福山：美国大选体现了政党的代表性危机

[摘要]福山说，需要解释的并不是为什么民粹主义者在今天脱颖而出，而是为什么，他们要过那么久才做到这一步。

福山：2016年美国大选的意义

桑德斯2016年5月在加州见支持者。

美 国大选依然进行得如火如荼。上周，曾在90年代提出“历史终结论”的政治学家弗朗西斯·福山在《外交事务》（Foreign Affairs）上发表了《美国政治的衰败或复兴？：2016年大选的意义》（American Political Decay or Renewal?: The Meaning of the 2016 Election）。

在 这篇文章里，福山把特朗普和桑德斯都视为某种意义上的民粹主义者。他认为，他们的出现，以及像杰布·布什这样利益集团和寡头政治的代表被早早淘汰，说明美 国的民主并没有人们以为的那么糟。最终，在两代人经历了精英和大众的分化之后，美国民主总算开始回应大多数人所关心的不平等和经济停滞问题，“社会阶级” 议题重新回到了美国政治舞台的中心。福山说，需要解释的并不是为什么民粹主义者在今天脱颖而出，而是为什么，他们要过那么久才做到这一步。

福 山首先分析了所谓民粹主义的社会基础。在这轮美国政治周期中，人们的关注焦点从寡头的过度积累，转向了那些被抛在后面的人们的拮据处境。工人阶级，尤其是 受过高中教育的白人工人的收入在持续下降。如今，他们仿佛处在了上世纪80年代的黑人底层所处的位置。在一些农村的白人社区中，毒品问题日益严重，死亡率 不断攀升——原因不外乎自杀、吸毒、酗酒。但如是惨淡的现实，几乎与美国的精英们毫不相干。

那 为什么这些问题到今年大选才暴露出来，而不是更早呢？福山说，这是因为美国政治体制的代表性出现了问题：共和、民主两党都无法为这些式微的群体服务。共和 党是商业精英和社会保守势力的合体，前者出钱，后者出选票。他们倡导经济自由化，促进自由贸易立法，使他们身后的商人从进出口贸易中获利；他们争取解除对 银行的各种调控，致力于为富人减税，减少穷人的社会福利。这些政策都对工人阶级的收入水平产生了负面的影响。民主党呢？从克林顿时代的“第三条道路”开 始，民主党的精英就去拥抱后里根时代关于自由贸易和移民的共识，他们收买劳工运动，阻止后者对贸易协定提出反对意见。民主党把身份政治作为其核心价值，他 们因此失去了过去罗斯福新政最有力的支持者：白人工人阶级。白人工人转而支持共和党，他们虽然是奥巴马医改的最大受益者，却误以为这个法案是为别人，而不 是为他们制定的。

福山指出，特朗普和桑德斯某种程度上共享了同一个主题：即一种旨在保 护和恢复美国工人工作的民族主义经济政策。所以特朗普反对移民，谴责外迁的美国公司，声讨贸易自由化。事实上，自由贸易令全球产出在过去的两代人中激增， 全球化使数以百万计的人脱贫，更为美国自身创造了难以计算的财富。但是，贸易自由化在提高总收入的同时，也会导致分配不均：它制造赢家和输家。一些经济学 家总是认为，贸易创造的收益可以以职业培训的方式补偿那些被淘汰的低端工人，但美国的现实告诉我们，这样的想法很不实际。怎么可能把一个55岁的流水线工 人培训成一个程序员？资本因其集中性、流动性，总是相对于劳动力更具优势。发展中国家和发达国家间的劳动力成本差异如此之大，要美国保留低端职业终究是不 可能的。福山建议美国向德国学习：学习德国的学徒制度，保护本国的供应链。如今的美国就是德国的反面，两党都对白人工人不管不顾，后者还是只能靠自己。

今 天，美国的经济和世界上其他地方如此紧密地扭结在了一起，特朗普主张的贸易保护主义显然会造成许多问题。福山说，这个国家不需要强硬的领袖，需要体制的改 革家。他提出了一些具体建议：首先是移民改革，一方面要为既有的“非法”移民提供成为美国公民的通道，一方面要严格执行法律，发行全国性的具有生物识别功 能的身份证，阻止新移民；其次，在不可能阻挡自由贸易势头的前提下，试图说服一些美国的跨国公司回国投资，修改公司税；最后，大规模地重建基础设施，从而 创造巨量的工作岗位，长远地推动美国的生产力。

