美国纽约客杂志网站于2024年7月15日发表题为《为何特朗普选中J·D·万斯作为副总统候选人》的文章。以下观点不代表任何译者立场，现将全文翻译如下：Why Donald Trump Picked J. D. Vance for Vice-President
The Ohio senator is an attack dog for the former President, but he is also something more emergent and interesting: he is the fuse that Trump lit.这位俄亥俄州的参议员不仅是前总统的攻击犬，更是一个新兴有趣的角色：他是特朗普点燃的导火索。By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
July 15, 2024
Photograph by Mark Peterson / ReduxThis past Saturday, two hours after a twenty-year-old Pennsylvania man with hazy political commitments and uncertain motives tried to kill Donald Trump, Senator J. D. Vance, a Republican from Ohio, typed out a reaction on social media: “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”上周六，一名20岁的宾夕法尼亚州青年因不明政治诉求和动机企图刺杀唐纳德·特朗普。事发两小时后，俄亥俄州共和党参议员J·D·万斯在社交媒体上发表了如下评论：“今天的事件绝非孤立事件。拜登竞选团队的核心主张是，唐纳德·特朗普总统是一个必须不惜一切代价阻止的威权主义法西斯分子。正是这种言论直接导致了针对特朗普总统的暗杀企图。”Follow the logic of Washington: Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate on Monday makes sense. Vance is the most conservative of the three finalists for the nomination, the most outspokenly loyal, and the most pugnaciously partisan—qualities that fit a candidate who is increasingly leading in the polls and looking ahead at fights to come. But Vance is also someone who has rapidly tracked from a genial reform conservatism to a hard-edged populism, which itself seems to be metastasizing again, all following a track of anti-élitism. He is an attack dog for Trump, but he is also something more emergent and interesting: he is the fuse that Trump lit.按照华盛顿的政治逻辑，特朗普周一选择万斯作为竞选搭档是顺理成章的。在决赛圈的三位候选人中，万斯立场最为保守，对特朗普最为忠诚，也最具好斗的党派色彩——这些特质恰恰符合一个民调领先且着眼于未来斗争的候选人的需求。然而，万斯的独特之处不仅在于此。他迅速从一个和蔼可亲的改革保守主义者转变为一个锋芒毕露的民粹主义者，而这种转变似乎仍在持续，始终围绕着反精英主义的轨迹。他不仅是特朗普的攻击犬，更是一个新兴有趣角色：他是特朗普点燃的导火索。It has been just two years since Vance, who is thirty-nine, first ran for elective office. His rise has been as sharp as any politician to emerge since Barack Obama, and it has been similarly fuelled by a rare ability to convert the raw material of his life into a compelling social narrative. Vance was raised in Appalachian Ohio by his grandparents, since his mother struggled with addiction. He served as an enlisted marine in Iraq before attending Ohio State, and then Yale Law School, where his mentor Amy Chua, the author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” encouraged him to package his experience as a memoir. The result, “Hillbilly Elegy,” was published in 2016 and became a phenomenon; the New York Times named it one of six books that explained Trump’s victory, a status made possible by Vance’s own anti-Trumpism. (During the 2016 campaign, Vance messaged his former roommate, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”)39岁的万斯首次参与选举仅仅是两年前的事。他的崛起之快堪比自巴拉克·奥巴马以来的任何政治人物，他同样具有那种罕见的能力，将自身经历转化为引人入胜的社会叙事。万斯在阿巴拉契亚地区的俄亥俄州由祖父母抚养长大，因为他的母亲一直在与毒瘾作斗争。他曾在伊拉克服役，后就读于俄亥俄州立大学，继而进入耶鲁法学院。在那里，他的导师、《虎妈战歌》的作者蔡美儿鼓励他将自己的经历写成回忆录。由此诞生的《乡下人的悲歌》于2016年出版，并引起轰动。《纽约时报》将其列为解释特朗普胜选的六本书之一，这一地位恰恰源于万斯当时对特朗普的批评立场。（在2016年竞选期间，万斯曾给前室友发消息说：”我对特朗普的看法时常摇摆，一会儿觉得他那种像尼克松一样愤世嫉俗的混蛋，不会太糟糕（甚至可能会有些用处），一会儿又觉得他是美国的希特勒。”）Some of the characterizations in “Hillbilly Elegy,” even at the time, seemed two-dimensional, but Vance’s rags-to-riches story and the timeliness of his analysis, which argued that economic dislocation had degraded the social relationships upon which a good life had depended in places like southwestern Ohio, gave it a cinematic lift. In 2020, by which time Vance had worked as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, and earned the patronage of Peter Thiel, “Hillbilly Elegy” was released as a movie directed by Ron Howard.