We Are Living in a Failed State
我们美国人生活在一个失败国家
The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.
冠状病毒没有破坏美国， 只是揭露已经坏掉的一面。
原文： The Atlantic https://tinyurl.com/y98zlj7b
译文：https://www.guancha.cn/GeorgePacker/2020_04_27_548392_s.shtml
作者：George Packer
译者：听桥
When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying
conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt
political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and
distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live,
uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a
pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition
that we are in the high-risk category.
新冠病毒到来时，发现了一个基本状况危险的国家，并无情利用了那些状况。腐败的精英
阶层，僵化的官僚体制，冷酷无情的经济，四分五裂且心烦意乱的公众，——这些慢性病
多年来一直得不到治疗。我们早就学会了别别扭扭地容忍这些症状。要用如此规模的一场
大流行病和与这流行病的亲密接触，那些症状的严重性才得以暴露，使美国人震惊地意识
到，我们眼下属于高风险类别。
The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The
United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with
shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too
corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered
two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful
blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy
theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted
quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a
government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House
took the mic and politicized the message.
这危机要求我们在全国层面快速展开理智的集体行动。但相反，美国的应对是巴基斯坦或
白俄罗斯式的，就像是个基础设施败坏、政府功能失调的国家，其一众领导人太过腐败和
愚蠢，乃至于无法阻挡大众蒙受苦难。行政分支浪费了无法挽回的两个月准备时间。总统
有意视而不见，嫁祸他人，夸夸其谈，谎话连篇。从他的喉舌那里，则冒出一个又一个阴
谋论和神奇疗法。一些参议员和企业高管行动迅速，但不是要预防即将到来的灾难，而是
要从中获利。当有政府医生试图警告公众有多么危险时，白宫拿走了话筒，把那条消息政
治化了。
Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find
themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent
instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on
their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks,
gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply,
governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called
on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced
into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate
profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep
ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia,
Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest
power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.
在没完没了的3月间，美国人每天早上醒来，都发现他们自己成了一个失败国家的公民。
没有全国性计画，根本没有一以贯之的指导方案：家庭、学校和办公场所都被告知，它们
可以自行决定是否关闭和寻求庇护。检测工具、口罩、医护服装和呼吸机的供应严重短缺
，各州州长恳请白宫提供这些物品，遭搪塞后，又向私人企业发出呼吁，而它们无法交货
。各州和各市被迫陷入投标大战，这让它们成了漫天要价和企业逐利的牺牲品。民众拿出
他们的缝纫机，竭力维持医院工作人员的健康和病人的生机。俄罗斯、台湾和联合国向这
个世界上最富有的大国，一个陷入彻底混乱中的乞丐国家，送来了人道主义援助。
Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms.
Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and
himself a wartime president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal
Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with
Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy
regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his
country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020
has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one
miserable leader. Some future autopsy of the pandemic might be called Strange
Defeat, after the historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch’s
contemporaneous study of the fall of France. Despite countless examples
around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national.
And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do
we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response
to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?
唐纳德‧川普几乎完全从个人和政治角度看待这场危机。因为担心连任，他宣布新冠病毒
大流行病为一场战争，而他自己是战时总统。但他令我们脑海中浮现的领袖，是法国将军
菲利普‧贝当（Philippe Petain）元帅。1940年，德国击溃法国防御力量后，贝当与德
国签署了停战协议，随后组建了亲纳粹的 Vichy regime。川普就像是贝当，与入侵者勾
结，将他的国家抛入了一场旷日持久的灾难。2020年的美国更像是1940年的法国，已经用
一场崩溃令自己目瞪口呆；相较于一位可悲的领袖，这场崩溃来得规模更大、程度更深。
未来，人们在剖析这场大流行病时，可以借用历史学家、抵抗运动战士马克‧布洛赫（
Marc Bloch）对同时期法国沦陷的研究，称其为“不可思议的失败”（Strange Defeat）
。
尽管在全美国，个人展示勇气和牺牲的例子数不胜数，但失败是全国性的，而且理当迫使
我们提出一个大多数美国人从不曾必须问到的问题：我们是否足够信任我们的领导人和彼
此，可以召唤人们以集体方式应对某次致命威胁？我们依旧有能力实施自治吗？
This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on
September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the
previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war
remained strong. On that day, people in the rural heartland did not see New
York as an alien stew of immigrants and liberals that deserved its fate, but
as a great American city that had taken a hit for the whole country.