福山在特朗普和桑德斯身上看到了某种契 机。他在文章最后写道，“民粹主义”是政治精英给那些他们不喜欢的、但老百姓支持的政策贴上的标签，但精英并不总是做出正确的选择，他们对大众选择的不 屑，很可能仅仅是为了遮蔽自己赤裸裸的利益。民众动员本身并不天然是好的或坏的。最终，要挽救美国政治的衰败，还是需要把民主的愤怒导向好的政策——那 么，福山在这次大选里支持谁，就不言而喻了。（文/丁雄飞）

转自澎湃新闻：http://www.thepaper.cn/

      American Political Decay or Renewal?

The Meaning of the 2016 Election

By Francis Fukuyama

Two years ago, I argued in these pages that America was suffering from political decay. The country’s constitutional system of checks and balances, combined with partisan polarization and the rise of well-financed interest groups, had combined to yield what I labeled “vetocracy,” a situation in which it was easier to stop government from doing things than it was to use govern­ment to promote the common good. Recurrent budgetary crises, stagnating bureaucracy, and a lack of policy innovation were the hall­marks of a political system in disarray.

On the surface, the 2016 presidential election seems to be bearing out this analysis. The once proud Republican Party lost control of its nominating process to Donald Trump’s hostile takeover and is riven with deep internal contradictions. On the Democratic side, meanwhile, the ultra-insider Hillary Clinton has faced surprisingly strong competition from Bernie Sanders, a 74-year-old self-proclaimed demo­cratic socialist. Whatever the issue—from immigration to financial reform to trade to stagnating incomes—large numbers of voters on both sides of the spectrum have risen up against what they see as a corrupt, self-dealing Establishment, turning to radical outsiders in the hopes of a purifying cleanse.

In fact, however, the turbulent campaign has shown that American democracy is in some ways in better working order than expected. Whatever one might think of their choices, voters have flocked to the polls in state after state and wrested control of the political narrative from organized interest groups and oligarchs. Jeb Bush, the son and brother of presidents who once seemed the inevitable Republican choice, ignominiously withdrew from the race in February after having blown through more than $130 million (together with his super PAC). Sanders, meanwhile, limiting himself to small donations and pledging to disempower the financial elite that supports his opponent, has raised even more than Bush and nipped at Clinton’s heels throughout.

The real story of this election is that after several decades, American democracy is finally responding to the rise of inequality and the economic stagnation experienced by most of the population. Social class is now back at the heart of American politics, trumping other cleavages—race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, geography—that had dominated discussion in recent elections.

The gap between the fortunes of elites and those of the rest of the public has been growing for two generations, but only now is it coming to dominate national politics. What really needs to be explained is not why populists have been able to make such gains this cycle but why it took them so long to do so. Moreover, although it is good to know that the U.S. political system is less ossified and less in thrall to monied elites than many assumed, the nostrums being hawked by the populist crusaders are nearly entirely unhelpful, and if embraced, they would stifle growth, exacerbate malaise, and make the situation worse rather than better. So now that the elites have been shocked out of their smug complacency, the time has come for them to devise more workable solutions to the problems they can no longer deny or ignore.

THE SOCIAL BASIS OF POPULISM

In recent years, it has become ever harder to deny that incomes have been stagnating for most U.S. citizens even as elites have done better than ever, generating rising inequality throughout American society. Certain basic facts, such as the enormously increased share of national wealth taken by the top one percent, and indeed the top 0.1 percent, are increasingly uncontested. What is new this political cycle is that attention has started to turn from the excesses of the oligarchy to the straitened circumstances of those left behind.

Two recent books—Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Robert Putnam’s Our Kids—lay out the new social reality in painful detail. Murray and Putnam are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, one a libertarian conservative and the other a mainstream liberal, yet the data they report are virtually identical. Working-class incomes have declined over the past generation, most dramatically for white men with a high school education or less. For this group, Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again!” has real meaning. But the pathologies they suffer from go much deeper and are revealed in data on crime, drug use, and single-parent families.

Back in the 1980s, there was a broad national conversation about the emergence of an African American underclass—that is, a mass of underemployed and underskilled people whose poverty seemed self-replicating because it led to broken families that were unable to transmit the kinds of social norms and behaviors required to compete in the job market. Today, the white working class is in virtually the same position as the black underclass was back then.