《乡下人的悲歌》中的某些描述即便在当时看来也显得有些片面，但万斯白手起家的故事以及他分析的时代性——他认为经济动荡已经破坏了西南俄亥俄州等地赖以维系美好生活的社会关系——为这本书增添了电影般的魅力。到2020年，万斯已在硅谷担任风险投资人，并获得了彼得·泰尔的赞助，《乡下人的悲歌》也被罗恩·霍华德改编成电影。The four-year trip from there (well-regarded, category-defying young conservative intellectual) to here (right-wing firebrand and Trump V.P. pick) has been equally extraordinary, and has hinged on two changes: one in Vance and one within conservatism. The change in Vance was that his politics hardened as he prepared to run for elective office. In an extended interview with the Times’ Ross Douthat last month, he attributed this turn to a shift he detected in liberalism toward the end of the Trump Presidency. “The thing that I kept thinking about liberalism in 2019 and 2020 is that these guys have all read Carl Schmitt—there’s no law, there’s just power,” Vance said. “And the goal here is to get back in power. Seemed true in the Kavanaugh thing, seemed true in the Black Lives Matter moment.” (Vance’s wife, Usha, an Indian American litigator whom he met at Yale, clerked for Brett Kavanaugh. “Kind of a dork,” Vance told Douthat, of the Supreme Court Justice. “Never believed these stories.”) When Vance ran for Senate, in 2022, his first campaign ad emphasized his antagonism to liberal élites. “Are you a racist?” he asked voters. “Do you hate Mexicans? The media calls us racist for wanting to build Trump’s wall. They censor us, but it doesn’t change the truth.”从备受赞誉、难以归类的年轻保守派知识分子到右翼煽动者和特朗普副总统人选，万斯在四年间的转变同样引人注目，这一转变主要在两方面：一是万斯本人，二是保守主义内部。万斯的变化在于，在准备竞选公职时，他的政治立场变得更加强硬。在上月接受《纽约时报》专栏作家罗斯·杜达特的长篇采访时，他将这一转变归因于他在特朗普总统任期末期察觉到自由主义的变化。万斯说：“2019年和2020年，我一直在思考自由主义的问题。这些人似乎都读过卡尔·施米特的著作——他们认为没有法律，只有权力。他们的目标就是重新掌权。在卡瓦诺事件和黑人的命也是命运动中，这一点似乎得到了印证。”（万斯的妻子乌莎是一位印度裔美国诉讼律师，两人在耶鲁相识，她曾为布雷特·卡瓦诺担任书记员。万斯在采访中称这位最高法院大法官“有点呆板”，并表示“从不相信那些指控”。）2022年万斯竞选参议员时，他的首个竞选广告强调了他对自由派精英的敌意。他问选民：“你是种族主义者吗？你讨厌墨西哥人吗？媒体说我们想建特朗普的墙就是种族主义。他们不让我们说话，但这改变不了事实。”That April, when I travelled to Ohio to watch Vance compete in a crowded U.S. Senate primary, he was stalked everywhere by his anti-Trumpism. “Let me just address the elephant in the room,” he said, and then gave a spiel about how he had not liked Trump at first but eventually had come to realize that the billionaire “revealed a corruption in our country that at least to my eyes was completely hidden.” Vance was not an especially gifted retail politician at the time (the coming general-election campaign will test whether he’s improved), and the crowds I saw grew a little tense at his acknowledgment that he had not always been a Trump loyalist. When audience members said that this history made them distrust him, Vance would nod along and say he completely understood if that was the case. But he was also the most intriguing figure in the race, positioning himself as a voice for working-class conservatives. His self-abnegation proved successful: Trump endorsed him, and Vance won the primary and then the general election. Vance, perhaps sensing what it takes to get ahead in the current Republican Party, went on to loudly denounce the accusations of sexual assault against Trump and insisted that, were he Vice-President on January 6th instead of Mike Pence, he would have authorized Trump’s fantastical slates of “alternate electors” and let Congress fight “over it from there.”