编者按：本文翻译一篇保守派出版物Imprimis的演讲摘要，分析美国民主党和共和党分裂的根源。（February 2020 • Volume 49, Number 2 • Christopher Caldwell ，2020年2月-卷49，11月2日-克里斯托弗·考德威尔）
演讲的主要观点是美国从宪法立国变成一派用民权进行道德绑架，树立道德敌人，绕开宪法的国家，造成各种分裂，仅供参考。Imprimis是希尔斯代尔学院（Hillsdale College）的每月的演讲摘要，免费订阅，有四百万订阅者。Salon.com将其描述为“您从未听说过的最具影响力的保守出版物“。Imprimis是拉丁语，意为 1.第一 , 2. 打印的动词的第二人称单数。

Senior Fellow, The Claremont Institute and Author, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
克莱蒙特研究所资深研究员和《权利的时代：六十年代以来的美国》一书的作者 

Christopher Caldwell is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books, and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. A graduate of Harvard College, he has been a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the Financial Times. He is the author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West and The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.
克里斯托弗·考德威尔是克莱蒙特研究所的资深研究员、《克莱蒙特书评》的特约编辑以及《纽约时报》的特约意见撰稿人。他毕业于哈佛大学，一直担任《每周标准》的资深编辑，同时也是《金融时报》的专栏作家。他是《欧洲革命的思考：移民、伊斯兰教和西方》以及《权利的时代：六十年代以来的美国》两本书的作者。

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on January 28, 2020, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation lecture series.
以下内容改编自2020年1月28日在华盛顿特区，希尔斯代尔学院的小艾伦·柯比宪法研究与公民中心发表的演讲，这是AWC家庭基金会系列讲座的一部分。

American society today is divided by party and by ideology in a way it has perhaps not been since the Civil War. I have just published a book that, among other things, suggests why this is. It is called The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. It runs from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the election of Donald J. Trump. You can get a good idea of the drift of the narrative from its chapter titles: 1963, Race, Sex, War, Debt, Diversity, Winners, and Losers.
今天的美国社会被政党和意识形态分裂，这可能是自南北战争以来从未发生过。我最近出版了一本书，其中就解释了为什么会这样。这本书名为《权利的时代：六十年代以来的美国》。本书从从约翰·肯尼迪遇刺讲到唐纳德·J·特朗普当选。您可以从以下章节标题中很好地了解本书叙述的趋势：1963年，种族，性别，战争，债务，多样性，胜利者和失败者。

I can end part of the suspense right now—Democrats are the winners. Their party won the 1960s—they gained money, power, and prestige. The GOP is the party of the people who lost those things.
现在我就可以结束部分的悬念——民主党是赢家。他们的政党赢得了1960年代的胜利，他们赢得了金钱、权力和声望。共和党是失去这些的东西的人的党派。

One of the strands of this story involves the Vietnam War. The antiquated way the Army was mustered in the 1960s wound up creating a class system. What I’m referring to here is the so-called student deferment. In the old days, university-level education was rare. At the start of the First World War, only one in 30 American men was in a college or university, so student deferments were not culturally significant. By the time of Vietnam, almost half of American men were in a college or university, and student deferment remained in effect until well into the war. So if you were rich enough to study art history, you went to Woodstock and made love. If you worked in a garage, you went to Da Nang and made war. This produced a class division that many of the college-educated mistook for a moral division, particularly once we lost the war. The rich saw themselves as having avoided service in Vietnam not because they were more privileged or—heaven forbid—less brave, but because they were more decent.
这个故事的其中一部分涉及越南战争。1960年代军队召集的落后方式最终导致了一个阶级制度的建立。我在这里指的是所谓的学生推迟入学。在过去，大学级别的教育很罕见。第一次世界大战开始时，每30名美国男性中只有1人在大学中，因此学生的推迟入学在文化上并不重要。到越南战争时，几乎一半的美国男性都在大学里读书，直到战争全面爆发，学生的推迟入学仍然有效。因此，如果你有足够的钱去学习艺术史，那你肯定是去伍德斯托克翻云覆雨。如果你在车库里工作，那你就得去岘港打仗了。这导致了阶级分裂，许多受过大学教育的人误以为这是道德分裂，尤其是在我们输掉了战争之后。富人认为自己逃过了去越南服役，不是因为他们享有更多的特权或不那么勇敢（但愿不是这样），而是因为他们更加体面。