Firefighters from Indiana drove 800 miles to help the rescue effort at Ground
Zero. Our civic reflex was to mourn and mobilize together.
这是这个短促二十一世纪经历的第三场重大危机。第一场发生在2001年9月11日，那时，
美国人从精神上讲还生活在前一个世纪，经济衰退、世界大战和冷战的记忆依旧强悍。那
一天，中部农业腹地的民众没有将纽约视作理当承受那般命运的外邦移民和自由派人士的
熔炉，而是视作一个为整个国家承受了打击的伟大美国城市。来自印第安纳州的消防队员
驱车八百英里，为在世界贸易中心废墟的救援行动施以援手。市民的本能反应是共同哀悼
，齐心动员。
Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the
sense of national unity and fed a bitterness toward the political class that
never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008, intensified it. At the top,
the financial crash could almost be considered a success. Congress passed a
bipartisan bailout bill that saved the financial system. Outgoing
Bush-administration officials cooperated with incoming Obama administration
officials. The experts at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department
used monetary and fiscal policy to prevent a second Great Depression. Leading
bankers were shamed but not prosecuted; most of them kept their fortunes and
some their jobs. Before long they were back in business. A Wall Street trader
told me that the financial crisis had been a “speed bump.”
党派政治和危害严重的政策，尤其是伊拉克战争，抹去了国家团结的意识，催生了对精英
阶层的怨恨，这种怨恨从未真正消失。发生在2008年的第二次危机加剧了那种怨恨。在最
顶层，金融崩溃几乎可以被认为是一次成功。国会通过了一项两党都接受的救助法案，挽
救了金融系统。即将离任的布什的行政官员与即将上任的欧巴马的行政官员展开了合作。
美联储和财政部的专家们运用货币和财政政策，防止了第二次大萧条的发生。一些最重要
的银行家遭到羞辱，但没有被起诉；他们中的大多数人保住了自己的财富，一些人保住了
工作。没过多久，他们的业务就回归正常。一位华尔街交易员告诉我，那场金融危机早就
成了“减速带”。
All of the lasting pain was felt in the middle and at the bottom, by
Americans who had taken on debt and lost their jobs, homes, and retirement
savings. Many of them never recovered, and young people who came of age in
the Great Recession are doomed to be poorer than their parents. Inequality—
the fundamental, relentless force in American life since the late 1970s—grew
worse.
身处中间层和底层的那些债务缠身，失去了工作、房子和退休储蓄的美国人，感受到了所
有挥之不去的苦楚。他们中间的很多人从来没有恢复元气，在那场萧条中成年的年轻人注
定比他们的父辈更加贫穷。不平等作为1970年代晚期以来美国人生活中的一支基础性的无
情力量，变得更加严重了。
This second crisis drove a profound wedge between Americans: between the
upper and lower classes, Republicans and Democrats, metropolitan and rural
people, the native-born and immigrants, ordinary Americans and their leaders.
Social bonds had been under growing strain for several decades, and now they
began to tear. The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were—in
health care, financial regulation, green energy—had only palliative effects.
The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors,
lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting
effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority,
especially government’s.
第二场危机在美国人中间，在更上阶层和更下阶层、共和党人和民主党人、大都市人和农
村人、土生土长的人口和移民、普通美国人和他们的领导人之间，制造出了深刻的隔阂。
社会关系承受着越来越大的压力，这种情况已有数十年，现在它们开始撕裂。欧巴马执政
时期的一些改革举措尽管在医保、金融监管、绿色能源等方面意义重大，但仅有权宜之效
。过去十年的长期复苏，富了企业和投资者，但欺骗了专业人士，且将工人阶级更远地抛
下。经济衰退的持久影响是，加剧了两极分化，令权威，尤其是政府的权威，声誉扫地。
Both parties were slow to grasp how much credibility they’d lost. The coming
politics was populist. Its harbinger wasn’t Barack Obama but Sarah Palin,
the absurdly unready vice-presidential candidate who scorned expertise and
reveled in celebrity. She was Donald Trump’s John the Baptist.
两党都迟迟未能领会到，他们的公信力丧失了多少。即将到来的政治是民粹主义的，其先
兆并非贝拉克‧欧巴马，而是萨拉‧佩林（Sarah Palin），这位毫无准备到荒谬程度的
副总统候选人对专业知识嗤之以鼻，并陶醉在名人效应中。她是唐纳德‧川普的“施洗者
约翰”（John the Baptist）。（萨拉‧佩林，生于1964年，2006年12月至2009年7月间
担任阿拉斯加州州长，是该州历史上最年轻且为女性的州长，共和党人。施洗者约翰，是
公元一世纪早期的一位犹太巡回传教者。——译注）
Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But
the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an
understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and
immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the
benefit of private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted
government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily
with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they made themselves
Trump’s footmen.