那年4月，我前往俄亥俄州观察万斯在拥挤的美国参议院初选中竞争，他的反特朗普立场无处不在。“让我直接谈谈这个敏感话题，”他说，随后解释道，他起初并不喜欢特朗普，但最终意识到这位亿万富翁“揭露了我国的一种腐败，这种腐败至少在我看来之前是完全隐藏的”。当时的万斯并非特别擅长基层政治（即将到来的大选将考验他是否有所进步），我看到的人群在他承认曾经不是特朗普忠实支持者时略显紧张。当听众表示这段历史让他们不信任他时，万斯会点头表示完全理解。但他也是竞选中最吸引人的人物，他将自己定位为工人阶级保守派的代言人。他的自我贬低策略奏效了：特朗普为他背书，万斯赢得了初选，随后又赢得了大选。万斯似乎意识到在当前共和党内获得晋升的要求，随后大声谴责针对特朗普的性侵指控，并坚称如果1月6日那天是他而不是迈克·彭斯担任副总统的话，他会授权特朗普那些异想天开的“替代选举人”名单，让国会”从那里开始争论"。Vance is, in some ways, a case study of Republican loyalty after January 6th, in which those who backed Trump after the insurrection at the Capitol have tended to go all in—their careers and reputations have become inextricably tied to the former President. But plenty of Republicans are diehard Trump loyalists. Vance’s rise has also depended on his populism. Like some other Republican senators of his generation (Tom Cotton, of Arkansas; Josh Hawley, of Missouri; and Marco Rubio, of Florida, among them), Vance often stressed the need for Republicans to break from the free-market absolutism of the past. “There is no path . . . to a durable governing majority for the conservative movement that doesn’t run through a rethinking of nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties economic dogma,” he said in 2023, at an event hosted by the think tank American Compass. He has backed tariffs and urged Republicans to try to win more union votes. “My grandma’s politics [was] a sort of hybrid between left-wing social democracy and right-wing personal uplift, and there is virtue to both of these world-views,” Vance told the New Statesman’s Sohrab Ahmari in February, though this kind of alliance has so far existed mostly at the level of rhetoric; as Ahmari put it, archly, “The mainstream labour movement has yet to find in Vance a partner on its legislative priorities.” Even so, Vance’s inclusion on the ticket represents a different idea of how Trump can engage the Party’s élite than Pence’s elevation did in 2016: less piety, more cultural war, a willingness to push economic nationalism a step further. In other words, it shows which direction the conservative élites are moving, and how much the Trump years have transformed them, too.从某种程度上说，万斯是1月6日事件后共和党忠诚度的一个典型案例。那些在国会山骚乱后仍支持特朗普的人往往会全力以赴——他们的事业和声誉已与这位前总统不可分割。但很多共和党人都是特朗普的死忠支持者。万斯的崛起还依赖于他的民粹主义立场。与他那一代的其他一些共和党参议员（如阿肯色州的汤姆·科顿、密苏里州的乔什·霍利和佛罗里达州的马尔科·卢比奥等）一样，万斯经常强调共和党人需要摆脱过去的自由市场绝对主义。2023年，他在美国指南针智库主办的一场活动上表示：“保守运动要获得持久的执政多数，必须重新思考80年代和90年代的经济教条。”他支持关税政策，并敦促共和党人争取更多工会选票。今年2月，万斯在接受《新政治家》杂志记者索拉布·艾哈迈里采访时说：“我祖母的政治观点是左翼社会民主和右翼个人奋斗的某种混合体，这两种世界观都有其价值。”不过，这种结合目前主要停留在语言层面；正如艾哈迈里尖锐地指出：“主流劳工运动尚未在立法优先事项上找到万斯这样的合作伙伴。”尽管如此，万斯入选副总统候选人代表了一种不同于2016年彭斯当选时的理念，展示了特朗普如何与党内精英互动：少一些虔诚，多一些文化战争，愿意将经济民族主义推进一步。换句话说，这显示了保守派精英正在向哪个方向发展，以及特朗普时代如何改变了他们。Of course, the Pence Vice-Presidency ended with Trump’s movement turning on him, storming the Capitol while calling for him to be strung up. Many Republicans who have joined Trump’s Cabinet have come to regret it. Vance is still pretty new to all this, and it is a little hard to say whether he will be an asset to the ticket, deepening its seriousness, or a too extreme, too wonky liability. But, in an election defined most of all by age, Vance has given the Trump campaign something small but invaluable: the chance to credibly suggest that Trumpism has a future beyond him.当然，彭斯的副总统任期结束之时，特朗普的支持者转而反对彭斯、冲击国会大厦并高呼要绞死他。许多加入特朗普内阁的共和党人最终都后悔了。万斯对这一切还很陌生，很难说他是否会成为竞选团队增加自身严肃性的财富，还是会成为一个过于极端、摇晃不稳的累赘。但在这场主要由年龄定义的选举中，万斯为特朗普竞选团队带来了一个小而宝贵的机会：特朗普主义在特朗普之后仍有未来。♦