Another strand of the story involves women. Today, there are two cultures of American womanhood—the culture of married women and the culture of single women. If you poll them on political issues, they tend to differ diametrically. It was feminism that produced this rupture. For women during the Kennedy administration, by contrast, there was one culture of femininity, and it united women from cradle to grave: Ninety percent of married women and 87 percent of unmarried women believed there was such a thing as “women’s intuition.” Only 16 percent of married women and only 15 percent of unmarried women thought it was excusable in some circumstances to have an extramarital affair. Ninety-nine percent of women, when asked the ideal age for marriage, said it was sometime before age 27. None answered “never.”
故事的另一方面涉及女性。如今，美国有两种女性文化—已婚女性文化和单身女性文化。如果在政治问题上让她们进行民意投票，她们的选择往往会截然不同。正是女权主义导致了这种破裂。相比之下，肯尼迪政府时期的女性只有一种女性文化，它把从摇篮到坟墓的所有女性团结在一起：90％的已婚女性和87％的未婚女性相信“女性直觉”的存在。只有16％的已婚妇女和15％的未婚妇女认为在某些情况下婚外恋是可以原谅的。当被问及理想结婚年龄的时候，有99％的女性表示结婚年龄在27岁之前。没有人回答“不结婚”。

But it is a third strand of the story, running all the way down to our day, that is most important for explaining our partisan polarization. It concerns how the civil rights laws of the 1960s, and particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1964, divided the country. They did so by giving birth to what was, in effect, a second constitution, which would eventually cause Americans to peel off into two different and incompatible constitutional cultures. This became obvious only over time. It happened so slowly that many people did not notice.
但一直持续至今的是故事的第三部分，它对于解释我们政党的两极化是最重要的。它涉及到1960年代的民权法如何分裂了国家，特别是1964年的《民权法案》。这样做实际上是创造了第二部宪法，最终使美国人陷入两种不同且矛盾的宪法文化中。这一点随着时间的流逝才变得明显。事情发生得如此缓慢，所以很多人都没有注意到。

Because conventional wisdom today holds that the Civil Rights Act brought the country together, my book’s suggestion that it pulled the country apart has been met with outrage. The outrage has been especially pronounced among those who have not read the book. So for their benefit I should make crystal clear that my book is not a defense of segregation or Jim Crow, and that when I criticize the long-term effects of the civil rights laws of the 1960s, I do not criticize the principle of equality in general, or the movement for black equality in particular.
由于今天的传统观点认为，《民权法案》使国家团结一致，因此我的书里提出的它分裂了国家的建议激起了民愤。这种愤怒在那些没有读过本书的人中尤其显著。因此，为了他们好，我应该极其明确地指出我的书不是为种族隔离或吉姆·克劳辩护，并且当我批判1960年代民权法的长期影响时，我并没有从总体上批判平等原则或是特意批判黑人平等运动。

What I am talking about are the emergency mechanisms that, in the name of ending segregation, were established under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These gave Washington the authority to override what Americans had traditionally thought of as their ordinary democratic institutions. It was widely assumed that the emergency mechanisms would be temporary and narrowly focused. But they soon escaped democratic control altogether, and they have now become the most powerful part of our governing system.
我要讲的以结束种族隔离为名建立的紧急机制是根据1964年《民权法案》建立的。这些机制赋予华盛顿权力，可以凌驾在美国人传统上认为是其一般民主体系的东西之上。人们普遍认为，紧急机制将是临时性的，且关注范围窄。但是，它们很快就完全摆脱了民主控制，现在已经成为我们治理体系中最强大的部分。

How Civil Rights Legislation Worked
民权立法是如何运作的？

There were two noteworthy things about the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965.
关于1964年和1965年的民权立法，有两点值得注意。