川普是作为共和党建制派的反对者登上权力宝座的。但保守派精英阶层和这位新领袖之间
很快达成了谅解。无论他们在贸易和移民之类问题上有何种分歧，他们的基本目标都是共
同的：为谋取私人利益而赤裸裸地开掘公共资产。那些希望政府尽可能少为共同利益做事
的共和党政客和捐款人，可以与一个全然不知如何统治国家的政权愉快共处，而且自己充
当了川普的仆人。
Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to
immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be
president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines
of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his
presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third
of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be
reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of
knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.
川普就像一个在干燥的田野上扔火柴的男孩那样肆意，开始牺牲美国人残存的市民生活。
他甚至从来都没有假装自己是整个国家的总统，而是挑动我们，围绕种族、性别、宗教、
公民身份、教育背景、地域，以及——在他上任以来的每一天——政党问题，互相争斗不
止。他的主要统治工具是谎言。这个国家有三分之一的人将自己锁在一个布满镜子的大厅
，认为那就是现实；有三分之一的人因坚持认为真理可知，而自己发疯了；另有三分之一
的人甚至放弃了尝试。
Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing
ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He
set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil
service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career
officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as
commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own
interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts
in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the
rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his
reelection pockets. If lying was his means for using power, corruption was
his end.
持续多年的右翼意识形态攻击，两党都在推动的政治化，加上持续的资金缺乏，已严重戕
害川普斩获的联邦政府。他开始着手摧毁总统这项工作，破坏专业的公务员队伍。他赶走
了一些最有才华和经验的职业官员，留下一些重要岗位无人填补，并安插了忠于他的人士
充当政委，凌驾于饱受恐吓的幸存者之上，目的是：服务于他自己的利益。他的主要立法
成果是减税法案，作为美国历史上最大规模的减税行动之一，这部法案为大企业和富人送
去了数千亿美元。受益者成群结队，到他的度假胜地消费，排队为他的连选提供资金。假
如撒谎是他运用权力的手段，那么腐败就是他的目的。
This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous
cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of
precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying
communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual
hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even
with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and
beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and
his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical
exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.
这就是呈现在新冠病毒面前的美国景观：在繁荣的城市，一群与全球各处联络的办公室工
作人员依赖一群朝不保夕、隐匿无形的服务业工人；在农村地区，衰败的社区反抗著现代
世界；在社交媒体上，不同阵营之间充斥着相互仇恨和无休无止的谩骂；在经济领域，尽
管就业充分，但成功的资方和受困的劳工之间存在巨大且不断拉大的差距；在华盛顿，一
个由骗子和他智力破产的政党，在领导一个无效的政府；在这个国家各个地方，弥漫着一
股愤世嫉俗的疲惫情绪，你看不到人们有共同的身份或未来。
If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this
soil in a century and a half. Invasion and occupation expose a society’s
fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime,
clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.
假如这场大流行病真的是一种战争，那么这将是一个半世纪以来在这片土地上发生的第一
场。侵略和占领暴露了一个社会的断层线，夸大了在和平时期被忽视或被接受的东西，澄
清了基本的真相，扬起了被掩埋的腐烂气味。
The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With
different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to
red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also
should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in
debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its
effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long.
When tests for the virus were almost impossible to find, the wealthy and
connected—the model and reality-TV host Heidi Klum, the entire roster of the
Brooklyn Nets, the president’s conservative allies—were somehow able to get
tested, despite many showing no symptoms. The smattering of individual
results did nothing to protect public health. Meanwhile, ordinary people with
fevers and chills had to wait in long and possibly infectious lines, only to
be turned away because they weren’t actually suffocating. An internet joke
proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to
sneeze in a rich person’s face.
