美国联邦调查局对唐纳德·特朗普在佛罗里达州的住所海湖庄园的戏剧性搜查再次显示了拜登政府对这位前总统的怀疑程度，而美国国会对国会山骚乱的调查则是背景。
它为最近出版的《这不会过去》一书提供了进一步的支持，该书对美国政治、民主党的日常内讧和唐纳德·特朗普对共和党非同寻常的控制，以及对媒体的不信任进行爆炸性的披露。作者乔纳森·马丁 (Jonathan Martin) 和亚历山大·伯恩斯 (Alexander Burns) 提供了466页关于美国民主混乱局面的基本读物，内容涉及从2020年竞选活动到今天仍在持续的立法泥潭和酝酿中的紧张局势。
副标题“特朗普、拜登和美国未来之战”很好地抓住了关键问题，因为鉴于本书中详述的分歧，美国政治的未来无法确定。这里所描绘的政治命运的曲折本身无疑会成为令人震惊的头条新闻。正是这些小细节的积累，无论是政府如何运作（或者更准确地说是失灵），还是对国会大厦之外世界的一瞥，都揭示了美国民主危机的状况。
系统故障
美国政治制度曾被誉为现代世界的前沿，但多年来，一直有一种病症困扰着美国社会。马丁和伯恩斯讲述的故事来自独家私人谈话和采访，它们令人痛心地描述了过去两年中症状如何变得越来越严重。事实上，据报道，美国副总统哈里斯曾对德国前总理默克尔说过同样的话。哈里斯将唐纳德·特朗普描述为“在美国体系中存在已久的传染病的泡沫”，并且“潜在的疾病可能不会仅仅因为特朗普失去选举而消失”。
这种坦率的话语与美国仍然经常被称为全世界自由和民主灯塔的形象没有相似之处。美国长期以来一直在全球范围内倡导民主和自由，但这本书说明了美国民主制度的日益脆弱。尽管许多资深参议员私下对这位前真人秀明星心存疑虑，但特朗普及其支持者似乎已经完全控制了共和党，并且在拜登获胜两年多后在很大程度仍旧如此，他们致力于推翻民主以及法治，正如特朗普在2020年大选中失利后的私下言论所表明的那样。这反映在作者对少数敢于在特朗普日益狭隘和不稳定心态之外发表观点的共和党立法者的描述中。可悲的是，他们都因为不服从命令而迅速被边缘化到政治荒野，或者对于健康的民主来说，也许更糟糕的是，他们干脆计划退出公共生活。
尽管在2020年之前，美国政府已经存在关键裂痕，但显然不能再指望预先存在的标准和独立媒体的监督。例如，竞选活动的特点是没有共同点的不同群体之间的斗争，正如一些州对在 新冠疫情大流行期间保护其公民的卫生措施的顽固态度所表明的那样。这在很大程度上取决于党派的新闻报道。就福克斯新闻和其他右翼媒体而言，作者认为，许多美国观众因为接触了这些媒体而“被浸泡在社交媒体阴谋论和反疫苗言论的毒液中”。乔·拜登总统本人曾将福克斯新闻描述为“美国最具破坏性的力量之一”，其所有者鲁珀特·默多克则是“世界上最危险的人”。这些都是一位在华盛顿政坛上几十年的政治家发出的富有说服力的感慨，他的前任经常被描述为自由世界的领袖。
具有讽刺意味的是，一些资深的共和党人，包括西弗吉尼亚州州长吉姆-贾斯蒂斯和参议院少数党领袖米奇-麦康奈尔，都对这种反疫苗的观点不屑一顾，但他们似乎无力或不愿意与现在主宰他们党的力量作斗争。阅读这些出乎意料的政治家公共和私人观点之间的巨大差异的例子，人们不禁想到，假新闻本身已经成为一种政治力量，就像革命一样，它有可能吞噬自己的孩子。
自身利益
这并不是说政客只是受害者。相反，通过这些书页，最清楚显现的是这些政治家的自身利益。特朗普以传播虚假信息并将其作为武器来满足其自身利益而闻名，当读到他在选举之夜怒斥福克斯新闻早些时候关于亚利桑那州已转向拜登的报道时，很难对他产生同情心。不过，他的选举失败当然不意味着媒体的报道会因此而更加独立或客观。毕竟，特朗普和福克斯新闻网在2021年的和解充分说明了他们的利益仍然深深地交织在一起，这本书将远远不是特朗普与 “假新闻 “结盟的最终定论。
我们也不应该认为假新闻在民主党人中并不盛行。虽然在2019年有时显得非常难以实现，但民主党人是2021年掌握总统职位和国会两院的政党。然而，由于美国立法的神秘规则，民主党人仍然不得不采用政治诡计来推进他们的立法议程。
结合他们在政策问题上的内部分歧，或者最有趣的是，对寻求对美国政治、人格冲突有趣见解的读者来说，本书巧妙地重述了真相非常不优先的戏剧性时刻。例如，长期担任众议院议长的南希-佩洛西(Nancy Pelosi)被描述为背弃了她早先对一些民主党议员和女议员作出的承诺，并向她的政党提供了关于该承诺的高度误导性描述，所有这些都是为了推动通过一项争论激烈的基础设施法案。 这种策略没有奏效，这表明真相在政治中仍然有点重要，但它仍然提醒人们，“假新闻”不是21世纪的新发明，因为虚假信息在政治中由来已久，而且两党都有错。
在一个真相非常相对的世界里，公众摆脱华盛顿的政治泥潭是可以理解的，而政治家们自己也会草率地做出决定，追逐收视率而不是考虑国家的最大利益。结果不仅民主处于危险之中，美国现在 “没有能力解决其最重要和最棘手的国内问题”，正如作者在对一个分裂的房子引人入胜的叙述中得出的结论一样。面对未来一年只会加剧的内部矛盾，特别是由于严重的通货膨胀和日益扩大的贫富差距，更不用说美国社会在枪支所有权和堕胎问题上的长期分歧，过去几年积累的民众愤怒不太可能减弱。
这是否意味着美国正进一步陷入不可逆转的政治两极化，而最近发生的事件预示着民主的消亡？只有时间会证明一切，但这本书不太可能让读者相信美国民主的命运将会改变，更好的政治将会到来。