The first was its unprecedented concentration of power. It gave Washington tools it had never before had in peacetime. It created new crimes, outlawing discrimination in almost every walk of public and private life. It revoked—or repealed—the prevailing understanding of freedom of association as protected by the First Amendment. It established agencies to hunt down these new crimes—an expanded Civil Rights Commission, an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and various offices of civil rights in the different cabinet agencies. It gave government new prerogatives, such as laying out hiring practices for all companies with more than 15 employees, filing lawsuits, conducting investigations, and ordering redress. Above all, it exposed every corner of American social, economic, and political life to direction from bureaucrats and judges.
首先是它史无前例的权力集中。它为华盛顿提供了和平时期从未有过的工具。它创造了新的罪行，在几乎在所有公共和私人生活中取缔歧视。它撤销了或废除了对《第一修正案》保护社团自由的普遍理解。它设立了机构来追查这些新的犯罪行为，包括扩大的民权委员会、平等就业机会委员会（EEOC）以及各个政府机构的民权办公室。它赋予了政府新的特权，例如为所有拥有15名以上雇员的公司制定雇用措施、提起诉讼、进行调查和命令纠正。最重要的是，它使美国社会、经济和政治生活的各个角落暴露于官僚和法官的指导之下。

To put it bluntly, the effect of these civil rights laws was to take a lot of decisions that had been made in the democratic parts of American government and relocate them to the bureaucracy or the judiciary. Only with that kind of arsenal, Lyndon Johnson and the drafters thought, would it be possible to root out insidious racism.
直言不讳地说，这些民权法的作用是将许多美国政府的民主部分之前一直做的决定转移给官僚机构或司法机构。林登·约翰逊和起草者们认为，只有有了这种军火库，才有可能铲除潜伏的种族主义。

The second noteworthy thing about the civil rights legislation of the 1960s is that it was kind of a fudge. It sat uneasily not only with the First Amendment, but with the Constitution as a whole. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, passed largely to give teeth to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal rights for all citizens, did so by creating different levels of rights for citizens of southern states like Alabama and citizens of northern states like Michigan when it came to election laws.
关于1960年代民权立法的第二点值得注意的事情是，它其实有点表面文章。它不仅与第一修正案格格不入，而且与整个宪法都不和谐。1965年的《投票权法案》在很大程度上通过了第14条修正案对所有公民平等权利的保障，这是通过在涉及选举法的时候，为诸如阿拉巴马州等南部州和如密歇根州等北部州的公民创造了不同程度的权利而实现的。

The goal of the civil rights laws was to bring the sham democracies of the American South into conformity with the Constitution. But nobody’s democracy is perfect, and it turned out to be much harder than anticipated to distinguish between democracy in the South and democracy elsewhere in the country. If the spirit of the law was to humiliate Southern bigots, the letter of the law put the entire country—all its institutions—under the threat of lawsuits and prosecutions for discrimination.
民权法的目标是使美国南部的虚假民主体制与宪法保持一致。但是没有人能做到完美的民主，事实证明，要想区别南方的民主与国家其他地方的民主，要比想象的要难得多。如果法律的精神是羞辱南方的顽固分子，那么法律条文就将整个国家（包括其所有机构）置于针对歧视的诉讼和起诉的威胁之下。

Still, no one was too worried about that. It is clear in retrospect that Americans outside the South understood segregation as a regional problem. As far as we can tell from polls, 70-90 percent of Americans outside the South thought that blacks in their part of the country were treated just fine, the same as anyone else. In practice, non-Southerners did not expect the new laws to be turned back on themselves.
不过，没有人对此太过担心。回顾过去，很明显南方以外的美国人将种族隔离视为一个区域问题。据民意检测，在南方以外的美国人中，有70-90％的人认为在他们所在地区的黑人受到的待遇与其他人一样好。实际上，非南方人并没有想到新法律会对他们自己不利。

The Broadening of Civil Rights
民权的扩大

The problem is that when the work of the civil rights legislation was done—when de jure segregation was stopped—these new powers were not suspended or scaled back or reassessed. On the contrary, they intensified. The ability to set racial quotas for public schools was not in the original Civil Rights Act, but offices of civil rights started doing it, and there was no one strong enough to resist. Busing of schoolchildren had not been in the original plan, either, but once schools started to fall short of targets established by the bureaucracy, judges ordered it.
问题在于，在完成民权立法的工作时，以及当法律上的种族隔离被停止时，这些新的力量并没有被暂停、缩减或重新评估。相反，它们被强化了。为公立学校设定种族配额的能力不是最初的《民权法案》所规定的，而是民权办公室开始这样做的，而且没有人有足够的力量来反抗。用校车接送学生也不是最初的计划，但是一旦学校开始无法达到官僚机构设定的目标，法官就会下令执行。

