拜登就职演说：在危机与分裂中呼吁团结
A Call for Unity to a Nation Facing a Pandemic and Division
DAVID E. SANGER
2021年1月21日
WASHINGTON — In the end, the inauguration triumphed over the insurrection.
华盛顿——最终，就职典礼战胜了叛乱。
President Biden’s plea for national unity in his Inaugural Address on Wednesday was rooted in a belief — born of decades working inside the fractious institutions of government — that America can return to an era where “enough of us have come together to carry all of us forward.”
拜登总统在周三的就职演说中呼吁全国团结，这是基于一种信念——它源于数十年来在派系林立的政府机构中工作的经历——美国可以回到一个“我们当中有足够多的人团结在一起，带领我们所有人向前”的时代。
It was a call for the restoration of the ordinary discord of democracy, with a reminder that “politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path.” The words were made all the more potent because they were delivered from the same steps at the entrance to the Capitol where a violent attack two weeks ago shocked the nation into realizing the lengths to which some Americans would go to overturn the results of a democratic election.
它呼吁恢复民主中那种常见的不和谐，并提醒人们，“政治不一定要像一场熊熊烈火，毁掉它所席卷的一切。”这番话显得更为强有力，是因为就职演说的发表地点——国会大厦入口处的台阶。两周前，正是在这里发生了震惊全国的暴力袭击事件，使人们意识到，一些美国人可以不惜一切代价地推翻民主选举结果。
Mr. Biden’s inauguration was notable for its normalcy, and the sense of relief that permeated the capital as an era of constant turmoil and falsehood ended. Yet he takes office amid so many interlocking national traumas that it is still unclear whether he can persuade enough of the nation to walk together into a new era. To do so, he needs to lead the country past the partisan divisions that made mask-wearing a political act, and to win acceptance from tens of millions of Americans who believed a lie that the presidency had been stolen.
随着一个持续动荡和谎言的时代宣告结束，拜登就职典礼上的正常性，以及弥漫在首都的释然感格外引人瞩目。然而目前尚不清楚，在各种国家创伤交织在一起的情况下上任，拜登能否说服足够多的美国人一起步入新时代。要做到这一点，他需要带领这个国家摆脱使戴口罩成为政治行为的党派分歧，并且赢得数千万相信总统职位被偷走这个谎言的美国人的认可。
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. is hardly the first president to take office in a moment of national desperation and division. Lincoln, whose inauguration amid fear of violence hung over this moment, faced a country fracturing into civil war. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was in his third term when Mr. Biden was born, faced a nation mired in depression, with “Hoovervilles” in the shadow of the Capitol.
小约瑟夫·罗比内特·拜登(Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.)并不是第一位在国家陷入绝望和分裂之际就职的总统。林肯(Lincoln)的就职典礼上笼罩着对暴力的恐惧，他面对的是一个在内战中分裂的国家。拜登出生时，正值富兰克林·D·罗斯福(Franklin D. Roosevelt)的第三个任期，他面对的是一个深陷萧条的国家，国会大厦近在咫尺的地方就有“胡佛村”的存在。
While Mr. Biden does not face a single crisis of equal magnitude, he made clear — without quite making the comparison — that none of his predecessors confronted such a fearsome array of simultaneous trials.
虽然拜登没有面临同样严重的危机，但他明确表示，他的前任都不曾同时面对如此可怕的一系列考验——虽然他没有做出太多比较。
He listed them: a devastating pandemic that in one year has killed more Americans than the nation lost during World War II (he could have added Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan), an economic downturn that brought with it “joblessness and hopelessness,” a crisis of racial justice and another of climate, and, for tens of millions of Americans, a collapse in their faith in democracy itself.
他列举了种种考验：一场毁灭性的大流行，一年下来给美国造成的死亡人数超过了“二战”（他还可以加上韩国、越南、伊拉克和阿富汗战争）；经济低迷带来“失业和绝望”；还有种族正义危机和气候危机；而对千万计的美国人来说，他们对民主本身的信仰也崩溃了。
And finally, he argued, American healing would require an end to partisan self-delusion, and to the era of alternative facts.
最后，他认为，美国的治愈需要结束党派的自欺欺人，结束另类事实的时代。
He never referred to President Donald J. Trump, but he was clearly talking about him — and the more than 140 Republicans in Congress who voted not to certify the election results, despite an absence of any evidence of widespread fraud — when he said that “we must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.”