During the run-up to the primary in New Hampshire—a state that is about as white and rural as any in the country—many Americans were likely surprised to learn that voters’ most important concern there was heroin addiction. In fact, opioid and methamphetamine addiction have become as epidemic in rural white communities in states such as Indiana and Kentucky as crack was in the inner city a generation ago. A recent paper by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton showed that the death rates for white non-Hispanic middle-aged men in the United States rose between 1999 and 2013, even as they fell for virtually every other population group and in every other rich country. The causes of this increase appear to have been suicide, drugs, and alcohol—nearly half a million excess deaths over what would have been expected. And crime rates for this group have skyrocketed as well.

American democracy is finally responding to the economic stagnation of most of the population.

This increasingly bleak reality, however, scarcely registered with American elites—not least because over the same period, they themselves were doing quite well. People with at least a college education have seen their fortunes rise over the decades. Rates of divorce and single-parent families have decreased among this group, neighborhood crime has fallen steadily, cities have been reclaimed for young urbanites, and technologies such as the Internet and social media have powered social trust and new forms of community engagement. For this group, helicopter parents are a bigger problem than latchkey children.

THE FAILURE OF POLITICS

Given the enormity of the social shift that has occurred, the real question is not why the United States has populism in 2016 but why the explosion did not occur much earlier. And here there has indeed been a problem of representation in American institutions: neither political party has served the declining group well.

In recent decades, the Republican Party has been an uneasy coalition of business elites and social conservatives, the former providing money, and the latter primary votes. The business elites, represented by the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, have been principled advocates of economic liberalism: free markets, free trade, and open immigration. It was Republicans who provided the votes to pass trade legislation such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the recent trade promotion authority (more commonly known as “fast track”). Their business backers clearly benefit from both the import of foreign labor, skilled and unskilled, and a global trading system that allows them to export and invest around the globe. Republicans pushed for the dismantling of the Depression-era system of bank regulation that laid the groundwork for the subprime meltdown and the resulting financial crisis of 2008. And they have been ideologically committed to cutting taxes on wealthy Americans, undermining the power of labor unions, and reducing social services that stood to benefit the less well-off.

This agenda ran directly counter to the interests of the working class. The causes of the working class’ decline are complex, having to do as much with technological change as with factors touched by public policy. And yet it is undeniable that the pro-market shift promoted by Republican elites in recent decades has exerted downward pressure on working-class incomes, both by exposing workers to more ruthless technological and global competition and by paring back various protections and social benefits left over from the New Deal. (Countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, which have done more to protect their workers, have not seen comparable increases in inequality.) It should not be surprising, therefore, that the biggest and most emotional fight this year is the one taking place within the Republican Party, as its working-class base expresses a clear preference for more nationalist economic policies.

The Democrats, for their part, have traditionally seen themselves as champions of the common man and can still count on a shrinking base of trade union members to help get out the vote. But they have also failed this constituency. Since the rise of Bill Clinton’s “third way,” elites in the Democratic Party have embraced the post-Reagan consensus on the benefits of free trade and immigration. They were complicit in the dismantling of bank regulation in the 1990s and have tried to buy off, rather than support, the labor movement over its objections to trade agreements.

But the more important problem with the Democrats is that the party has embraced identity politics as its core value. The party has won recent elections by mobilizing a coalition of population segments: women, African Americans, young urbanites, gays, and environmentalists. The one group it has completely lost touch with is the same white working class that was the bedrock of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. The white working class began voting Republican in the 1980s over cultural issues such as patriotism, gun rights, abortion, and religion. Clinton won back enough of them in the 1990s to be elected twice (with pluralities each time), but since then, they have been a more reliable constituency for the Republican Party, despite the fact that elite Republican economic policies are at odds with their economic interests. This is why, in a Quinnipiac University survey released in April, 80 percent of Trump’s supporters polled said they felt that “the government has gone too far in assisting minority groups,” and 85 percent agreed that “America has lost its identity.”

The Democrats’ fixation with identity explains one of the great mysteries of contemporary American politics—why rural working-class whites, particularly in southern states with limited social services, have flocked to the banner of the Republicans even though they have been among the greatest beneficiaries of Republican-opposed programs, such as Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. One reason is their perception that Obamacare was designed to benefit people other than themselves—in part because Democrats have lost their ability to speak to such voters (in contrast to in the 1930s, when southern rural whites were key supporters of Democratic Party welfare state initiatives such as the Tennessee Valley Authority).