Affirmative action was a vague notion in the Civil Rights Act. But by the time of the Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke decision, it was an outright system of racial preference for non-whites. In that case, the plaintiff, Alan Bakke, who had been a U.S. Marine captain in Vietnam, saw his application for medical school rejected, even though his test scores were in the 96th, 94th, 97th, and 72nd percentiles. Minority applicants, meanwhile, were admitted with, on average, scores in the 34th, 30th, 37th, and 18th percentiles. And although the Court decided that Bakke himself deserved admission, it did not do away with the affirmative action programs that kept him out. In fact, it institutionalized them, mandating “diversity”—a new concept at the time—as the law of the land.
平权法案是《民权法案》中的一个模糊概念。但是到了最高法院1978年对巴基案裁决之时，这已经成为一种完全种族偏好为非白人的制度。在这个案件中，原告艾伦·巴基是越南的美国海军陆战队队长，尽管他的考试成绩分别位于第96、94、97和72百分点位置，但他的医学院申请被拒绝了。同时，少数族裔申请者的平均分数分别排在第34、30、37和18百分点位置，但被录取了。尽管法院裁定巴基本人应当被录取，但它并没有消除使他无法被录取的平权法案。实际上，法院把它们制度化了，将“多样性”（当时的一个新概念）作为国家法律来强制执行。

Meanwhile other groups, many of them not even envisioned in the original legislation, got the hang of using civil rights law. Immigrant advocates, for instance: Americans never voted for bilingual education, but when the Supreme Court upheld the idea in 1974, rule writers in the offices of civil rights simply established it, and it exists to this day. Women, too: the EEOC battled Sears, Roebuck & Co. from 1973 to 1986 with every weapon at its disposal, trying to prove it guilty of sexism—ultimately failing to prove even a single instance of it.
同时对于其他群体，其中许多甚至都没有被包括在原始立法中，但他们掌握了使用民权法的窍门。例如移民倡导者：美国人从来没有投票赞成双语教育，但是当最高法院在1974年支持这一想法时，民权办公室的规则编写者就简单地确立了这一思路，而直到今天它仍然存在。妇女也是如此：EEOC在1973年至1986年期间与西尔斯·罗巴克百货公司进行了斗争，竭尽全力证明该公司犯了性别歧视罪，但最终甚至连其中一个例子都未能证明。

Finally, civil rights came to dominate—and even overrule—legislation that had nothing to do with it. The most traumatic example of this was the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. This legislation was supposed to be the grand compromise on which our modern immigration policy would be built. On the one hand, about three million illegal immigrants who had mostly come north from Mexico would be given citizenship. On the other hand, draconian laws would ensure that the amnesty would not be an incentive to future migrants, and that illegal immigration would never get out of control again. So there were harsh “employer sanctions” for anyone who hired a non-citizen. But once the law passed, what happened? Illegal immigrants got their amnesty. But the penalties on illegal hiring turned out to be fake—because, to simplify just a bit, asking an employee who “looks Mexican” where he was born or about his citizenship status was held to be a violation of his civil rights. Civil rights law had made it impossible for Americans to get what they’d voted for through their representatives, leading to decades of political strife over immigration policy that continues to this day.
最终，民权掌控甚至推翻了与之无关的立法。最惨痛的例子是1986年的《移民改革和控制法》。该立法本应是我们现代移民政策本该建立的方式的重大妥协。一方面，将使大约300万大多来自墨西哥北部非法移民获得公民身份。另一方面，严苛的法律将确保特赦不会刺激到未来的移民，并且非法移民将永远不会再失去控制。所以，本来要对雇用非公民的任何人实施严厉的“雇主制裁”。但是法律通过后，发生了什么？非法移民得到了特赦。但是，事实证明，对非法雇用的处罚被证明是虚假的，因为，简单来说，询问“看着像墨西哥人”的雇员其出生地或国籍身份被视为违反了其公民权利。民权法使美国人无法通过其代表获得他们投票支持的东西，导致数十年来因移民政策而引起的政治纷争一直持续到今天。