他没有提到唐纳德·J·特朗普(Donald J. Trump)总统，但他说“我们必须拒绝事实本身被操纵，甚至被捏造的文化”时，显然是指特朗普——以及国会中140多名共和党人投票拒绝认证选举结果，尽管没有任何证据表明存在广泛的舞弊行为。
Mr. Biden’s presidency is predicated on a bet that it is not too late to “end this uncivil war.” Even some of his most ardent supporters and appointees, a generation or more younger than he is, wonder whether his calls for Americans to listen to one another, “not as adversaries but as neighbors,” are coming too late.
拜登当选总统的前提是，现在“结束这场非内战”还不算太晚。就连他最热心的支持者和被任命的人——他们比他年轻一代或更多——也在怀疑，他呼吁美国人相互倾听，“不是作为对手，而是作为邻居”，是否来得太晚了。
“Like Lincoln, Biden comes to power at a moment when the country is torn between conflicting visions of reality and identity,” said Jon Meacham, the presidential historian who occasionally advises Mr. Biden and contributed to his Inaugural Address.
“和林肯一样，拜登上台时，国家正徘徊在现实和身份的冲突愿景之间，”偶尔为拜登先生提供建议，并为他的就职演说做出贡献的总统历史学家乔·米查姆(Jon Meacham)说。
“Too many Americans have been shaped by the lie that the 2020 election was somehow stolen,” he said. “The new president’s challenge — and opportunity — is to insist that facts and truth must guide us. That you can disagree with your opponent without delegitimizing that opponent’s place within the Republic.”
“太多美国人受到2020年选举遭人窃取这个谎言的影响，”他说。“新总统面临的挑战——也是机会——是坚持事实和真理必须指引我们。你可以不同意对手的观点，但不会令对手在合众国的地位变为不正当。”
Mr. Biden’s speech was about restoring that world, one that existed in the America he grew up in. It is the argument of a 78-year-old who has endured tragedy after tragedy in public and who, in a reverse of the usual order, took on the manner of a statesman before he returned to the campaign trail as a politician.
拜登的演讲是关于恢复那个世界，一个存在于他所成长的美国的世界。这是一位78岁老人的观点。他在公众面前经历了一场又一场的悲剧，而且，与通常的顺序相反，他在以政治人士的身份重返竞选活动之前，就已经表现出了政治人士的风范。
But what millions of Americans hear as a heartfelt call to restore order, millions of others believe masks deep partisanship, or a naïveté about what has happened to America over the past four years, or the past 20.
但是，数以百万计的美国人听到的是对重建秩序的衷心呼吁，另外数以百万计的美国人却相信这是在掩盖深刻的党派之争，或是对美国过去四年乃至过去20年所发生事情的天真无知。
In fact, beyond the call for unity, Mr. Biden’s speech was littered with phrases bound to reignite those arguments.
实际上，除了呼吁团结外，拜登的演讲中充满了必定会重新引燃这些论点的话语。
His references to the “sting of systemic racism,” to “white supremacy” and “domestic terrorism,” and his insistence that the climate crisis ranks among the nation’s top threats, were meant to signal to the progressive side of his party, which always viewed him as too conservative and cautious, that new priorities had arrived.
他提到“系统种族主义的刺痛”，提到“白人至上主义”和“国内恐怖主义”，他坚持认为气候危机是美国面临的主要威胁之一，这是向党内总是认为他过于保守谨慎的改革派人士发出新的优先事项的信号。
But they are also triggers to those who oppose him: Just on Tuesday, his last full day in office, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a broadside on Twitter, where the president was silenced, against “woke-ism, multiculturalism, all the -isms — they’re not who America is.”
但这也激怒了反对他的人：就在周二，国务卿迈克·庞皮欧(Mike Pompeo)在任期的最后一天在总统被噤声的平台Twitter上发表了猛烈抨击，反对“觉醒主义、多元文化主义以及所有主义——它们不代表美国”。
Mr. Biden planned his inauguration to declare the opposite, that they are the modern America.
拜登的想法是通过就职典礼宣示一种截然相反的观点，即它们恰恰代表了现代美国。
And his anticipated actions in his first days in office — rejoining the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization, vowing to find a pathway to citizenship for 11 million immigrants and to re-enter the Iran nuclear agreement — are meant to reinforce the point.
他在任初期预计会采取的行动——重新加入《巴黎气候协定》和世界卫生组织(World Health Organization)，誓为1100万移民找到获取公民身份的途径，并重新加入伊朗核协议——意在强调这一点。
He paired that with a warning to American adversaries, who spent the past four years, but particularly 2020, filling power vacuums around the world as America counted its dead and took to the streets.