THE END OF AN ERA?

Trump’s policy pronouncements are confused and contradictory, coming as they do from a narcissistic media manipulator with no clear underlying ideology. But the common theme that has made him attractive to so many Republican primary voters is one that he shares to some extent with Sanders: an economic nationalist agenda designed to protect and restore the jobs of American workers. This explains both his opposition to immigration—not just illegal immigration but also skilled workers coming in on H1B visas—and his condemnation of American companies that move plants abroad to save on labor costs. He has criticized not only China for its currency manipulation but also friendly countries such as Japan and South Korea for undermining the United States’ manufacturing base. And of course he is dead set against further trade liberalization, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership in Asia and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with Europe.

All of this sounds like total heresy to anyone who has taken a basic college-level course in trade theory, where models from the Ricardian one of comparative advantage to the Heckscher-Ohlin factor endow­ment theory tell you that free trade is a win-win for trading partners, increasing all countries’ aggregate incomes. And indeed, global output has exploded over the past two generations, as world trade and investment have been liberalized under the broad framework of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and then the World Trade Organization, increasing fourfold between 1970 and 2008. Globalization has been responsible for lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in countries such as China and India and has generated unfathomable amounts of wealth in the United States.

Yet this consensus on the benefits of economic liberalization, shared by elites in both political parties, is not immune from criticism. Built into all the existing trade models is the conclusion that trade liberalization, while boosting aggregate income, will have potentially adverse distributional consequences—it will, in other words, create winners and losers. One recent study estimated that import competition from China was responsible for the loss of between two million and 2.4 million U.S. jobs from 1999 to 2011.

The standard response from trade economists is to argue that the gains from trade are sufficient to more than adequately compensate the losers, ideally through job training that will equip them with new skills. And thus, every major piece of trade legislation has been accompanied by a host of worker-retraining measures, as well as a phasing in of new rules to allow workers time to adjust.

In practice, however, this adjustment has often failed to materialize. The U.S. government has run 47 uncoordinated federal job-retraining programs (since consolidated into about a dozen), in addition to countless state-level ones. These have collectively failed to move large numbers of workers into higher-skilled positions. This is partly a failure of implementation, but it is also a failure of concept: it is not clear what kind of training can transform a 55-year-old assembly-line worker into a computer programmer or a Web designer. Nor does standard trade theory take account of the political economy of investment. Capital has always had collective-action advantages over labor, because it is more concentrated and easier to coordinate. This was one of the early arguments in favor of trade unionism, which has been severely eroded in the United States since the 1980s. And capital’s advantages only increase with the high degree of capital mobility that has arisen in today’s globalized world. Labor has become more mobile as well, but it is far more constrained. The bargaining advantages of unions are quickly undermined by employers who can threaten to relocate not just to a right-to-work state but also to a completely different country.

The American political system will not be fixed unless popular anger is linked to good policies.

Labor-cost differentials between the United States and many developing countries are so great that it is hard to imagine what sorts of policies could ultimately have protected the mass of low-skilled jobs. Perhaps not even Trump believes that shoes and shirts should still be made in America. Every industrialized nation in the world, including those that are much more committed to protecting their manufacturing bases, such as Germany and Japan, has seen a decline in the relative share of manufacturing over the past few decades. And even China itself is beginning to lose jobs to automation and to lower-cost producers in places such as Bangladesh and Vietnam.

And yet the experience of a country such as Germany suggests that the path followed by the United States was not inevitable. German business elites never sought to undermine the power of their trade unions; to this day, wages are set across the German economy through government-sponsored negotiations between employers and unions. As a result, German labor costs are about 25 percent higher than their American counterparts. And yet Germany remains the third-largest exporter in the world, and the share of manufacturing employment in Germany, although declining, has remained consistently higher than that in the United States. Unlike the French and the Italians, the Germans have not sought to protect existing jobs through a thicket of labor laws; under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s Agenda 2010 reforms, it became easier to lay off redundant workers. And yet the country has invested heavily in improving working-class skills through its apprenticeship program and other active labor-market interventions. The Germans also sought to protect more of the country’s supply chain from endless outsourcing, connecting its fabled Mittelstand, that is, its small and medium-size businesses, to its large employers.