A more recent manifestation of the broadening of civil rights laws is the “Dear Colleague” letter sent by the Obama Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in 2011, which sought to dictate sexual harassment policy to every college and university in the country. Another is the overturning by judges of a temporary ban on entry from certain countries linked to terrorism in the first months of the Trump administration in 2017.
民权法扩大的最新体现是奥巴马教育部民权办公室在2011年发出的“致亲爱的同事”信，该信试图规定美国每所学院和大学的性骚扰政策。另一个是法官在2017年特朗普政府执政的头几个月临时禁止某些与恐怖主义有关的国家人员入境的规定。

These policies, qua policies, have their defenders and their detractors. The important thing for our purposes is how they were established and enforced. More and more areas of American life have been withdrawn from voters’ democratic control and delivered up to the bureaucratic and judicial emergency mechanisms of civil rights law. Civil rights law has become a second constitution, with powers that can be used to override the Constitution of 1787.
这些政策或类似政策都有其捍卫者和反对者。对我们的目的而言，重要的是如何建立和执行它们。美国生活中越来越多的领域已经从选民的民主控制中撤离，并进入民权法的官僚和司法紧急机制。民权法已经成为第二部宪法，其权力可以被用来推翻1787年的宪法。

The New Constitution
新宪法

In explaining the constitutional order that we see today, I’d like to focus on just two of its characteristics.
在解释我们今天看到的宪法秩序时，我只想重点介绍它的两个特征。

First, it has a moral element, almost a metaphysical element, that is usually more typical of theocracies than of secular republics. As we’ve discussed, civil rights law gave bureaucrats and judges emergency powers to override the normal constitutional order, bypassing democracy. But the key question is: Under what conditions is the government authorized to activate these emergency powers? It is a question that has been much studied by political thinkers in Europe. Usually when European governments of the past bypassed their constitutions by declaring emergencies, it was on the grounds of a military threat or a threat to public order. But in America, as our way of governing has evolved since 1964, emergencies are declared on a moral basis: people are suffering; their newly discovered rights are being denied. America can’t wait anymore for the ordinary democratic process to take its course.
首先，它具有道德元素，几乎是一个玄学的元素，通常在神权政体中比在世俗共和政体中更为典型。正如我们所讨论的那样，民权法赋予官僚和法官紧急权力，他们能绕过民主原则推翻正常的宪法秩序。但是关键问题是：政府在什么条件下有权激活这些紧急权力？欧洲的政治思想家已经对该问题进行了大量研究。通常，过去的欧洲政府宣布紧急情况而绕过宪法时，是出于军事威胁或对公共秩序的威胁。但在美国，自1964年以来，随着我们执政方式的进化，紧急情况是出于道德原因被宣布的：人民遭受苦难；他们新发现的权利被拒绝了。美国已经无法等待正常的民主进程自然发展来决定分歧。

A moral ground for invoking emergencies sounds more humane than a military one. It is not. That is because, in order to justify its special powers, the government must create a class of officially designated malefactors. With the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the justification of this strong medicine was that there was a collection of Southern politicians who were so wily and devious, and a collection of Southern sheriffs so ruthless and depraved, that one could not, and was not morally obliged to, fight fair with them.
引起紧急情况的道德基础听起来比军事基础更为高尚。但并不是这样。这是因为，为了证实其特殊权力，政府必须创建一类官方指定的作恶分子。根据1964年的《民权法案》，这种强效药物存在的理由是，一些南方政客非常诡计多端，一些南方警长非常残酷无情，卑鄙不堪，以至于人们不能，也没有义务在道德上与他们公平作战。

That pattern has perpetuated itself, even as the focus of civil rights has moved to American institutions less obviously objectionable than segregation. Every intervention in the name of rights requires the identification of a malefactor. So very early on in the gay marriage debate, those who believed in traditional marriage were likened to segregationists or to those who had opposed interracial marriage.
这种模式延续了下来，尽管民权的焦点已经转移到美国的体制上，且与种族隔离制度相比没有那么令人反感。每种以权利名义进行的调停都必须确定一个作恶分子。因此，在同性婚姻辩论的早期，相信传统婚姻的人就被比作种族隔离主义者或反对跨种族婚姻的人。