与此同时，他还向美国的对手——在过去的四年中，尤其是在2020年，在美国生灵涂炭、人民走上街头抗议的时候，他们在填补世界各地的权力真空——发出了警告。
Mr. Biden cautioned them not to mistake the din of the past four years for weakness.
拜登警告他们不要把过去四年的喧嚣误认为是软弱。
“America has been tested, and we’ve come out stronger for it,” he insisted, promising to “repair our alliances and engage with the world once again.”
“美国已经经受了考验，我们因此变得更加强大，”他坚称，并承诺“修复我们的联盟并再次与世界互动”。
But he never once mentioned the country that poses the longest-term challenge to American pre-eminence — China — or any of the array of lesser challengers seeking to disrupt, to build nuclear weapons, to undercut the United States by manipulating its computer networks or exploiting social media.
但是他从未提到过对美国优越地位构成长期挑战的国家——中国，或是任何制造破坏、制造核武器、企图通过操纵其计算机网络或利用社交媒体来削弱美国的次要挑战者。
And in the parts of the speech that sounded more like a fireside chat than soaring rhetoric, he acknowledged that America’s diminished status could only be restored by ending the damage at home, and replacing an “America First” swagger with a dose of post-Covid humility.
在演讲中，有些部分更像是促膝长谈而不是高谈阔论，他承认，只有通过止住国内的损失，并用后疫情时期的谦逊替代“美国优先”的趾高气扬，才能将美国日益下降的地位恢复。
The scope of that damage could be seen from the West Front of the Capitol. Gone were the throngs of hundreds of thousands who usually witness, and cheer, a ritual of American democracy that Mr. Biden was determined must look just as it always looks to the millions tuning in.
从国会大厦西面可以看到损失的程度。往常来这里见证并为美国民主仪式欢呼的成千上万的人群没有了，拜登坚决要求，对于上百万屏幕前的观众，该仪式看上去要和以前一样。
It wasn’t the empty National Mall that struck attendees as much as the miles of iron fencing, topped with razor wire and surrounded by thousands of National Guard troops. There was no more vivid illustration of the state of the nation that Mr. Biden was inheriting.
使出席者感到惊叹的不光是空荡荡的国家广场，还有数英里加上了铁丝网的铁栅栏以及周围成千上万的国民警卫队员。拜登所继承的国家看不到曾经的蓬勃朝气。
Sometime in the next few days and weeks, that fencing will have to come down. Mr. Trump’s trial in the Senate, most likely a brief one, will have to end.
在接下来的几天和几周内的某个时候，铁栅栏将必须拿掉。特朗普在参议院的审判——可能会很短暂——终会结束。
Then will come the test of Mr. Biden’s declaration that “without unity, there is no peace.”
接下来就要考验拜登“没有团结就没有和平”的宣言。
And while an array of leaders from both parties flocked to the inauguration and clapped at the sentiment, it is far from clear that the country is truly ready to move on.
尽管来自两党的许多领导人蜂拥来到就职典礼并鼓掌，但现在还不能确定，这个国家是否真的准备好继续前进。
In a nation that cannot seem to share a common set of facts, agree on the utility of simple masks, on the safety of vaccines, or that the presidential vote wasn’t rigged, fulfilling Mr. Biden’s dream of restoring orderly debate on policy may seem like the triumph of hope over lived experience.
在一个似乎无法就事实达成共识，在口罩的效用、疫苗的安全性或大选没有被操纵这些简单的事情上达成一致的国家，拜登的这个恢复对政策进行有序辩论的梦想，看上去只是不顾现实的空想。
“I am desperately grateful that the institutions of democracy have held, despite the damage President Trump and his enablers have inflicted these past four years,” said Kori Schake, a Republican who held positions in the Pentagon and the National Security Council and is now at the American Enterprise Institute.
曾在五角大楼和国家安全委员会任职，现供职于美国企业研究所(American Enterprise Institute)的共和党人科丽·舍克(Kori Schake)说：“尽管特朗普总统及其支持者在过去四年中制造了破坏，但民主制度未受损害，这令我感到万分庆幸。”
“But for President Biden, the challenge won’t only be governing, but also restoring strength to the battered institutions of our democracy,” Ms. Schake said. “We Republicans have a responsibility to restore public trust in the integrity of our elections, because we’re the ones who called them into question.”
“但拜登总统面临的挑战将不只是执政，他还要让受重创的民主体制恢复力量，”沙克说。“我们共和党人有责任恢复公众对我们的选举公正性的信任，因为提出这些质疑的是我们。”
