要时能够集中部署权力，以保护社区、维持公共秩序和提供必要
的公共服务。
What distinguishes a liberal democracy from an authoritarian regime is that
it balances state power with institutions of constraint—that is, the rule of
law, and democratic accountability. The exact point of balance between the
principal institution of power, the executive branch, and the primary
constraining institutions (the courts and legislature) differs from one
democracy to another, and also differs over time.
自由民主与专制政体的区别在于，它平衡了国家权力与约束机制（即法治和民主问责制）
之间的关系。但主要权力机构（行政部门）和主要约束机构（法院和立法机关）之间的平
衡点在不同的民主国家之间、在不同的时间节点上都是不同的。这一点对美国与对其他任
何自由民主国家而言都一样，尽管美国的政治文化对集中的国家权力、被神圣化的法律和
民主都抱有强烈的不信任。
This is no less true of the United States than of any other liberal
democracy, despite its having a political culture that breeds intense
distrust of concentrated state power and sacralized law and democracy. The
U.S. Constitution was written against the backdrop of the weakness of the
Articles of Confederation. Alexander Hamilton, an ardent advocate of what, in
“Federalist No. 70,” he called “energy in the executive,” understood
perfectly well the need for strong legal and democratic constraints on
executive power. But Hamilton also argued that neither the Court nor Congress
would be able to act decisively in times of national danger. These dangers
would arise in times of war or domestic insurrection, but they could also
arise from novel causes, such as the global pandemic that we are facing now.
The kinds of authority granted to the executive would differ depending on
circumstances; what was appropriate during peacetime was not necessarily what
would prevail in times of war or crisis.
美国宪法是在《美国邦联条例》式微的背景下制定的。亚历山大‧汉密尔顿在《联邦党人
文集》第70篇极力支持“行政权的活力”。他完全理解对行政权进行强有力的法律和民主
约束的必要性。但汉密尔顿也认为，在国家面临危险的时候，法院和国会都不可能采取果
断的行动。国家的危险会在战争或国内叛乱时期出现，也可能产生于不可预料的新情况，
例如我们现在面临的全球流行病。授予行政机关的权力种类应视情况而定，在和平时期看
起来适当的做法，未必能在战争或危机时期适用。
And so the Constitution established, in Article II, an executive branch that
has grown in power and authority in the centuries since the Founding. This
growth has been propelled by emergencies that required strong executive
action, such as the Civil War, the two World Wars, and the financial crises
that took place in 1908, 1929, and 2008. During the Civil War, Abraham
Lincoln mobilized an army of a million men, although the Union contained
fewer than 20 million people. When the American railroads required to supply
the war effort in Europe became hopelessly snarled, Woodrow Wilson
nationalized them, turning them into state-owned enterprises. Franklin D.
Roosevelt marshaled an even larger war effort during the Second World War,
and bypassed Congress in negotiating Lend-Lease. During the 2008 financial
crisis, the Federal Reserve was delegated unprecedented powers, funneling
hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up systemically important financial
institutions (including several foreign ones) with little congressional
oversight.
因此，宪法第二条确立了行政部门的地位，它的权力和权威在建国后的几个世纪里不断增
长。这种增长是由紧急状态下对强有力的行政的需要推动的，例如美国内战、两次世界大
战，以及1908年、1929年和2008年发生的金融危机。内战期间，亚伯拉罕‧林肯动员了
100万人的军队，尽管联邦的人口不足2000万；当为欧洲战争提供物资的美国铁路陷入绝
望的混乱时，伍德罗‧威尔逊把它们收归国有，让铁路变成了国有企业；富兰克林‧d‧
罗斯福在第二次世界大战期间绕过国会实行了租借政策；2008年金融危机期间，美联储被
授予了前所未有的权力，动用数千亿美元支持具有系统性关键作用的金融机构（包括几家
外国机构），而国会几乎没有监督这一行动。
The U.S. has thus been able to generate huge amounts of state power when
necessary. In Latin America, legislatures have frequently bestowed emergency
powers on presidents who then kept them and became dictators. We see similar
power grabs taking place in Hungary and the Philippines today. By contrast,
the U.S. has tended to return power to society once the emergency has passed.
Armies were rapidly demobilized in 1865, 1918, and 1945; Wilson returned the
railroads to private ownership after a couple of years. The powers granted to
the executive branch under the Patriot Act after 9/11 have been gradually
clawed back.
可以看出，在必要时，美国往往能够产生巨量的国家权力。在拉丁美洲，立法机关经常授
予总统紧急权力，但这些总统在紧急状态结束后，会继续保留这些权力并成为独裁者。我
们今天在匈牙利和菲律宾看到了类似的权力争夺。相比之下，一旦危机过去，美国往往会
将权力交还给社会。军队在1865年、1918年和1945年迅速复员；威尔逊在危机过去几年后
将铁路交还给私人所有；9‧11之后，根据《爱国者法案》授予行政部门的权力已逐渐收
回。
So while America may be slow to act at first, once it is up to speed, it can
probably match the capabilities of most authoritarian governments, including
China’s. Indeed, one can argue that because power in the U.S. is
democratically legitimated, it is more durable in the long run than the
authority of a dictatorship. In addition, the government can draw on ideas
and information from citizens and civil society in a way that China cannot.