Joe Biden recently said: “Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.” Now, most Americans, probably including Joe Biden, know very little about transgenderism. But this is an assertion that Americans are not going to be permitted to advance their knowledge by discussing the issue in public or to work out their differences at the ballot box. As civil rights laws have been extended by analogy into other areas of American life, the imputation of moral non-personhood has been aimed at a growing number of people who have committed no sin more grievous than believing the same things they did two years ago, and therefore standing in the way of the progressive juggernaut.
乔·拜登最近说：“我们要明确：跨性别者的平等是我们这个时代的民权问题。在基本人权方面没有妥协的余地。”如今，大多数美国人，可能包括乔·拜登在内，对跨性别主义的了解很少。但这是一个要求，旨在禁止美国人通过在公共场合讨论这个问题或在投票箱中解决分歧以增进他们的知识。由于民权法通过类比被扩展到了美国生活的其他领域，道德上非人的污名瞄准了越来越多的人，他们没有犯比相信两年前所相信的同样的东西更严重的罪行，却因此阻碍了改革的强大力量。

The second characteristic of the new civil rights constitution is what we can call intersectionality. This is a sociological development. As long as civil rights law was limited to protecting the rights of Southern blacks, it was a stable system. It had the logic of history behind it, which both justified and focused its application. But if other groups could be given the privilege of advancing their causes by bureaucratic fiat and judicial decree, there was the possibility of a gradual building up of vast new coalitions, maybe even electoral majorities. This was made possible because almost anyone who was not a white heterosexual male could benefit from civil rights law in some way.
新民权宪法的第二个特征我们可以称之为交叉性。这是社会学的成果。只要民权法仅限于保护南部黑人的权利，这就是一个稳定的制度。它背后具有历史逻辑，既证明了应用的合理性又专于此。但是，如果可以通过官僚批准和司法命令赋予其他团体推进其事业的特权，则有可能逐步建立起庞大的新联盟，甚至可能是选举的多数派。之所以能够这样做，是因为几乎所有不是异性恋白人男性的人都可以某种方式从民权法中受益。

Seventy years ago, India produced the first modern minority-rights based constitution with a long, enumerated list of so-called “scheduled tribes and castes.” Eventually, inter-group horse trading took up so much of the country’s attention that there emerged a grumbling group of “everyone else,” of “ordinary Indians.” These account for many of the people behind the present prime minister, Narendra Modi. Indians who like Modi say he’s the candidate of average citizens. Those who don’t like him, as most of the international media do not, call him a “Hindu nationalist.”
七十年前，印度制定了第一部以现代少数民族权利为基础的宪法，其中列举了一系列所谓“计划内的部落和种姓”。最终，团体间的资源交换引起了该国的极大关注，以至于出现了一群怨声载道的“普通印度人”中的“其他所有人”。这些人属于现任总理纳伦德拉·莫迪背后的许多人。喜欢莫迪的印度人说他是普通公民的候选人。像大多数国际媒体一样，不喜欢他的那些人，称他为“印度民族主义者”。

We have a version of the same thing happening in America. By the mid-1980s, the “intersectional” coalition of civil rights activists started using the term “people of color” to describe itself. Now, logically, if there really is such a thing as “people of color,” and if they are demanding a larger share of society’s rewards, they are ipso facto demanding that “non–people of color” get a smaller share. In the same way that the Indian constitution called forth the idea of a generic “Hindu,” the new civil rights constitution created a group of “non–people of color.” It made white people a political reality in the United States in a way they had never been.
我们在美国有同一件事发生的版本。到1980年代中期，民权活动家的“交叉”联盟开始使用“有色人种”一词来形容自己。现在，从逻辑上讲，如果真的有“有色人种”之类的存在，并且如果他们要求更大比例的社会奖励，那么他们事实上就在要求“非有色人种”获得更少的份额。与印度宪法提出普通“印度人”的想法一样，新的民权宪法创造了一群“非有色人种”。这使白人以前所未有的方式成为美国的政治现实。

Now we can apply this insight to parties. So overpowering is the hegemony of the civil rights constitution of 1964 over the Constitution of 1787, that the country naturally sorts itself into a party of those who have benefited by it and a party of those who have been harmed by it.
现在，我们可以将此见解应用于各个政党。压倒一切的是1964年的民权宪法对1787年的宪法的领导权，美国自然而然地将自己划分为受益的一党和受损害的一党。