这病毒本应当将美国人团结起来，对抗共同的威胁。假如领导层不同，美国人是可能被团
结起来的。相反，即使病毒从民主党主政的地区蔓延到了共和党主政的地区，人们的态度
依旧沿着我们熟悉的党派分界线分裂了。
这病毒也本应成为一个重要的平衡因素。要成为病毒的攻击目标，你不必在军队服役，也
不必负债累累，而只需要是一个人。但从一开始，病毒的影响就被我们容忍太久的不平等
扭曲了。在几乎不可能找到病毒检测方法的时候，富人和有关系的人——模特和电视真人
秀节目主持人海蒂‧克拉姆（Heidi Klum），布鲁克林网队（Brooklyn Nets）的全部候
选队员，总统的保守派盟友——就能以某种方式获得检测机会，尽管许多人没有症状出现
。这样的个人零星检测结果对保护公众健康毫无帮助。
与此同时，有发烧和发冷症状的普通人不得不排在漫长且可能已被感染了的队伍中等待，
但只是被拒之门外，因为他们实际上并没有出现呼吸困难的症状。一个网络笑话提议，要
想知道你是否感染了病毒，唯一的办法就是对着富人的脸打喷嚏。
When Trump was asked about this blatant unfairness, he expressed disapproval
but added, “Perhaps that’s been the story of life.” Most Americans hardly
register this kind of special privilege in normal times. But in the first
weeks of the pandemic it sparked outrage, as if, during a general
mobilization, the rich had been allowed to buy their way out of military
service and hoard gas masks. As the contagion has spread, its victims have
been likely to be poor, black, and brown people. The gross inequality of our
health-care system is evident in the sight of refrigerated trucks lined up
outside public hospitals.
当被问及这种明目张胆的不公正时，川普表达了不赞同的意见，但补充说：“也许这就是
生活。”正常时期，大多数美国人很少注意到这种特权。但在这场大流行病爆发的最初几
个星期，如此特权引发了公愤，就好像在一次总动员期间，富人被允许出钱免服兵役，并
囤积防毒面具。随着这场传染病的扩散，其受害者已经可能是穷人、黑人和棕色人种。美
国医疗卫生系统的严重不平等，从公立医院外排队运送尸体的冷藏车可以明显看出。
We now have two categories of work: essential and nonessential. Who have the
essential workers turned out to be? Mostly people in low-paying jobs that
require their physical presence and put their health directly at risk:
warehouse workers, shelf-stockers, Instacart shoppers, delivery drivers,
municipal employees, hospital staffers, home health aides, long-haul
truckers. Doctors and nurses are the pandemic’s combat heroes, but the
supermarket cashier with her bottle of sanitizer and the UPS driver with his
latex gloves are the supply and logistics troops who keep the frontline
forces intact. In a smartphone economy that hides whole classes of human
beings, we’re learning where our food and goods come from, who keeps us
alive. An order of organic baby arugula on AmazonFresh is cheap and arrives
overnight in part because the people who grow it, sort it, pack it, and
deliver it have to keep working while sick. For most service workers, sick
leave turns out to be an impossible luxury. It’s worth asking if we would
accept a higher price and slower delivery so that they could stay home.
我们现在有两类工作：必不可少的工作的和非必不可少的工作。谁是必不可少的工人？主
要是从事低薪工作的人，那些工作需要他们本人在场，会直接危及他们的健康：仓库工人
、填充货架的工人、在Instacart为网上下单者买东西并交付的人、送货司机、市政雇员
、医院工作人员、家庭护理工人、长途卡车司机。医生和护士是抗击这场大流行病的英雄
，但配有瓶装消毒液的超市收银员和带着乳胶手套的联邦包裹公司（UPS）司机，是保持
前线部队完好无损的供应和后勤部队。（Instacart是一家技术公司，创办于2012年，在
美国和加拿大运营，提供当日食品杂货的送货和取货服务。——译注）
在隐匿了各阶层人类的智能手机经济中，我们正在学习的是，我们的食物和商品从哪里来
，是谁让我们活着。在亚马逊生鲜配送（AmazonFresh），下单一份有机婴儿芝麻菜很便
宜，且可以隔夜送到，这部分是因为，种植、分类、包装和运送它们的人在生病期间必须
继续工作。对大多数服务业的工人来说，病假是一种不可能的奢侈。值得追问的是，我们
是否愿意接受更高的价格和更慢的交货速度，这样他们就可以呆在家里了。
The pandemic has also clarified the meaning of nonessential workers. One
example is Kelly Loeffler, the Republican junior senator from Georgia, whose
sole qualification for the empty seat that she was given in January is her
immense wealth. Less than three weeks into the job, after a dire private
briefing about the virus, she got even richer from the selling-off of stocks,
then she accused Democrats of exaggerating the danger and gave her
constituents false assurances that may well have gotten them killed. Loeffler
’s impulses in public service are those of a dangerous parasite. A body
politic that would place someone like this in high office is well advanced in
decay.