In the United States, in contrast, economists and public intellectuals portrayed the shift from a manufacturing economy to a postindustrial service-based one as inevitable, even something to be welcomed and hastened. Like the buggy whip makers of old, supposedly, manufac­turing workers would retool themselves, becoming knowledge workers in a flexible, outsourced, part-time new economy, where their new skills would earn them higher wages. Despite occasional gestures, however, neither political party took the retooling agenda seriously, as the centerpiece of a necessary adjustment process, nor did they invest in social programs designed to cushion the working class as it tried to adjust. And so white workers, like African Americans in earlier decades, were on their own.

The first decade of the century could have played out very differently. The Chinese today are not manipulating their currency to boost exports; if anything, they have been trying recently to support the value of the yuan in order to prevent capital flight. But they certainly did manipulate their currency in the years following the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98 and the dot-com crash of 2000–2001. It would have been entirely feasible for Washington to have threatened, or actually imposed, tariffs against Chinese imports back then in response. This would have entailed risks: consumer prices would have increased, and interest rates would have risen had the Chinese responded by not buying U.S. debt. Yet this possibility was not taken seriously by U.S. elites, for fear that it would start a slide down the slippery slope of protectionism. As a result, more than two million jobs were lost in the ensuing decade.

A WAY FORWARD?

Trump may have fastened onto something real in American society, but he is a singularly inappropriate instrument for taking advantage of the reform moment that this electoral upheaval represents. You cannot unwind 50 years of trade liberalization by imposing unilateral tariffs or filing criminal indictments against American multinationals that outsource jobs. At this point, the United States’ economy is so interconnected with that of the rest of the world that the dangers of a global retreat into protectionism are all too real. Trump’s proposals to abolish Obamacare would throw millions of working-class Americans off health insurance, and his proposed tax cuts would add more than $10 trillion to the deficit over the next decade while benefiting only the rich. The country does need strong leadership, but by an institutional reformer who can make government truly effective, not by a personalistic demagogue who is willing to flout established rules.

Nonetheless, if elites profess to be genuinely concerned about inequality and the declining working class, they need to rethink some of their long-standing positions on immigration, trade, and investment. The intellectual challenge is to see whether it is possible to back away from globalization without cratering both the national and the global economy, with the goal of trading a little aggregate national income for greater domestic income equality.

Clearly, some changes are more workable than others, with immigra­tion being at the top of the theoretically doable list. Comprehensive immigration reform has been in the works for more than a decade now and has failed for two reasons. First, opponents are opposed to “amnesty,” that is, giving existing undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. But the second reason has to do with enforcement: critics point out that existing laws are not enforced and that earlier promises to enforce them have not been kept.

The idea that the government could deport 11 million people from the country, many of them with children who are U.S. citizens, seems highly implausible. So some form of amnesty appears inevitable. Immigration critics are right, however, that the United States has been very lax in enforcement. Doing this properly would require not a wall but something like a national biometric ID card, heavy investment in courts and police, and, above all, the political will to sanction employers who violate the rules. Moving to a much more restrictive policy on legal immigration, in which some form of amnesty for existing immigrants is exchanged for genuine efforts to enforce new and tougher rules, would not be economically disastrous. When the country did this before, in 1924, the way was paved, in certain respects, for the golden age of U.S. equality in the 1940s and 1950s.

It is harder to see a way forward on trade and investment, other than not ratifying existing deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership—which would not be extremely risky. The world is increasingly popu­lated with economic nationalists, and a course reversal by Washington—which has built and sustained the current liberal international system—could well trigger a tidal wave of reprisals. Perhaps one place to start is to figure out a way to persuade U.S. multinationals, which currently are sitting on more than $2 trillion in cash outside the United States, to bring their money home for domestic investment. U.S. corporate tax rates are among the highest in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; reducing them sharply while eliminating the myriad tax subsidies and exemptions that corporations have negotiated for themselves is a policy that could find support in both parties.

Another initiative would be a massive campaign to rebuild American infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that it would take $3.6 trillion to adequately upgrade the country’s infrastructure by 2020. The United States could borrow $1 trillion while interest rates are low and use it to fund a massive infrastructure initiative that would create huge numbers of jobs while raising U.S. productivity in the long run. Hillary Clinton has proposed spending $275 billion, but that number is too modest.

不变与变：美国总统选举政治历史回顾- 环球视野