And for all that U.S. federalism fractures authority, it also creates a
50-state laboratory for new ideas. The governors of New York and California
have been willing to move much faster and more decisively in the pandemic
than the bogged-down federal government.
因此，尽管美国一开始可能行动迟缓，但一旦加快速度，它可能就能赶上包括中国在内的
大多数政府的能力。由于美国的国家权力是以民主程序合法获得的，因此从长远来看，它
比其他政权更持久；另一方面，美国政府可以以中国无法做到的方式，汲取和采用来自公
民社会的思想和信息。此外，尽管联邦制瓦解了权威，但它也为新想法的诞生提供了由50
个州组成的实验室。在本次疫情中，与陷入困境的联邦政府相比，纽约州和加利福尼亚州
的州长们一直愿意更快、更果断地应对疫情。
A democracy delegates emergency powers to its executive to deal with
fast-moving threats. But willingness to delegate power and its effective use
depend on one thing above all, which is trust that the executive will use
those powers wisely and effectively. And this is where the U.S. has a big
problem right now.
民主国家将紧急权力下放给行政部门，以应对快速变化的威胁。但是，放权的意愿和权力
的有效使用取决于一个前提：信任行政人员将明智和有效地使用这些权力。这才是美国现
在面临的一个大问题。
Trust is built on two foundations. First, citizens must believe that their
government has the expertise, technical knowledge, capacity, and impartiality
to make the best available judgments. Capacity simply has to do with the
government having an adequate number of people with the right training and
skills to carry out the tasks they are assigned, from local firemen,
policemen, and health workers to the government executives making
higher-level decisions about issues such as quarantines and bailouts. Trust
is something the U.S. Federal Reserve had in spades in 2008: Its chairman,
Ben Bernanke, was a former academic who had studied the Great Depression in
depth; the Fed is staffed with professional economists rather than political
appointees likely to favor friends and cronies.
这一信任建立在两个基础上。首先，公民必须相信他们的政府具有专业知识、技术和能力
，能够秉公做出最好的判断。能力仅仅与政府是否拥有足够数量的受过适当培训和技能的
人来执行各自的任务有关，即从当地的消防员、警察和卫生工作者到政府的执行人员，能
否在诸如隔离和救助等专业问题上做出更高级别的决策。2008年，美联储绝对拥有信任：
其主席本‧伯南克曾是一位深入研究大萧条的学者。美联储由专业经济学家组成，而不是
由任人唯亲的政治家组成。
The second foundation is trust in the top end of the hierarchy, which means,
in the U.S. system, the president. Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt enjoyed
high levels of trust during their respective crises. As wartime presidents,
this trio succeeded in symbolizing, in their own persons, the national
struggle. George W. Bush did initially after September 11, but as his
invasion of Iraq soured, citizens began questioning the delegations of
authority they had made to him via legislation like the Patriot Act.
第二个基础是对高层的信任，在美国的体系中，也就是对总统的信任。林肯、威尔逊和罗
斯福在各自的危机中都享有高度的信任。作为战时总统，这三位成功以他们自己的身份象
征了国家的斗争。乔治‧w‧布什在9‧11之后的最初一段时间也享有这种信任，但随着他
对伊拉克的入侵，民众开始质疑他们通过《爱国者法案》授予他的权力。
The United States today faces a crisis of political trust. Trump’s base—the
35–40 percent of the population that will support him no matter what—has
been fed a diet of conspiracy stories for the past four years concerning the
“deep state,” and taught to distrust expertise that does not actively
support the president.
而今天的美国则面临着一场政治信任危机。川普当选的基础是无论如何都会支持他的35
- 40%的人口，他们在过去的四年里被灌输了关于“深度国家”的阴谋故事，并被教导不
去信任那些不积极支持总统的专家。
President Trump continues to denigrate and undermine agencies he feels are
hostile: the intelligence community, the Justice Department, the State
Department, the National Security Council, even the National Oceanographic
and Atmospheric Administration. Many administrative agencies have seen a
steady depletion of career civil servants in recent years, with positions of
high responsibility going either to acting agency and bureau heads, or else
to political friends of the president such as Acting Director of National
Intelligence Richard Grenell. With a 29-year-old partisan conducting a purge
of federal agencies, the administration has placed personal loyalty far above
competence. Trump appears to be well on his way to sidelining the highly
trusted Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases, for disagreeing with him publicly.