这场大流行病也明确了，谁才是非必不可少的工人。一个例子是来自佐治亚州的共和党新
晋参议员凯莉‧吕弗勒（Kelly Loeffler），她1月份之所以能填补空缺的议员席位，唯
一的资质是她的巨额财富。上任不到三个星期，她参加了一次有关新冠病毒的可怕的秘密
简报会，之后抛售股票，从中获得了更多财富。然后她指责民主党夸大了危险，并向她的
选民做出了错误的保证，这大有可能害了他们。吕弗勒在公共服务方面展示的冲动，是那
种危险寄生虫的冲动。一个可以让这样的人担任高级职务的政治体，已经败落到了较晚期
。
The purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his
son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. In his short lifetime, Kushner
has been fraudulently promoted as both a meritocrat and a populist. He was
born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan entered the
Oval Office, in 1981—a princeling of the second Gilded Age. Despite Jared’s
mediocre academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father,
Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation to the university. Father helped son
with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business, then Jared
continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where
his father had contributed $3 million. Jared repaid his father’s support
with fierce loyalty when Charles was sentenced to two years in federal prison
in 2005 for trying to resolve a family legal quarrel by entrapping his sister
’s husband with a prostitute and videotaping the encounter.
政治虚无主义最纯粹的体现不是川普本人，而是他的女婿兼高级顾问贾里德‧库什纳（
Jared Kushner）。在他短暂的一生中，库什纳被欺骗性地宣传成了精英和民粹主义者。
1981年，罗纳德‧雷根入主白宫椭圆形办公室的那个月，他出生于一个富裕的房地产商家
庭，是第二镀金时代的太子党。尽管学业成绩平平，但在其父查尔斯（Charles）承诺向
哈佛捐赠250万美元后，贾里德仍被哈佛大学录取。父亲用1000万美元的贷款帮助儿子创
办了家族企业，然后贾里德继续在纽约大学的法学院和商学院接受精英教育，他父亲向这
里贡献了300万美元。2005年，查尔斯因利用妓女搆陷其妹夫并拍下了这次会面，试图用
这种办法解决家族法律纠纷，而被判入狱两年，当时贾里德以强烈的忠诚回报了他父亲的
支持。
Jared Kushner failed as a skyscraper owner and a newspaper publisher, but he
always found someone to rescue him, and his self-confidence only grew. In
American Oligarchs, Andrea Bernstein describes how he adopted the outlook of
a risk-taking entrepreneur, a “disruptor” of the new economy. Under the
influence of his mentor Rupert Murdoch, he found ways to fuse his financial,
political, and journalistic pursuits. He made conflicts of interest his
business model.
贾里德‧库什纳曾拥有一栋摩天大楼，并办过一份报纸，都未获成功，但他总能找到人来
拯救他，而且他不过是越来越自信。安德烈‧伯恩斯坦（AndreaBernstein）在《美国寡
头》（American Oligarchs）一书中描述了他如何采纳了一位敢于冒险的企业家即新经济
“破坏者”意见的故事。在导师鲁伯特‧默多克（Rupert Murdoch）的影响下，他找到了
融合财务、政治和新闻业追求的门道。他将利益冲突当成了自己的商业模式。（默多克，
1931年生于澳大利亚，美国传媒业大亨。——译注）
So when his father-in-law became president, Kushner quickly gained power in
an administration that raised amateurism, nepotism, and corruption to
governing principles. As long as he busied himself with Middle East peace,
his feckless meddling didn’t matter to most Americans. But since he became
an influential adviser to Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, the result has
been mass death.
因之，随着其岳父成为总统，库什纳很快就在一个将业余行为、裙带关系和腐败升级为统
治原则的行政分支中获得了权力。只要他忙于中东和平，他那些没有意义的介入对大多数
美国人来说就并不重要。但自从他成为对川普有重要影响的新冠病毒事务顾问以来，结果
就是大规模的死亡。
In his first week on the job, in mid-March, Kushner co-authored the worst
Oval Office speech in memory, interrupted the vital work of other officials,
may have compromised security protocols, flirted with conflicts of interest
and violations of federal law, and made fatuous promises that quickly turned
to dust. “The federal government is not designed to solve all our problems,”
he said, explaining how he would tap his corporate connections to create
drive-through testing sites. They never materialized. He was convinced by
corporate leaders that Trump should not use presidential authority to compel
industries to manufacture ventilators—then Kushner’s own attempt to
negotiate a deal with General Motors fell through. With no loss of faith in
himself, he blamed shortages of necessary equipment and gear on incompetent
state governors.