A Party of Bigots and a Party of Totalitarians
顽固派的一党和极权主义者的一党

Let’s say you’re a progressive. In fact, let’s say you are a progressive gay man in a gay marriage, with two adopted children. The civil rights version of the country is everything to you. Your whole way of life depends on it. How can you back a party or a politician who even wavers on it? Quite likely, your whole moral idea of yourself depends on it, too. You may have marched in gay pride parades carrying signs reading “Stop the Hate,” and you believe that people who opposed the campaign that made possible your way of life, your marriage, and your children, can only have done so for terrible reasons. You are on the side of the glorious marchers of Birmingham, and they are on the side of Bull Connor. To you, the other party is a party of bigots.
假设您是进步派人士。实际上，假设您是同性婚姻中的一个同性恋进步派人士，有两个领养的孩子。民权版本的美国就是您的一切。您的整个生活方式都取决于它。您怎么可能支持动摇这一点的政党或政客呢？很有可能，您自己的整个道德观念也取决于它。您可能带着“停止仇恨”标志参加了同性恋骄傲游行，并且您相信反对这场使您的生活方式、婚姻和孩子成为可能的运动的人们只能出于非常可怕的原因才这样做的。您站在伯明翰光荣的游行者的一边，而其他人站在在布尔·康纳的一边。对您而言，另一方就是顽固派的一党。

But say you’re a conservative person who goes to church, and your seven-year-old son is being taught about “gender fluidity” in first grade. There is no avenue for you to complain about this. You’ll be called a bigot at the very least. In fact, although you’re not a lawyer, you have a vague sense that you might get fired from your job, or fined, or that something else bad will happen. You also feel that this business has something to do with gay rights. “Sorry,” you ask, “when did I vote for this?” You begin to suspect that taking your voice away from you and taking your vote away from you is the main goal of these rights movements. To you, the other party is a party of totalitarians.
但是，假设您是一个会去教堂的保守派人士，而您七岁的儿子正在接受一年级的“性别流动性”教育。您没有抱怨的途径。起码您会被称为顽固派。实际上，尽管您不是律师，但是您仍然模糊地感觉到自己可能会被解雇、被罚款或可能发生其他不好情况。您还觉得这件事与同性恋权利有关。您问到，“抱歉，我何时为此投票？”您开始怀疑夺走您的话语权，夺走您的选票是这些权利运动的主要目标。对您来说，另一方是极权主义者的政党。

And that’s our current party system: the bigots versus the totalitarians.
这就是我们的政党体系：顽固派对极权主义者

If either of these constitutions were totally devoid of merit, we wouldn’t have a problem. We could be confident that the wiser of the two would win out in the end. But each of our two constitutions contains, for its adherents, a great deal worth defending to the bitter end. And unfortunately, each constitution must increasingly defend itself against the other.
如果这些宪法中的任何一项都完全没有价值，那么我们就不会有任何问题。我们可以相信，两者中的明智者最终将获胜。但是，对于它们的拥护者而言，我们的两个宪法都包含许多值得奋斗到底目标。不幸的是，每个宪法都必须越来越多地捍卫自己不受另一个宪法的侵犯。

When gay marriage was being advanced over the past 20 years, one of the common sayings of activists was: “The sky didn’t fall.” People would say: “Look, we’ve had gay marriage in Massachusetts for three weeks, and I’ve got news for you! The sky didn’t fall!” They were right in the short term. But I think they forgot how delicate a system a democratic constitutional republic is, how difficult it is to get the formula right, and how hard it is to see when a government begins—slowly, very slowly—to veer off course in a way that can take decades to become evident.
在同性婚姻不断发展的过去20年中，积极分子常说的一句话是：“天还没塌呢。”人们会说：“看，我们在马萨诸塞州实行同性婚姻已过去三个星期了，我有个好消息要告诉你！天还没塌呢！”他们在短期内是正确的。但是我认为他们忘记了民主宪法制政体的体制有多么精致，制定正确的方案有多困难，以及看到政府何时开始（缓慢，非常缓慢地）以某种方式偏离路线是多么难受。这可能需要数十年才能变得明显。

Then one day we discover that, although we still deny the sky is falling, we do so with a lot less confidence.
然后有一天我们会发现，尽管我们仍然不认为天塌下来了，但这样说的时候却信心不足。