黑暗的挑战潜伏各处，随时可能扑来。
（时代文化/作者：塔敏·凯恩/2022-08-18）
Dark Clouds in Washington: Behind the Scenes of Embattled American Democracy
BY TADMIN
TIMES CULTURES
The dramatic search of Mar-a-Lago, the Florida home of Donald Trump by FBI has once again shown the extent of suspicion against the former president by the Biden administration, with the US Congress investigation on the Capitol Hill riot at the background.
It provides further support to the recently published book, This Will Not Pass, packed with explosive revelations on American politics, the daily infighting with the Democratic Party and Donald Trump’s extraordinary hold on the Republican Party (GOP), and the mistrust of the media. The authors Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns deliver 466 pages of essential reading on the chaos consuming American democracy from the 2020 election campaign to the legislative quagmire and simmering tensions that still linger today.
The subtitle, Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future, captures well the key issues at stake, for there can be no certainties about the future of American politics given the divisions detailed in this book. The twists and turns of political fortunes charted here would have undoubtedly made shocking headlines by themselves, but it is in the accumulation of small details, whether in how the government functions (or, perhaps more accurately, malfunctions), or the glimpses of the world beyond the Capitol, that reveals much about the state of America’s democratic crisis.
System Malfunction
The American political system was once reputed as the forefront of the modern world but there has been a sickness afflicting American politics for years. The stories told by Martin and Burns, drawn from exclusive private conversations and interviews, give a harrowing account of how the symptoms have become much, much worse in the past two years. Indeed, Vice President Kamala Harris is reported to have said as much to the now former German Chancellor Angela Merkel; Harris described Donald Trump as representing “a bubbling-up of a contagion that had been in the American system for a long time” and that the “underlying illness was likely not gone just because Trump had lost the election”.