川普总统还持续诋毁和破坏他认为敌对的机构：情报界、司法部、国务院、国家安全委员
会，甚至国家海洋和大气管理局。近年来，许多行政机构的职业公务员不断减少，一些责
任重大的职位要么落到代理领导手中，要么落到总统的政治盟友手中，比如国家情报局代
理局长理查德‧格伦内尔。党派人士正在对联邦机构进行清洗，将个人忠诚置于能力之上
。川普似乎很有可能将备受信任的美国国家过敏和传染病研究所所长安东尼‧福奇排挤出
局，原因是福奇公开反对川普。
All of which highlights the extent of the challenge to the second foundation:
trust in the president and his immediate circle. Donald Trump has never,
during his three and a half years as president, sought to reach out to the
more than half of the country that didn’t vote for him. He has not taken any
of the simple steps he could have to build trust. When recently asked by a
journalist what he would say to fearful Americans—a softball question any
other leader would have hit out of the park—he instead went on a tirade
against the question and the journalist.
以上情况都凸显了对第二种信任——总统及其政府班子的信任的挑战。唐纳德‧川普在担
任总统的三年半时间里，对一半以上没有投票给他的人，他从未采取任何措施来建立信任
。最近，一位记者问他会对胆怯的美国人说些什么，这是一个任何领导人都能轻易回答的
简单问题，但川普却对这个问题和发问的记者进行了激烈的抨击。
Because of Trump’s hesitancy to take the COVID-19 pandemic seriously, many
conservatives have come to deny that we are in a crisis at all, and insist
that the panic surrounding the virus is the result of a Democratic plot to
take down the Trump presidency. Trump himself, after briefly pivoting to
portray himself as a “wartime” president, declared that he wanted to reopen
the country by Easter. He has admitted that this date was chosen not on any
epidemiological grounds, but because it would be a “beautiful” date for
churches to be full. Perhaps he is thinking of the national spectacle of
thanksgiving he could stage around his reopened rallies, and how that would
affect his reelection chances.
由于川普不愿认真对待新型冠状病毒，许多保守派人士开始否认我们正处于危机之中，并
坚称，围绕该病毒的恐慌是民主党推翻川普总统任期的阴谋。川普本人在短暂地把自己描
绘成一个“战时”总统后，宣布他希望在复活节前重新开放这个国家。他承认，选择这一
天不是因为流行病学的原因，而是因为这将是一个“美丽”的日子，在这一天教堂将十分
热闹。他可能还在盘算在重新开放的那天上演一场全国性的感恩节日典，在他的计画里，
这种庆典可能会对他的连任机会产生影响。
The intense distrust that Trump and his administration have aroused, and the
distrust of government that they have instilled in their supporters, will
have terrible consequences for policy. The Democrats were insistent on
including transparency requirements for use of the corporate-bailout fund
included in the $2 trillion relief bill passed on Friday. The Trump
administration, in signing it, asserted that it will not be bound by this
provision, just as it refused congressional oversight during the impeachment
proceedings. This guarantees that any future exercise of emergency powers to
help distressed businesses or hard-hit regions will be second-guessed, and
subject to accusations of cronyism on the part of an administration that up
to now has been quite happy to reward cronies.
川普和他的政府引发的强烈的不信任，以及他们向支持者灌输的对政府的不信任，将产生
可怕的后果。民主党坚持要求在周五通过的2万亿美元救助法案中纳入使用公司救助基金
的透明度要求。但川普政府在签署该法案时坚称，它不会受到这一条款的约束，就像它在
弹劾程序期间拒绝接受国会的监督一样。这将使得任何为了帮助受困企业或地区而动用的
紧急权力，都将受到事后的质疑，并受到任人唯亲的指责。因为到目前为止，川普政府一
直乐于奖励裙带关系。
In the end, I don’t believe that we will be able to reach broad conclusions
about whether dictatorships or democracies are better able to survive a
pandemic. Democracies such as South Korea and Germany have been relatively
successful so far in dealing with the crisis, even if the U.S. is doing less
well. What matters in the end is not regime type, but whether citizens trust
their leaders, and whether those leaders preside over a competent and
effective state. And on this score, America’s deepening tribalism leaves few
reasons for optimism.
最后，我不相信我们能够就哪种政体更有能力在大流行中生存下来得出普遍性结论。到目
前为止，尽管美国的表现没那么好，但韩国和德国等民主国家在应对危机方面取得了相当
的成功。归根结底，重要的不是政体类型，而是公民是否信任他们的领导人，以及这些领
导人是否领导著一个称职而有效的国家。在这一点上，美国不断加深的部落主义让我们没
有理由感到乐观。
//
心得：
1. “和体制无关，是领导人有问题”的结论非常脆弱，它完全回避了该体制如何走到今
天这种局面 (权力收放问题)，产生出这种领导人 (信任问题)，而这才是应该讨论的重
点。
2. 文中既然已经认为应用高效和低效在划分政体，就不该再纠结于民主、专制这种无意
义的称呼。