3月中旬，上任后第一周，库什纳参与撰写了记忆中最糟糕的椭圆形办公室演讲稿，打断
了其他官员的重要工作，或者已经违反了安全协议，参与到了涉嫌利益冲突且违反联邦法
律的事项中，并做出了很快就化为乌有的愚蠢承诺。“联邦政府的设计不是要解决我们所
有的问题”，他在解释他将如何利用自己的公司关系，在免下车餐厅（drive-through）
设立核酸检测点时这样说。那些关系从未落到现实中。一些企业领导人说服他相信，川普
不应动用总统的权威强迫一些产业生产呼吸机。后来，库什纳自己试图与通用汽车谈判达
成协议，但未能实现。他对自己没有失去信心，于是将必要设备和装备短缺的责任算到了
不称职的州长头上。
To watch this pale, slim-suited dilettante breeze into the middle of a deadly
crisis, dispensing business-school jargon to cloud the massive failure of his
father-in-law’s administration, is to see the collapse of a whole approach
to governing. It turns out that scientific experts and other civil servants
are not traitorous members of a “deep state”—they’re essential workers,
and marginalizing them in favor of ideologues and sycophants is a threat to
the nation’s health. It turns out that “nimble” companies can’t prepare
for a catastrophe or distribute lifesaving goods—only a competent federal
government can do that. It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of
attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a
heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded,
stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a
second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat.
看到这位面色苍白、身材苗条的票友闲庭信步般介入一场致命的危机，抛开了商学院的行
话以掩盖他岳父的行政分支的巨大失败，就相当于看到了整个统治方式的崩溃。事实表明
，科学专家和其他公务员并非叛国的“阴谋势力集团”（deep state）成员：他们是必不
可少的工人，将他们边缘化，以理论家和谄媚者取代，是对国家健康的威胁。事实表明，
“灵活”的公司无法为灾难做好准备，也无力分发救生物资，只有能干的联邦政府可以做
到这一点。事实表明，所有事情都有代价；经年累月地攻击政府、榨干政府资源、消耗政
府的士气，造成的沉重代价是公众不得不付出生命。
所有项目都被撤资，所有库存都被耗尽，所有计画都被取消，这意味着我们已经成了一个
二流国家。然后，病毒和不可思议的失败就来了。
The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health
of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now
enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will
change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment,
2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But
putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the
beginning.
制服这一大流行病的战斗也必须是恢复国家健康并重建它的战斗，非如此，我们眼下正忍
受的苦难和悲痛就将永远得不到补偿。
有目前的领导层，什么都不会改变。如果说9‧11事件和2008年金融危机耗尽了人们对老
一代政治当权派的信任，那么2020年就应当碾灭“反政治”是我们的救星的念想。结束这
个政权，是必须的和值得的，但这仅仅是个开始。
We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can
stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another,
letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our
normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones
so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical
workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in
Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator
production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get
through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of
Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election
forced on them by partisan justices. We can learn from these dreadful days
that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a
citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After
we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what
it was like to be alone.
我们面临一个选择，这场危机让这个选择变得清晰到了无可逃避的地步。我们可以长期保
持自我隔离，惧怕和回避彼此，让我们共同的纽带消失殆尽。
抑或，我们可以利用正常生活中的这种停顿，留意一下：那些举着手机，好让他们的病人
可以和亲人说再见的医院工人；那些从亚特兰大飞去纽约帮忙的一飞机医务人员；那些要
求把他们的工厂改造成呼吸机生产厂的马萨诸塞州航空产业工人；那些因无法通过电话联
系到人手稀少的失业办公室，而排著长队的佛罗里达人；那些无惧没完没了的等待、冰雹
和传染，在党派立场强烈的法官强加给他们的选举中投票的密尔沃基居民。
我们可以从这些可怕的日子中领会到：愚蠢和不公正是致命的；在一个民主国家中，充当
公民是必不可少的工作；团结的替代品是死亡。走出藏身之处，摘下口罩后，我们不应忘
记一个人独处是什么滋味。
（本文转载自《大西洋月刊》，是美国最受尊敬的杂志之一，创办于1857年。作者是美国
《大西洋》杂志特约撰稿人，著有《 Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of
the American Century 》和《The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
》。）