来源：《卫报》
原文刊登日期：2022年6月6日
Performative politics is on trial and, for all its successes, has begun to be found wanting. Boris Johnson’s electoral triumphs that delivered the failure of Brexit and what is now obviously a zombie government have shown the limits of theatre and showmanship over substance, reason and integrity.
表演型政治正在经受考验，尽管取得了种种成功，但人们开始发现它的不足。鲍里斯·约翰逊在选举中取得的胜利导致了脱欧的失败，现在的英国政府明显是一个僵尸政府，这表明了戏剧和表演技巧相较于事实、理性和诚信的限制性。
However, mastery of “performative politics”, the term used by Hillary Clinton in an interview, has been until now a prerequisite for democratic success. Johnson is, or was, a master, the former US secretary of state acknowledged: the rumpled hair, artful self-mockery and ever-present liking to find the comic angle all a smokescreen to cover his ambition, entitlement and rightwing views. Masters also are Donald Trump, her husband, Bill, and Barack Obama, but the latter two both predated the worst of today’s social media.
然而，精通“表演性政治”（希拉里•克林顿在一次采访中使用的词汇）一直是民主选举成功的先决条件。这位美国前国务卿承认，约翰逊是(或者曾经是)一位这方面的大师：蓬乱的头发、巧妙的自嘲和始终存在的寻找喜剧角度的嗜好，这些都是掩盖他野心、资格和右翼观点的烟幕弹。这方面的大师还包括唐纳德·特朗普、她的丈夫比尔克林顿和巴拉克·奥巴马，但后两者当总统时都早于当今社交媒体最糟糕的时代。
Joe Biden? The issue is not content or delivery on the ground, where Biden has plenty of achievements that Clinton warmly admires – his failing is that he is no performer: “So you basically saved people from falling into unemployment. You save small businesses and you’re going to build airports, bridges and tunnels and all kinds of great things,” she says. But the larger question in 2022 remains: “What are you going to do to entertain me? He’s not a performer – and that’s a real problem.”
乔•拜登？问题不在于拜登在实际行动中的表现，拜登在这方面有很多成就，克林顿对此表示热烈赞赏。他的失败在于他不是个表演家：“所以你基本上挽救了人们免于失业。你拯救了小企业，你将建造机场、桥梁、隧道和各种各样的伟大工程。”但2022年更大的问题仍然是：“你打算做什么来娱乐我？”他不是一个表演者——这是一个真正的问题。”
An element of theatre and performance has always been essential in democratic politics. People need their passions stirred, values touched and a belief – even transient – that they are part of a great transformative project. Of course there has to be an organising idea, a unifying cause and an enemy to slay, but all has to be framed in ways that inspire.
戏剧和表演元素在民主政治中一直是必不可少的。人们需要激情的激发，价值观的触动，以及一种信念——即使是短暂的——即他们是伟大变革项目的一部分。当然，必须有一个有组织的想法，一个统一的目标和一个要消灭的敌人，但所有这些都必须以鼓舞人心的方式表达出来。
What has degraded political theatre into performative posturing, argues Clinton, is social media built on our obsession with screens – the catalyst in the witch’s brew of rightwing ideology, Christian fundamentalism, sheer greed and predatory capitalism driving the US’s political polarisation. Politics has become a subset of an alternative reality defined by an avalanche of the hype, trolling, misinformation, retweets, trending, anonymised racism and misogyny in which we now live, exacerbated by big tech and its algorithms, for whom the resulting data traffic is gold.
克林顿认为，是建立在我们对屏幕痴迷之上的社交媒体，使政治舞台退化为表演作态。社交媒体是右翼意识形态、基督教原教旨主义、纯粹的贪婪和掠夺性资本主义等可怕混合物中的催化剂，推动了美国的政治两极分化。政治已经成为另一种现实的一个子集，它由我们现在生活的铺天盖地的炒作、喷子、错误信息、转发、热搜、匿名种族主义和仇视女性定义，并被大型科技公司及其算法加剧，对它们来说，由此产生的数据流量就是黄金。
Politics has to swim in these currents that breed obsessive single issue after single issue and the advantage falls first to the shameless performer. There is an inherent bias against what she calls the politics of hope: politicians who in different ways want to speak for a “we society”, a future in which we look out for each other more.
政治必须在这些潮流中游弋，这些潮流滋生了一个又一个令人着魔的问题，而优势首先落在了无耻的表演者身上。她所称的“希望的政治”是：政客们以不同的方式想要为“我们的社会”发声，为一个我们更加关心彼此的未来发声。但人们对此有一种固有的偏见。
What grabs our social media attention instead is the negative – “the car wreck, the sensationalist story, the conspiracy theory” – which makes putting a case for hopeful reform harder and shameless lying politically easier.
相反，吸引我们社交媒体注意力的是负面消息——“车祸、哗众取宠的故事、阴谋论”——这使得更有希望的改革更加困难，让无耻的政治谎言变得更加容易。