Such frank words bear little resemblance to America’s still often-heralded image as a beacon of freedom and democracy across the world. The United States has long advocated democracy and freedoms across the globe, but the book has illustrated the increasing fragility of the American democratic system. Trump and his supporters appear to have seized total control of the GOP, and still do to a large extent more than two years after Biden’s win, despite many senior senators’ private misgivings about the former reality TV star, and they are committed to overturning democracy and the rule of law, as made clear by Trump’s private remarks following his defeat in the 2020 election. This is reflected by the authors’ accounts of the few Republican legislators who dared to express a view outside of Trump’s increasingly narrow and unstable mind-set. Sadly, they were all swiftly marginalised to the political wilderness for their disobedience or, perhaps worse for a healthy democracy, have simply planned to retire from public life.
Although key fissures already existed in American government before 2020, it is clear that pre-existing standards and scrutiny from an independent media can no longer be expected. The election campaign, for example, was characterised by struggles between disparate groups that have no common grounds, as seen by some states’ intransigence against health measures that would have protected their citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of this depends on the partisan news coverage; in the case of Fox News and other right-wing outlets, the authors contend that many American viewers “were marinating in a toxic brew of social-media conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine rhetoric” due to their exposure. President Joe Biden himself had described Fox News as “one of the most destructive forces in the United States” and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, as “the most dangerous man in the world”. These are telling sentiments from a politician who had been involved in Washington for decades and whose predecessors were often described as the leader of the free world.
Ironically, some senior Republicans, including Jim Justice, the governor of West Virginia and Mitch McConnell, the Machiavellian Senate Minority Leader, have little time for such anti-vax views, but they were seemingly powerless or unwilling to battle against the forces that now dominate their party. Reading these unexpected instances of the dramatic differences between a politician’s public and private views, one cannot help but think that fake news has become a political force in its own right, and just like revolutions, it is liable to devour its own children.
Self-Interests
This is not to say politicians are mere victims. Instead, what emerges most clearly through the pages is these politicians’ self-interest. Trump is famous for spreading and weaponising disinformation to suit his own mercurial interests, and it would be hard to feel sympathy for him when reading his election-night rage against Fox News’s early call that Arizona has swung to Biden. His electoral defeat, however, certainly does not mean that the media will be any more independent or objective in their reporting as a result. After all, Trump and the Fox News network’s reconciliation in 2021 speaks volumes of how deeply intertwined their interests remain and this book will be far from the final word on Trump’s alliance with ‘fake news’.
Nor should we think that disinformation was not rife among Democrats. Although at times in 2019 it appeared a very difficult feat to achieve, Democrats were the party holding the presidency and both houses of congress in 2021. However, the Democrats still have to resort to political trickery to advance their agenda thanks to the arcane rules governing American law-making.
Combine with their internal divisions over matters of policy or ,most interestingly for readers seeking intriguing insights into American politics, personality clashes, this book offers a skilful retelling of dramatic moments when the truth was very much not priority. Nancy Pelosi, the long-standing Speaker of the House of representatives, was for instance, described as reneging on an earlier promise she made to some Democrat congressman and congresswomen and providing a highly misleading account of that promise to her party, all in a bid to push through a fiercely-debated infrastructure bill. This ploy did not work which in sign of the truth still matters a little in politics, but it remains a reminder that “fake news” was not a new invention of the twenty-first century as disinformation has long-standing in politic and it is bipartisan to a fault.
In a world where the truth is very much relative, it is understandable for the public to disengage from the political quagmire in Washington and for politicians themselves to make decisions carelessly, to chase ratings instead of considering the nation’s best interests. Not only is democracy in danger as a result, America is now “incapable of resolving its most important and intractable domestic problems”, as the authors conclude in their riveting narrative of a divided house. Faced with internal contradictions that will only get worse in the coming year, particularly due to severe inflation and the widening gap between the rich and the poor, to say little of the long-term divisions in American society over gun ownership and abortion, it is unlikely that the popular anger built up over the past few years will abate.
Does this mean that America is sinking further into irreversible political polarisation and recent events herald the demise of democracy? Only time will tell, but this book is unlikely to give the reader much confidence that the fortune of American democracy will change and a better politics will come to pass.
Dark challenges are lurking everywhere and waiting to pounce.
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